The Subliminal History of New York State is a project of the Society for a Subliminal State (Carrie Dashow and Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg) and incorporates local and New York history, research, songwriting, video and community engagement. At the project’s core is an emergent narrative about New York, its land progress, industrialization, utopianism and sentience. Using the term”subliminal history” to locate platitudes of place through the people who live there, rather than books, museums and Google (where we were often first sent), living history lessons were told, not always ‘correct’, but that stands to question, who the teller is and who has been pubished. The story starts with Under Island, the First Chapter in The Subliminal History of New York State.
Under Island documents a turbulent and unmapped history. Carrying out psychical and physical research for months, Carrie uncovers Roosevelt Island as a living breathing monster, whom after gaining sight, desires to leave Manhattan’s East River. Carrie tells the island’s story through the combination of assumptive and fact-based evidence, creating a truer than true narrative substantiated by local residents. Performance, songs, compact disc and book. 2004/ 5
On its way upriver the island is contained momentarily in the caves of Rosendale for a summer project with the Widow Jane Mine, Century House Historical Society, Rosendale, New York. 2006
During the summer of 2007, traveling further Northways along the river, with shape note singer and composer, Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg at Troy, they turn west onto the Mohawk. A journey along the short lived yet influential route of the now defunct, Erie Canal, and American Industrialism. Blending history, local lore, intuition, and geology and video and song they attempt to to unearth the underlying story.
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