The social space of the elevator is an uncanny replication of the current condition.

As a uniquely modern architectural element, the elevator stands in for our ideas about technology and building and progress, all the while disappearing mechanics and function. As the rides get smoother, elevators truly become the space of the upwardly mobile, naturalizing and pacifying people to the contradictions of labor and class plaguing the late capitalist state.

While the machinery and electronics of the elevator are fascinating and complex, in truth, elevators must also be seen as faith-based instruments. Anyone who has ever been stuck in one, or who avoids them instinctually, understands this. Faith in the elevator is like an unshakeable faith in progress itself; with the ceiling expanding infinitely overhead into the stars, the elevator brings the next colony within reach.

The elevator music mixes ambient dance music ("trance") with samples from the memorial service for the Space Shuttle Columbia (February 2003). The sound bytes feature NASA officials, the media, the Navy Choir, and President Bush vocalizing fantasies about space exploration and lamenting a deep sadness at having lost human life in the quest for the beyond. One speaker quotes John F. Kennedy: " Space is the sea into which we must sail," linking American space exploration to centuries of colonial history.

Issuing from the final days leading up to the United States' illegal and internationally- condemned occupation of Iraq, the uplifted voices at the service take on insidious meanings as they echo policies and motivations of the American Empire, whose unshakable faith in Western expansionist knowledge and science is the testimony used to mount strikes in the Middle East.

While elevators are known to put people in trances, this Speculative Architecture is about the anti-hypnotic, and therefore, unlike television, driving on the freeway, or other modern conveniences. Built out of wood (would?) and silk, like a hand-hewn coffin, it is intentionally an anachronism, a political metaphor out-of-step. Like a pirate's prosthesis the wooden elevator is both a memorial and a memory aid as it points to what is missing, what has passed, and to the violence that has gone unseen.