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29 years of the artist’s voice

Justin Hopper’s Pittsburgh-based Public Record is a series of sound poems created from 19th-century crime reports which will be delivered via mobile phone to listeners standing on the sites where the crimes occurred, much like a historic walking tour. In a second phase, visual artists will produce illustrations to accompany his poems in a series of hand-bound books. Finally, the project will launch in July with a presentation of the written, oral and illustrated works.

Through this ubiquitous rendering, the buildings, streets, and characters Hopper references can live on, even if they no longer exist. “The idea is to populate the city,” he says. “To conjure a haunting, whereby the people are still here, walking around Pittsburgh.”

In the 19th-century, before modern sewage systems snaked beneath city streets, garbage was filtered into deep, open pits. Night-soil men would climb into the pits, carry up buckets of human waste, and transport it to farms for use as manure. On June 5, 1872, the Pittsburgh Daily Gazette reported the alleged murder of 55-year-old Andrew Kurtzbaner, a night-soil man at the St. Nicholas Hotel, formerly at the corner of Grant Street and Fourth Avenue. According to the report, Kurtzbaner was pushed into the pit while cleaning it.

“The guy drowned in feces collected from what must have been a flophouse,” says Justin Hopper, who spends his days reading newspaper accounts of Pittsburgh crimes committed 150 years ago, and then writes “documentary poetry” by directly sampling language from the crime reports, and re-structuring it into verse:

A gentleman who was in the vicinity and saw the excitement,

ran to the place, stripped off his clothing,

and was lowered by ropes into the vault.

Speedy as the work of rescue had been, it was not speedy enough,

and the man was quite dead when brought out

As artist-in-residence at Old/New Media — a program supported by a technology start-up, DeepLocal, and an independent publisher, Encyclopedia Destructica — Hopper designed Public Record, an immersive, multifaceted collaboration: His poems will be converted into audio pieces by a sound artist and delivered via mobile phone to listeners standing on the sites where the crimes occurred, much like a historic walking tour. In a second phase, visual artists will produce illustrations to accompany his poems in a series of hand-bound books. Finally, the project will launch in July with a presentation of the written, oral and illustrated works.

Through this ubiquitous rendering, the buildings, streets, and characters Hopper references can live on, even if they no longer exist. “The idea is to populate the city,” he says. “To conjure a haunting, whereby the people are still here, walking around Pittsburgh.”

Public Record began a couple of years ago, envisioned as choreographed re-enactments of the murders. But a year later, Hopper — a long-time arts reporter — discovered Mark Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary, a book-length documentary poem culled in part from court testimonies of the surviving Sago, West Virginia miners. “It’s rooted in actual square footage of land,” he says. “[Nowak] takes something as prosaic as court testimony, and finds the poetic value in it. I realized that this is what Public Record was meant to be.”

Hopper searches microfilm for crimes that occurred on streets identifiable on both a map of 1872 and a current map, within a several-block range. He looks for at least one name — a perpetrator, victim or bystander — as well as discrepancies in language or reporting. People described as “decrepit, homeless, and alcoholic” speaking in language that’s practically Shakespearean, for example, or a report of a stabbing that includes the lyrical admission of a man nicknamed “Bruiser” Lynch (“I stepped toward the bed and a man raised up -/ I saw he wasn’t her husband, raised the knife and let it drive”) alongside his sister’s fragmented, pedestrian rhetoric. He remixes texts to call out ironic juxtapositions of articles (for example, an account of a rape appears beside a sexually charged advertisement for horse-riding accoutrements) using italics, underlining, and bolded typeface to distinguish between sources.

Public Record marks a formal shift for Hopper, who describes his work here as “art,” rather than “journalism” or “non-fiction,” freeing him to eschew structural conventions. Hopper repurposes fact to read like myth that conveys a sense of history in a way that the original documents don’t. “It’s the difference between fact and truth,” Hopper says. “What I’m writing is the truth. I might not end up using all of the facts, and the poems might not be factually true, but hopefully they say something that’s a bit larger than the event. The form gives me permission to do that.”

Hopper's "Knights of the Green Cloth" is set on Forbes Avenue between Smithfield and Wood Streets. Photo by Erin Brubaker.

Presenting the material across genres also allows for new conceptual frameworks, primarily through the use of technology. For example, how can the stories of the dead co-exist among the living, yet free from the constraints of the contemporary world? Hopper originally imagined on-site, audio-enabled kiosks. His conversations with DeepLocal’s software engineers lead to the use of mobile devices instead.

“Public Record evolved, but the shifts were less about practicalities and more about keeping the concept intact,” says Nathan Martin, CEO of DeepLocal. “In fact, nothing about the project is all that difficult to implement from a technological standpoint. But we were able to offer options, such as different interfaces, that would expand what the experience could mean.” The collaboration also forced his designers to consider older, “gutter” technologies and less accurate mapping tools in order to best transmit the historical sense Hopper’s poems depict; thus, the lack of distracting gadgetry that sometimes forefronts new media projects.

iPhone users will be able to download an application that includes a simple map of 1872 Pittsburgh marked with the crime sites. When users approach the site on foot, a red blinking light will appear on the map that, when clicked, will initiate the sound piece associated with the location. Non-iPhone users can hear the same via a pre-recorded message by texting a short code, available on a paper map of the city. Once users send the text, they immediately receive a phone call. In this way, the poems become both ethereal and permanent. “It doesn’t matter how the topography is altered, because there is no physical manifestation. There are no signs that can be removed a hundred years from now,” Hopper says. “It’s an idea that might be lost as people walk from place to place — that it’s not about these incredibly banal sites. It’s about the narrative we’re lending to them.”

If cell phones disembody Public Record in the intangible realm of cyberspace, the handmade books of Encyclopedia Destructica ground it in the tactile efforts of grassroots organizing — key to the their interest in “old media.” What started as a zine for a college student’s senior project has expanded into a sustained exploration of new modes of distributing writing and artwork that sidesteps publishing bureaucracy and traditional gallery exhibitions, says co-founder Jasdeep Khaira. In the past four years, Encyclopedia Destructica has organized community-wide bookbinding parties; democratic, ad hoc PowerPoint displays; and collective drawing activities across state lines. Encyclopedia Destructica prints 250 copies of each book, and uses the proceeds from the first half of a run to fund the production of the second half.

Most Old/New Media applicants don’t understand the “old media” aspect of the residency, Khaira says. Proposals generally offer a half-hearted marketing plan that includes, for example, hand-printed flyers for an otherwise carefully considered project. “But Justin really got it. The idea of inviting artists to produce original works in response to the poems that also resonate in the recordings taps into we’re trying to do,” she says.

The St. Nicholas Hotel, site of night-soil man Andrew Kurtzbaner's death, used to reside at the corner of Grant Street and Fourth Avenue, downtown Pittsburgh. Photo by Erin Brubaker.

Once artists create the drawings, they will likely be reproduced on a solid-ink printer and “tipped” onto pages — adhered only by the corners and margins. Other details of form and process have not yet been decided, as Hopper continues to apply for funding to support future phases of Public Record, which includes the book, an additional iPhone application for poems that document North Side crimes (the first launch focuses solely on downtown Pittsburgh), and a brochure that lists the crime sites and text-message short codes. He seeks to distribute the brochures in area galleries and museums, and hopefully at stops along the city’s existing tour of public art.

Understandably, not all city tourism entities have welcomed Public Record: After all, the project documents rapes and murders in an effort to capture a sullied history of urban America, compelling for the failures and misfortunes of unknown, ordinary people. Night-soil man Andrew Kurtzbaner exemplifies the kind of life that would likely be absent from any historical record, if not for his unfortunate death. Likewise, “Bruiser” Lynch, who chased down a man for sleeping with his sister and stabbed him in the chest, isn’t a figure typically considered when commemorating a neighborhood’s past.

Hopper quotes Raymond Williams in The Country and the City:

The opaque complexity of modern city life is represented by crime, and the explorer of society is reduced to the discoverer of single causes, the isolable agent, and above all his means and techniques.

“He’s talking about the detective and how that character understands a city as a mythology. This is a big part of Public Record,” Hopper says. “Because in most of these cases we know who committed the crime, but we don’t know what happened to them. Yet we continue to remember, and their memory, and psyche, is part of the strata. People say that Pittsburgh is hung up on its history, but I would say the opposite — that the city draws its power from it. It’s the reason people stay in a place through 25 years of unemployment. It’s the malleable thing that writers can manipulate to create mythology.”

Listen to “A Fearful Death” below: