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The LANDSPLOITATION Podcast hosts experimental video and audio documenting the social experience of the human landscape, including but not limited to the spaces of the built environment, vernacular architecture, proxemics, human interaction, and political boundaries. Submissions from independent scholars, photographers, and filmmakers are welcome. To submit, please insure that sound or video is hosted on a public server (such as archive.org) and email the link together with a brief descripti ...
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The Landscape Studies Podcast brings together scholarship that documents the relationship between personal and political boundaries worked out in space. Scholars from history, sociology, geography, and architecture offer synopses of the best recent work in the field.
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Observers who grow up in the suburbs are used to seeing green lots as the emblem of a city working towards public health. It takes more than a few bicycle trips past the empty lots in south-side Chicago for the newcomer to realize that the fields, nearly five miles of them, are not a park system at all. In 1962, Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes were a…
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In Rust Belt Tour '09, scholar Jo Guldi and activist Simon Strikeback traveled the landscape between Flint, Michigan and Holyoke, Massachusetts, documenting the foreclosures, arsons, vacant lots, anarchist squats, community gardens, and revitalization projects across eleven cities. This conversation, recorded on the road in Western Massachusetts, o…
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In 2009, the wasting steel town of Braddock, Pennsylvania hit international newspapers as an example of how post-industrial ruins could be transformed into utopian spaces after the mayors' plea for dedicated urban homesteaders to relocate to Braddock's abandoned houses. Braddock left behind a model of redevelopment pursued elsewhere, a model of urb…
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At the close of the Civil War, the industrial hub of Elmira, NY began to pioneer a new model of economic development: they opened a reformatory. The model served them well. In the twentieth century, nineteenth-century industry collapsed around Elmira in Albany, NY and Pittsburgh, PA. Elmira, however, survived, even flourished, thanks to a constant …
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Rust Belt Tour '09: Traces of Industrial History in America: First Generation and Second Generation Rust Belt
The first, nineteenth-century industrial revolution began with mill-building along the rivers of New England in the eighteenth century. It grew to encompass a wide network of canals and rivers. The decline of early industrial towns today leaves few traces of decline, relative to the second industrial revolution. The second industrial revolution, a …
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Footage collector Rick Prelinger takes us on a tour of the forces that built the vernacular sinews of twentieth-century experience in San Francisco: ethnic migration, infrastructure on the an enormous scale, mass transport, and consumer videography. His presentation draws attention to how vulnerable are the landscapes, experiences, and even memory …
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Robert Todd feels things through landscape. In the first film of his I saw, fields bristled in sunlight, the hirsute stems of Queen Anne's lace lit by the rising sun. Like the psychoanalyst Gaston Bachelard, Todd thinks that all materiality contains a metaphysics of unseen relations. "Life shivers as the ground beneath and sky above tremble," he wr…
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Max Cafard's Surre(gion)alist Manifest first appeared in Exquisite Corpse in 1990 and was afterwards republished with a preface by New Orleans poet Andrei Codrescu. Arguing for the eminence of the local as a point of view, the manifesto urged readers to consider their own perspective, political and culture, as the outcome of their existence at a ce…
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U Chicago grad student Simon Strikeback takes us on a hypnotizing visual tour of the textures and geometry of infrastructure around Memphis. Travel shots capture trucker zones at winter sunset and other thresholds. Landscape is abstracted to pure mathematics at the level of electronica.By Jo Guldi
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How do you channel experimental mastermind Chris Marker and higher-level mathematics at once? Transplanted from Chicago to Tokyo, astrophysicist Simon DeDeo started looking around him in the cafes of Tokyo, watching eye-contact and subtle variations in light, trying to make sense of the subtle aesthetics that govern everyday interaction. The result…
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The Government Sublime How the Infrastructure State changed our relationship to the natural environment, 1800-1830 Click To Play Jo's paper looks at the moment when large, centralized bureaucracies began to mediate everyday experiences of the natural landscape. Looking at early tourist visits to the Menai Straits Bridge, among the first modern engi…
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Industrial Fantasia Simon Gunn presents his paper, "Industrial Fantasia: Engineering Bradford, 1945-1970," a study in mid-century urban planning fantasies of a continuously renewed, mechanized white city that would replace Bradford's nineteenth-century mills. (for full screen, select button on the menu to the furthest right)…
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This episode comes courtesy of Jeremy Blatter, a member of the Landscape Posse, former intern at the Prelinger Archive, and graduate student in the History of Science department at Harvard. Landsploitation is proud to present "Saro," a vernacular film tribute to westward migration, set to music by Sam Amidon. In "Saro," love for the woman left behi…
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"The Business Man and the Business Place" How did nineteenth-century American business travelers decide to visit Galena or Sioux Falls? How did they sort other travelers into worthwhile "business men" and deceitful "confidence men?" Berkeley historian Bill Wagner narrates how early-nineteenth century American men navigated the landscape. This short…
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"It has come time to talk about the very small and the very large; streetscape, townscape, highways, continents and oceans. It is time to talk about vision." "Cosmology" explores the relationships between the traveler and social gravitation, handling the connections between vision and movement in ordinary journeys. It is presented as the first epis…
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Persons on Foot Indiana sociologist Laurel Cornell asks, why are American highways designed without regard to the concerns of the person on foot? She examines the point of view of the twentieth-century civil engineer and concludes that engineers' training taught them not to see the people on the roadside. cc Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.…
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