Imaginary Places
PLATO Lecture Series Spring, 2014 – Greeners on the Cutting Edge
Monday April 28, 1:30-3 pm, LH1
Irina Gendelman, Ph.D. and Jeff Birkenstein, Ph.D., St. Martin’s University
Poet Charles Pierre Baudelaire wrote about the flâneur, a perfect spectator, an impassioned observer, a character who is away from home and yet who feels at home, who is in the midst of the world and at the same time hidden from it. Baudelaire’s flâneur, a person of some means who had the time to be idle, spent his leisure time wandering the streets of Paris and observing the life of the street.
We apply this idea to the modern observer of the world. Like Baudelaire’s flâneur, the modern wanderer is something of a hidden observer, at once within the world and outside of it, even as she is now time tethered to digital technologies such as Facebook, Instagram and digital cameras. The digital camera (and the internet applications on which its images are shared) acts as an extension of the flâneur’s body, a cyborg eye and a cyborg memory. It sees, frames and captures observations to be selectively shared as visual artifacts. With this extension, the flâneur, the spectator, also becomes a creator of new digital spaces to be explored. As modern wanderers, we record and reproduce the physical world as we see it, even as we alter that space through our digital images.
By recording, archiving, and looking at images of food and art, we will discuss these new and ever-evolving realms of imaginary spaces and how they reflect–and are reflected by–our understanding of observed reality.
Bios:
Irina Gendelman studies discourses in and about urban spaces, visual communication and technology. Her research and writing focus on the construction of place, nature and art in cities and online. She founded CROW, a community mural group and UW Urban Archives, a digital repository of street art, graffiti and signs. She also started and directs a campus urban garden as a teaching laboratory for sustainability. She currently teaches Digital Imagination in the Department of Society and Social Justice at Saint Martin’s University. She is passionate about teaching that engages students in a learning derived from experience and a connection to everyday practices. Recently, she co-led a study trip to Italy with English professor, Jeff Birkenstein, to explore the Slow Food movement and the roles that food and rituals around food serve in defining histories and identities of places.
Jeff Birkenstein strives to break down walls between the classroom and the world. For example, watching a plane crash into New York’s World Trade Center live on television led to a conference and then a class (co-taught with anthropologist David Price) and then a book: Reframing 9/11: Film, Pop Culture and the “War on Terror” (Continuum 2010), co-edited with Anna Froula (East Carolina University) and Karen Randall (University of Bedfordshire, UK). Another example: a successful eater for his entire life (except for those scorpions in Beijing), he uses these diverse experiences when teaching a course called “Food & Fiction,” which has, in turn, led to more writing, more traveling, more team-teaching and, of course, more good eating. His second book is The Cinema of Terry Gilliam: It’s a Mad World (Columbia UP/Wallflower P, 2013), co-edited with the same beloved co-editors.
Companion Reading:
- Required: Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, Connected, Back Bay Books, 2009. pp. xiii – 134.
Alternate or Optional Reading: Lev Manovich, Navigable Space in
The Language of New Media, pp. 213 – 243.