Landsploitation

Landsploitation episodes:

• 10.08.2009

  Jo Guldi: The Opposite of Development: The Landscape of government bulldozing in Chicago

  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...

  
• 09.15.2009

  Rust Belt Tour '09: Looking at Landscapes

  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...

  
• 09.08.2009

  Rust Belt Tour '09: Braddock, PA and Radical Utopianism

  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...

  
• 09.02.2009

  Rust Belt Tour '09: Elmira, NY and Prison-based Urbanism

  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...

  
• 08.22.2009

  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...

  
• 08.15.2009

  Rick Prelinger on the lost landscapes of San Francisco

  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...

  
• 08.08.2009

  Robert Todd: Thunder

  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...

  
• 08.03.2009

  Max Cafard: The Surre(gion)alist Manifesto

  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...

  
• 07.23.2009

  Simon Strikeback: Visit to Memphis

  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...

  
• 07.21.2009

  Broadcasting from Tokyo

  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...

  
• 07.25.2008

  Sam Amidon: "Saro"

  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...

  
• 04.27.2008

  Landsploitation: Cosmology

  "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...