Landsploitation

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 description of your piece to landscapestudies (at) gmail (dot) com.

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Episodes

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 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 at the forefront of city experiments in government experiments in racial integration, housing 11,000 people on the edge of Chicago's south side. Despit...

Oct 08, 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 on the road in Western Massachusetts, offers an on-the-fly introduction to the phenomenology of landscape. How does a landscape scholar move through an environment? How do social and econom...

Sep 15, 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 left behind a model of redevelopment pursued elsewhere, a model of urban clearances and arson that required the eviction of the urban poor. In contrast, Braddock and its mayor, John Fetterman, were lauded as pioneering a...

Sep 08, 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 in Albany, NY and Pittsburgh, PA. Elmira, however, survived, even flourished, thanks to a constant stream of prison-based revenue. 150 years later, what does an experiment in prison-based development look like? Is it actually a healthy form of urban...

Sep 02, 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 decline, relative to the second industrial revolution. The second industrial revolution, a revolution in scale, was predicated upon the vertical and horizontal integration of steel, rail, and labor across segments of the economy. Its foundat...

Aug 22, 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 to how vulnerable are the landscapes, experiences, and even memory of those landscapes not linked directly to the needs of the state.

Aug 15, 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 contains a metaphysics of unseen relations. "Life shivers as the ground beneath and sky above tremble," he writes. More of his films are available for viewing here: http://www.roberttoddfilms.com/...

Aug 08, 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 to consider their own perspective, political and culture, as the outcome of their existence at a certain place and time. It argued that only in radical utopian moments such as May 1968 do individuals become able to envision life beyond the bounds of...

Aug 03, 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 the level of electronica.

Jul 23, 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 sense of the subtle aesthetics that govern everyday interaction. The result: a semiotics of the smallest boundaries and gestures that reconcile and divide in Japan.

Jul 21, 2009

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 to westward migration, set to music by Sam Amidon. In "Saro," love for the woman left behind in the old world blends with nostalgia for a remembered landscape from home, both starkly contrasted against the changing, harsh reality of the Ame...

Jul 25, 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 between vision and movement in ordinary journeys. It is presented as the first episode of the LANDSPLOITATION podcast of experimental short films about landscape.

Apr 27, 2008

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