Tourist Productions 2005

« September 2005 | Main | November 2005 »

October 28, 2005

A Virtual Holiday in the Virtual Sun

A Virtual Holiday in the Virtual Sun
By MARK WALLACE
More than 10 million people around the world travel to imaginary destinations regularly, using online games like Second Life... New York Times, 10/28/05.

Posted by BKG at 6:43 AM

October 24, 2005

Surveillance, pizza, etc.

Here's what the American Civil Liberties Union has to say about video surveillance.

http://www.aclu.org/Privacy/Privacy.cfm?ID=13482&c=130

And a funny/terrifying clip about privacy and ordering pizza: http://www.aclu.org/pizza/index.html?orgid=EA071904&MX=1414&H=1

Posted by Brigitte Sion at 5:00 PM

What Kind of Experience Do You Want to Have?

Psychogeography, the study of the effect of the geographical environment on the emotions and behavior of individuals, provides a useful lens to view the issues in this week’s readings. In Casey’s examination of place, Simmel’s analysis of adventure and Brown’s exploring urban adventurism, there is an examination of alternate ways of experiencing place that privileges individual, subjective experience in order to better understand the complex interaction between a site and the individual. The derive, urban adventurism, i-See and the Surveillance Camera Players are all endeavors that increase one’s awareness about the interaction between place and self; empowering you to make a conscious decision about what place-self interaction you want to have and how to reshape the urban landscape to allow for that experience.

Casey in “Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does it Mean to Be in a Place-World?” looks at the human subject situated in place, what he calls “the geographical self.” (683) As opposed to space, which Casey identifies as abstract and about the gross positioning of things, place is deeply phenomenological, rooted in the subjective experience, the “immediate environment of the lived body.” (683) He examines three different dimensions of place: self, body and landscape. In this post-modern era, places are loosing specificity; they no longer define identity as the “work world” used to do. Indeed, psychogeography is appealing in this post-modern era precisely because it is about reclaiming the specificity of places.

Simmel in “The Adventure” (1919) describes how adventure is “a form of experiencing,” (7) rather than a particular type of experience. In the adventure there is a “life tension” in which “the quantity of these tensions becoming great enough to tear life . . . completely out of itself: this is what transforms mere experience into adventure.”(9) Adventure is a form of experiencing the world in the present moment in which there is a balance between active and passive, certainty and uncertainty. Adventure functions outside of our “meaningful context of life-as-a-whole” (1) and therefore becomes dreamlike. There is an affinity between the artist and the adventurer because both value the experience of the present moment and both the adventure and the art work are bounded experiences cut out from the continuous sequence of experience.

In the adventure, room is made for chance there is a welcoming of accident, like the gambler, “the adventurer . . . lets the accident somehow be encompassed by the meaning which controls the consistent continuity of life, even though the accident lies outside that continuity.” (3) The adventurer gives the experience meaning, which might be denied because of its accidental and extra-ordinary qualities. Adventure gets us in touch with a greater reality, that of the soul, “such that our earthly, conscious life is only an isolated fragment as compared to the unnamable context of an existence running its course in it.” (4) Moreover, adventure provides a category of experience around which other categories of experience are conceptualized in relationship to. There is immediacy to adventure: “the intensity and excitement with which it lets us feel life in jus this instance.” (8)

The notion of immediacy and chance made me think back to my experience on the Cardiff walk. On the walk, I felt a real immediacy and connection to the park, a heightened awareness and a being in the present moment. Indeed, Cardiff had us literally breathe with her at the end of the walk; becoming aware of the rhythm of your breathe is one of the easiest ways to bring yourself into the present moment.

The urban adventurism Brown describes in “Online and underground” is an example of people seeking out what Casey calls “thick places in which their own personal enrichment can flourish” (685) As there become fewer and fewer places which can keep something within it, there is a desire to hunt out places which are bounded and help people reflect on self. Solis and Deyo are urban explorers who engage in “infiltration,” whether it be of abandon subway tunnels or achieving an expansive view of the city by climbing to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge. Solis fascination with abandoned lunatic asylums and hospitals seems to speak to a desire for Casey’s “thick places,” exploring places filled with rich, forgotten stories. Moreover, by exploring abandoned places or familiar places in unfamiliar ways, experience in heightened and comes into the present moment as described by Simmel in “The Adventure.”

Debord in “Introduction to a critique of Urban Geography,” outlines his notion of psychogeography, which entails changing the social organization to allow for new notions of desire that are counter to the homogenized desires produces by the Coca-Cola capitalist machine. In “Theory of the Derive,” he provides an example of this type of urban geography or urban exploration. Derive, literally drifting, involving passing rapidly through varied ambiances while staying aware of the psychogeographical effects. You can be an adventurer in places you know and do not know by changing the way you are going about experiencing place. Two key aspects of a derive is both to study a terrain, for example its emotional affects, and emotionally disorientation. The derive, like all forms of adventure, involves some form of disorientation in order to allow for a new experience of place.

The New York Surveillance Players and the Institute for Applied Autonomy both deal with increasing awareness of surveillance around the city. One becomes aware of the surveillance aspect of psychogeography which is often forgotten, but none the less affecting one’s experience. Going on the tour, I became aware of the magnitude of cameras around Washington Square Park. I was not particularly surprised, rather the tour confirmed feelings of surveillance that I had that had not been articulated; these feelings were brought into consciousness. Indeed, the derive, iSee and Surveillance Camera Players all increase awareness of how city space is constructed to encourage or allow only certain types of interactions. For example, ostensively the camera where there to deter and pre-empt crime, but no one knew about the cameras and people weren’t being spotted pre-crime; the surveillance was not functioning according to script. Our tour, looking at the surveillance cameras, was a greater deviation from the original script. Participating in a derive offers a concrete example of how to broaden possible interactions with the city.

In terms of how this could apply to my project on Hassidic Williamsburg, I could search out Casey’s thick, bounded places, which will be filled with history and meaning. It is important that I stay aware of my psychogeographic response to place. I could also ask people in the community to make their own psychogeographic maps, which could be of emotion-space, or perhaps a biographical map (i.e. this is the synagogue where I had a bat mitzvah). Also taking inspiration from the derive, I could explore the forgotten places, not just the main boulevards and pay attention to the detail. Indeed, I could do a derive of Williamsburg. Taking a cue from the surveillance camera tour I could look at how Williamsburg is constructed to function (city planning wise) and how it actually functions.

Posted by Sarah Zoogman at 8:40 AM

Surveillance Camera Tour at Washington Square Park

In the tour, I was surprised at the considerable number of surveillance cameras around Washington Square Park, a place which I consider safe and does not need to be monitored. The revelation of the fact that surveillance cameras are installed in high density around the area makes me curious about why this public place is intensely under surveillance.

Our tour guide gave us an explanation of the high density of the surveillance equipment installation in the area. According to the guide, surveillance cameras, whose purpose are to prevent the crimes, are usually installed in the relatively wealthy neighborhoods, such as West Village, where the crime rate is relatively low compared with that of poor communities. The installation of the cameras, again, according to the tour guide, reflects the fear of the rich, who deeply concern about their own safety and properties. To some extent, the act of installation and monitoring can be read as people’s buying insurance. In this case, the wealthy people’s fear, or lack of a sense of security, has been commodified and transformed into the surveillance safeguard packet selling back to those people who psychologically need such service.

In addition to pointing out the motive of the camera installation, our guide also drew on the events of suicidal bombers in the London subway to reveal the fact that installation of surveillance cameras intending to prevent crimes, terrorist attack, and other anti-social behavior might end up in futility by spending huge amount of money. In this case, the undesirable effect, or affect, of recording the faces of the bombers is that such footage clearly depicted the faces of the bombers and idolized them.

Regardless of the effectiveness of the surveillance camera installation in terms of reducing crime rate, it seems to me that such infrastructure of the park will affect how people distribute their bodies in this place. How people perceive themselves and how they behave in Washington Square Park might also change due to the enforcement of surveillance.

In “Between Geography and Philosophy,” Casey indicates that the philosophical tradition tends to downplay the physical (the body, place, and space), and to privilege the cerebral (awareness, consciousness) when it comes to the discussion on self identity. Casey proposes that we should also take “space,” and “landscape” on broad and recognize the fact that these factors are also influential to the formation of the concept of self. He introduces the concept of geographical self which comes into being through the dialectic between the individual and the space in which s/he is situated. In Casey’s concept, the physical environment leaves traces on the individual who is/was exposed to it and alters his/her cognition as well as body.

Taking on Casey’s idea, it is possible that being surrounded by numerous surveillance cameras, people in Washington Square Park will alter their behavior accordingly in response to such heavy surveillance.

The realization of being watched closely by surveillance devices, people might, on one hand, restrain themselves to behave in a way which fulfills the expectations of the authority/the polices/the camera installers; or, on the other hand, react against such surveillance to break the rules intentionally. It is also likely that some people will take the role as “performers,” doing something that is harmless, yet idiosyncratic, in front the surveillance cameras to embark on an “adventure” (I am using Simmel’s term loosely).

The tour reminds me of the facts I failed to notice. I appreciate our guide’s brief introduction of how surveillance cameras have evolved over time and how the advancement of surveillance technology influence and/or will influence our daily existence. Also, I found the article by Casey resonates with the concepts introduced in another course. I think the interplay between the space and people might be pertinent to my research on movie tour at Central Park.

Posted by Stella Yu-Wen Wang at 6:34 AM

What does it mean to be in the Place-World?

The interrelated tensions that run through of this week’s materials are those of the self versus other, mind versus body, legitimate versus illicit viewing, regulation versus experimentation, and the joy of looking versus the fear of being looked at.

Casey’s discussion of the modernist and postmodernist distinctions/relations between self, place, and space is a good jumping-off point for this idea. Modernist ideas about the inner self that existed independently of the physical location, was vigent during an era characterized by mass migration from the country to the anonymous, homogenizing city and when new kinds of architecture and city planning were transforming what it meant to live in a city. Postmodernist theory of self was inspired by themes of the fragmentation of identity brought about by intensified deterritorialization and the transnational flows of capital, goods, and people. Both moments where characterized by a terror of rootlessness provoked by the rapid changes in attachments selves formed with their material environments.

Both moments generated voluminous writing by the intellectuals and artists of their time who struggled to figure out what the future was of their feelings of disassociation and alienation with their environment. Some modernists like some postmodernists celebrated the changes (like the Futurists), others made social critiques and interventions (like the Situationalists). All contemplated the effects of geography, architecture, or place on people in spite of the purported mind-body split we have cherished since ancient times.

The tourist and flaneur, are modern figures that celebrated the looking that connected people to places. Now web-surfer can be counted among the idle lookers, meandering through new kinds of rationalized ‘scapes. Your body does not even need to leave home to experience and be reciprocally reconstituted in new virtual environments. At the same time, the self whose body that does not venture outside the space of the cubicle must be in some way different than the person whose body experiences physical places, mustn’t it?

Fourcault’s idea of the panopticon reminds us of the nefarious aspect of modernist looking. It is much more pleasurable to be the tourist-looker than the disciplined-lookee. Now a virtual panoipticon regards our every move. Have you ever been given one of those pamphlets that say that at the end of the world, we will all get barcodes and the number 666 tattooed on us? Scary stuff... On the other hand, wouldn’t it be great not to have to flash your NYU ID or worry about losing your credit card?

Credit cards, ATMs, sending email are all electronic transactions that locate you at a particular place in time. Have you ever gotten a call from your credit card company, because you had been spending too much in a place far from home? How do you define surveillance? Is it someone looking at the location of your body? Or could it be the data that records your location in a more much precise way? I sense that for some reason the blind gaze of the mechanical eye looking at your body without seeing is more disturbing to us. Only hackers and “identity thieves” are creatively producing critical “situations” that cause us to reflect on our electronic-environments. However, the moral outrage they produce is often not linked to the victim’s critical awareness of the structures of the place he inhabits. Rather the reaction is more likely to be a bourgeois fury in defense of private property and accumulation.

Casey’s account on current philosophical interests that deconstruct the mind-body divide cause me think of the psychiatrist R.D. Laing’s theories of schizophrenogenisis. According to him, in the healthy individual, the body is the outer-limit between the “self” and “other.” In his modernist model, the self resides inside the body, which is its vehicle that allows it to interact with the outside world. Pathological individuals, however, do not experience reality in this way. Their selves extend past the limits of their bodies into the world, creating for them confusion between self and non-self.

Now it is completely natural for middle class Americans to be cyborgs connected to palm pilots, Ipods, cell phones, and laptops. As Casey notes, our selves (we?) are extending into the world through different “mediatrices” in ways that are unaccounted for by both modernist and postmodernist ways of thinking about the individual and the places s/he occupies. “Despite and affinity for thick places, the contemporary self can flourish even in spaces that are disemobodied, virtualized, and notably thin."

Posted by Pilar Rau at 3:56 AM

Memory on Feet

Edward Casey’s article “between geography and philosophy” provides a wonderful example of a bridge between discipline, or how geography informs philosophy, while philosophy enriches geography. His articulation of the bodily experience in the lived space, of the immediate relation between the self and the place is precisely one of the prisms of study that inspires my research about memorials.

While visiting the Holocaust memorial in Berlin last May, I noticed four different moments, relating to four completely different experiences: the fenced memorial as construction site, closed to the public, and frustrating the need to experience a new space; the memorial opened to a thousand happy-fews on the day of its unveiling, when the limited number of visitors and the light rain falling added to the oppressive and claustrophobic feeling induced by the architectural design; the memorial during the day, open to the public, and right away transformed into a tourism destination and a playground; the memorial at night, populated by rebellious teenagers, drunkards, sex-hunters and other night owls. It is precisely the contextualization, the agency of the body in a given context that performs a variety of things, that makes a memorial sometimes a happy playground and sometimes a solemn space for reflection, sometimes a serious place, sometimes a fun place, sometimes a dangerous place and sometimes an ugly place. By the same token, the body is also touched by the walking on tilted ground, the forbidden climbing, the touching of the cold slabs, and their spiky angles.

Last August, I interviewed an Argentinean mother whose only daughter was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by the military dictatorship in 1976. Forty years later, she was able to visit the ESMA, a former detention center where her daughter was last seen alive: “Visiting the ESMA was painful and relieving at the same time. I walked through the rooms and I tried to touch every square inch with my hands, the walls, the doors, the floor, the pillars, thinking that Franca had touched them too. It was a very tactile, physical way of bonding with my dead daughter.” Remembering her daughter was not a matter of intellectual work, it was as much a bodily experience that helped the mourning phase and gave the mother some hope.

The mutual enrichment of body, self and place also offers original ways of looking at the performance of the place and at the mediation of the body, and to understand this liminal or transitory state experienced by the body in an usual place (especially places that are typically designed for the brains, such as Berlin). This state in-between refers to Simmel before referring to Victor Turner, as Simmel describes the modern condition of the stranger as someone who “has not belonged to [the group] fro the beginning, that he imports qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group itself” (1st paragraph). The stranger acts as a trustworthy door that one can open to confide, and at the same time, the stranger keeps a secret key to a backdoor that remains closed, personal and inaccessible. “He is near and far at the same time,” writes Simmel, which could very well come from Casey, or from Debord, who tackles the notion of pushing boundaries and challenging traditional use of spaces. If I look back at my project in the light of Debord and Janelle Brown, I realize that the visitors of memorials belong to different –and often conflicting—categories, from survivor to tourist, from adventurer to stranger, from wanderer to celebrity. Add the delicate question of regulating the space, limiting the bodily experience and imposing rules of contact, and we enter a new world were body, self and space seem all the more polarized rather than join forces to apprehend the world around us. This week’s readings offer a number of original new paths to explore that are extremely inspiring.

Posted by Brigitte Sion at 2:46 AM

Big Brother Blinks

The issues treated in this week’s readings map an intersection between philosophy and geography. Clear parallels can be drawn between Casey’s discussion of the “geographical self”, the human subject oriented and situated in place (683) and the Situationists’ formulation of psychogeography. Whereas the Situationist writings, which intended to incite and provoke action, are more closely linked to the alternative tourism practices of urban exploration, Casey’s analysis of the reciprocal relationship between self and place is more intricate and subtle. A shared phenomenological thread can be traced through all the readings primarily concerned with the experiential aspects of both place and self.

In his interesting essay “Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be in the Place-World?” Casey closely examines the ways in which place and self help to construct and activate each other. The two not only influence each other reciprocally but are also of “constitutive coingredience: each is essential to the being of the other.” (684) Casey uses Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a liaison between place and self. Habitus here represents a product of geography and history, which in turn produces individual and collective practices, and hence history and geography. (686) Casey points to historical moments, such as our own, where places have become attenuated. Because of their interdependence, the process thinning-out is by necessity directly tied to the desiccation and diminishing of self. (686-687) The virtue of the nature of habitus is its improvisatory potential. Habitus, although a condensation of past experiences, comes into being through a skillful application and can be replaced by another habitudinal set of practices. It is in this fluidity, a ceaseless becoming in place that habitus is linked to Situationist practices, which attempt to play with and disorient congealed behavior.

I would be very interested in a further elaboration of the ways in which places imprint themselves differently on different persons. Clearly, the psychogeodynamics have different impacts on different individuals, is this because we come to them with different sets of inculcated habitus? Are there any examples of psychogeographical maps in existence? How was the consensus of these maps established?

The practices of urban exploration and the Situationists both encourage a critical approach to the exploration of our surroundings. The New York Surveillance Camera Players provoke a similar critical investigation of the urban landscape. It is at once fascinating and disquieting to envision the impact that the little eyes of surveillance have on the psychogeography of our world. These eyes poke holes in our universe which may very intensify the perforation and thinning out of the place-world. Big Brother’s eyes blink however. While walking with my son during today’s tour I witnessed several instances of drug solicitation.

Krzysztof Wodiczko 'sreconfiguration of urban sites signal alternative possibilities of remapping cities. Wodiczko's large-scale projections of images (that are often controversial) onto public buildings function to unsettle our relationship to place. His work acts as a disruption to the "routine and passive perception of the ideological theatre of the built environment as well as a disruption of our imaginary place in it." (Wodiczko 1996: 55) Wodiczko's project is to disrupt the "continuous process of reproducing the individual in space." (Wodiczko and Ferguson 1992: 64) Wodiczko sees his projections as the externalization of that which lies hidden beneath the surface, of things unsaid as well as fantasy. Unlike the Situationist dérive, which is primarily focused on the experience of the individual or a small group of individuals, work of artists like Wodiczko has the potential to unhinge the urban experience on a mass scale.

Above, I quote Wodiczko from Nick Kaye's Site Specific Art: Place, Performance and Documentation View image
in the chapter entitled "Performing the City".

http://www.art-for-a-change.com/Krzysztof/krzy.htm

http://www.roland-collection.com/rolandcollection/section/36/666.htm

Posted by Dominika Bennacer at 2:01 AM

Placebo experiences vs. experiencing the real

If ‘psychogeography’ is “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment” (Debord:1) on human emotions and behavior, then the essence of the readings for this week could be generated under the term ‘geopsychology’; how human beings “perceive”, “(in)habit”, “live” and “experience” (Casey), “explore” (Brown), “conquer” (Simmel), “terrain” and “encounter”, “utilize” and “commoditize” (Debord), and “control” (i-SEE) geographical spaces and places. In other words, the essays depict the different ways we reconceptualize the relation between self/body and space/place.

The starting point of all the essays is the opposition between being at home and exploring new places; the ways in which these seemingly contradictory experiences can be resolved. And I cannot help but thinking of MacCannell’s fundamental formula: the tourist travels in order to get away from the predictability and certainty of everyday life. The symptoms are the same, but the antidote is different this time. The prescription is simple: instead of going away, stay home and find a way to perceive and experience your environment in a different way – dérive, adventure or “off-limits tourism”: either of these should be effective for the disease of boredom and habituation.

It is the monotony and – I would say – alienation of the delimited modern urban life that these writers and their protagonists all struggle with. What the case studies demonstrate is that adventure, in the Simmelian sense, as a synthesis of activity and passivity, conquest and self-abandonment is a possible and accessible lifestyle in and escape from contemporary urban society.
Simmel’s, Debord’s, and Brown’s essays are important contributions and counterpoints to the twentieth centuries and contemporary discourses on the alienated urban life. When I first heard the title “Surveillance Camera Players” I expected a similar experience: that the playfulness of a performance would counter-balance the anxious presence of surveillance cameras all over the city. Needless to say, the walking tour turned out to be something very different from what I expected, and after the tour I am sitting here still with doubts and dilemmas that I do not know how to resolve at this point.
I think my main problem is that I find the “pro” and the “con” arguments in the debate around the surveillance cameras equally weak. I understand that those who oppose it claim that it is ineffective, expensive and not worth its price, and turns the city into an Orwellian place of anxiety. I also see that it can be dangerously discriminating and racial. At the same time, I find the ongoing biased and paranoid discourse related to surveillance cameras (such as the i-SEE) dangerous and narrow-minded, too. Despite the negative examples, I still can imagine certain cases, in which the surveillance cameras could be effective devices in tracing down and preventing future crimes and terror attacks.
I am wondering what impact the cameras have on our behavior in reality. How much they do they change our experience of the space/place? Do we indeed perceive the city in a different way? Are we really conscious of these cameras that – as we saw it today – only seemingly follows us everywhere? I am sure that all of us would have different answers to these questions. I personally do not think that I will walk in a different way from now on. Maybe tomorrow I will still think about the cameras Bill pointed out to us. However, I am convinced that eventually my ‘habitus’ will take over and I will hurry without perceiving much of the space as – unfortunately – I most of the time travel in my everyday environment. (The question is what happens, if the presence of the surveillance cameras, the feeling of being watched will become part of our ‘habitus’ one day.)
At this point, I think that surveillance camera is a placebo for people to feel both safe and secure in public and private places. It might not be effective in preventing a crime or terror attack, but it is effective in attenuating fear and anxiety for now.

Casey points out the significance of places in the process of ‘becoming’: “Place requires human agents to become “primary places,” in Sack’s nomenclature, and these same agents require places to be the selves they are in the process of becoming” (484). Debord, Simmel and Brown explore how the ‘habitus’ of derives, adventurers and urban explorers are transformed by spatial experiences. What we find in these cases are real transformations; triggered by real experiences and perceptions.

I do not know what is the ‘becoming’ that is at stake in the perception of these placebo surveillance cameras. At this point, people’s experience with the cameras relies on what is communicated to them from the outside. It is a prevalent discourse that defines each individual’s attitude, whether he/she feels more secure or more anxious with the cameras. I do not believe that these external arguments can provoke/inspire real ‘becoming’.
At the same time, I do believe that the presence of surveillance cameras will change our ‘habitus’. In what way? I am not sure yet. But perhaps anxiety is not even the right context to look for the answer. Camera is the ultimate power in our society. It is the window to the world, the exclusive channel of canonization, a magic box, in which everything and everybody is transformed through performances. Perhaps it is this new kind of performitivity – that cameras will introduce on the streets – that will change our ‘habitus’. The street becomes a screen – without frames.

Posted by Aniko Szucs at 12:58 AM

Fame

Today’s walking tour of surveillance cameras around the Washington Square area has me thinking about fame. Not the TV show from the 80s (although that dancing in the streets sequence from the credits would, I suppose, be a performance for the NYPD’s CCTV cameras in today’s New York), but your run-of-the-mill (okay, I’m revealing my biases), sort of American/New Yorkish overwhelming desire for your 15 minutes of fame. Getting yours means you have truly arrived (analogous to the body’s physical arrival on the scene, imaged by sensors perhaps).

London, as the world’s most heavily surveilled city, is mostly just ho-hum to me. The more cameras there are, and therefore more footage that is being captured, the less concerned I feel about being watched – with the idea that in the great sea of boring people doing boring things, I am even more insignificant. The possibility of watchers seeing me, or reviewing tapes with me on them, decreases with the vast increase of footage to watch. For Bill Brown, on the other hand, the London scenario seems to pose a nightmarish prototype of what might happen this side of the Atlantic. More cameras mean more cameras watching him. That is, while I feel comfortable being lost in the millions of my everyday travels around New York, Bill Brown is a surveillance performer. And he is the main attraction, the hero, the action star who may even be billed above the film’s title.

With absolutely no attempt to back this up, I would like propose that a lot of people in the media-infused, media-savvy US live their lives according to what would make good TV. It’s a bit like an aching for Simmel’s adventure, a dropping out (or above) the continuity of life. We see this played out in tourism where you can get away from yourself and your life and be someone else, somewhere else. But I am suggesting that there is also an ache to create these moments in/out of daily life – moments of heightened awareness of the geography around you and the self you are playing, where you know what a great story this will be. A sensibility of celebrity or stardom, or just a minor guest stop on an episode of ‘Friends.’ But you know the camera must be nearby catching this, how like a movie is this!… And when Big Brother becomes a global TV phenomenon, things become a little more complicated.

Bill Brown, on his surveillance tour, is a celebrity performer – his awareness of our tour being a performance for the cameras was only just outshone by his awareness of what makes good news on CNN the next day (spray painting camera lenses, putting up signs saying “You are currently being recorded by a CCTV surveillance camera” at appropriate locations), and his performance in the upcoming documentary on the redevelopment of Washington Square Park. And, in turn, this was outshone by his observation of how surveillance in the London underground, far from preventing the July bombings, in fact assisted the bombers’ project of martyrdom by providing CCTV images for the next day’s media coverage.

I suppose this, the ineffectiveness of video surveillance, is the objection I can get most behind. A point made very clear on iSee’s website. Their program for navigating your ‘path of least surveillance’ has resonances with Debord’s ‘maps of influences’ and ‘psychogeographical pivot points.’ (An aside: in strange ways, this virtual walking experience put me more in touch with the body’s agency/constriction in manoeuvring unsurveilled through New York than following Bill Brown today.) And situated in the context of other infiltrations (going places or seeing things that should be unnoticed), the sensibility of the surveillance walking tour aligns itself with the sensibility of Debord’s dérive.

The theory of dérive has obvious implications for my research on Cardiff’s Her Long Black Hair, as does Casey’s essay. I am interested in tracing a line originating in the literal translation of dérive, ‘drifting,’ to a chapter of Paul Carter’s ‘Drift Lanes’ dealing with the lie of the land, its folds, vortexes, etc, but this needs further reflection to see where it leads. I am also taken with Casey’s claim to an imaginative, improvisational nature of habitus, linking place and self, and the body as the pivot of the place-world, as I increasingly feel the participation of the body is central in Cardiff's work.

Posted by Justine Shih Pearson at 12:58 AM

How does surveillance limit the conditions of possibility for adventure? Preliminary late-night thoughts ...

While I agree with some of you who align the Surveillance Camera Players tour with dérive, or adventure, in that it brings us into a new relation to our environment, creating an “ambiance” (to use Debord’s terminology) of alternately exasperation and paranoia, I ultimately think that the reality of surveillance is in serious tension with our ability to adventure and experience places in creative ways. On the one hand, knowing that you are being surveilled - and recorded - gives the experience (whether you are picnicking in Washington Square Park or an abandoned subway tunnel) a different “ambiance”, or “flavour”. But what happens when this surveillance pervades nearly every place? It can hardly be just an “ambiance” then. It is a real presence - or is it that we are present in relation to it? It seems that Bill Brown’s goal in the Surveillance Camera Players Tour was to make us consciously present to these surveillance techologies, to these eyes everywhere, and the unpredictable or apathetic or perverted or bored or sleeping ‘I’s that operate them.

To be present to these eyes all the time, espcially in an area as (absurdly) heavily surveilled as Washington Square Park, requires energy that may have otherwise been spent in creative ways. Is it possible to ‘adventure’ the presence of surveillance cameras? Is it possible to do so without addressing their presence? Is it possible to “forget” about them for the duration of an adventure, or is that hopelessly naive? What I’m getting at is that I don’t think surveillance is “just one aspect” of experience, like weather or company. If you are in the presence of them, they are in your presence; and if you explicitly seek places outside of the view of surveillance cameras, (by using isee for example) you are avoiding them; they are therefore directly affecting your behaviour.

I do not know if it matters that the cameras (at least here in NYC) largely fail in their crimefighting mandates/justifications. It is the presence and the fact of being watched that seems to narrow the conditions of possibility for adventure. Not just on the level of “I’d better not do anything illegal”, but also that ‘someone’ may (always) be watching changes the nature of the adventure, makes necessarily into a performance. Most of the time in public space, we behave as though we are not (or do not believe we are) under surveillance. How would this change if A) surveillance were everywhere and B) we all knew about it. For some reason, I am struck with the image of the witch from The Wizard of Oz watching Dorothy and friends make their way up the yellow brick road, using a crystal ball or some such ‘magical’ device. This technology is now widespread; the difference is, we are very unlikely to be the star of the video surveillance footage, and if we are, it is doubtful that the “adventure” as recorded and viewed will accurately reflect the adventure as experienced (psychogeographically). The surveillor may or may not have malicious intent toward the surveilled; but they are probably not your archnemesis. This is for me the central problem of surveillance: it is so pervasive that it seems to demand treament in experiences to which it is present, a change of behaviour; on the other hand, unlike the Wizard of Oz, or 1984, we are not the stars of its narrative, it is largely indifferent to our narratives and adventures. Unless we are breaking the law, foolishly or ignorantly in front of it, or we are playing directly to it. It may have to become central in my narrative (the narrative I make of my adventure before and after it occurs), even if I am marginal to its narrative, if it has one at all.
I want to be able to ignore them as much as I know or suspect that I am ignored by them; but I am unable to. If I do, it is out of forgetfulness - willed or not, ignorance, or naïveté. It isn’t about the paranoia of being arrested or the discomfort with my private moments being penetrated by cameras. It is about the way I feel impelled to address them as presences, and the unevenness and uncertainty of this relationship.

Posted by Sarah Klein at 12:45 AM

October 23, 2005

What gets left

This week’s reading’s dealt with the relationships between space, place, geography, and the body. The convergence of all these factors, psychogeography, looks at the way characteristics of a space and geography affects human emotions and actions. More than in previous readings which maintained tourist theories in an external realm, these readings enter the affects of place and exchange into the human body. The tourist acts looked at and participated in during the Surveillance Camera Players tour demonstrate performances of real life where everyday people and everyday life becomes a stage for exchange between participants and viewers, mostly non-consensual.

Throughout our previous readings, we have looked relationships between two parties: the tourist and the toured, the viewer and the viewed, the performer and the recipient. In this group of readings, the two parties involved are organized slightly different with one party highly visible and physical and the other party represented, not present, less visible, and through this lack of presentation on a plane of higher power; the relationship is then between the controller and the controlled. Implied in most of the readings yet stated by Guy-Ernest Debord’s articles, the two parties involved describe a power relationship, recognizing those that control our spaces (more specifically our urban spaces) control our interaction with and feelings about the place. Some individuals determine the space and some are merely affected by others determinations.

Such power relationships, introduced by MacCannell, clarified by Bruner, and interpreted artistically by Lippard, revealed themselves in today’s Surveillance Camera Players’ tour. When writing about the Derive, Debord describes a technique through which place can be neutralized and experienced freshly. The act of “adventure” subverts the power dynamic inscribed in the everyday society of the governed. Simmel’s “The Adventure” like the Derive urges an awareness of our psychic and emotional presence in a space. Simmel defines the adventure by contrast to the everyday experience (of being controlled). Drawing comparisons between an adventure, a gambler, works of art, falling in love, and dreams, the common thread of each is a lack of continuity, an act that goes beyond the everyday by breaking away from a temporal or physical chain. Simmel synthesizes external, internal, chance and necessity to explain the state of adventure in our life.

“Between Geography and Philosophy” explores the relationships between place, space, self, geography, and agency. Casey references Proust’s theories on the ability of place to record itself onto the self, the ability of place to record itself onto our body by way of sensory memory. Kant’s view that we are the subjects of place or subjects to place was clearly demonstrated in today’s tour. The SCP tour exposed the not-so-invisible characteristic of surveillance within a delineated urban space. Within our “free” society, without our “public” spaces, we are constantly being observed for purposes of control and through this observation we become subject to the place. Although it appears to be people in power who control a surveyed environment, we observed today through Bill that it is actually a “manipulation of perception” and with instances of no people behind the cameras, the buildings, cameras, corners, wires and the place, independent of people, become the modus of control. In this stage of the real, where people performing perfunctory acts are being watched by mechanical eyes, there is a layer of inanimate material between the viewer and the viewed creating a scenario where man made objects end up controlling man.

In common with the Surveillance players, the Urban Exploration movement written about by Janelle Brown discusses the anti-establishment desire to overcome boundaries not always visible. Describing the practice of “infiltrating” remnants of buildings, Brown describes social and government established imagined barriers that people ritually break, The way in which people know of these boundaries is similar to the way in which people accept surveillance cameras. From this article, I visited the site of Sean O’Boyle’s photographs that document abandoned places and spaces from insane asylums to nuclear laboratories. In these photographs the buildings were disintegrating, paint peeling, empty of all human element yet full of the human energy of abandonment. In these images the ability of place to burn onto person reverses and we see how human presence burns itself onto place. The photos were beautifully balanced, highlighting aesthetic qualities in the remains of civilization. The spaces themselves became bodies, doorways morphing into eyes, peeling paint referencing skin, and hallways functioning visually as limbs.

Debord describes the ways in which space and geography is sculpted by human concerns which in turn affect human feelings as they navigate through the geography. The urban explorers participate in physically engaging body practice where participants inscribe their entire beings within a strange space. I am intrigued by this desire to place oneself within such extreme environments. What does this act of penetrating a left behind space do for humans? It seems as if they are drawn to the remains of human energy. The space within which these highly dimensional routines intersect with the flattened lack of dimensionality of the performers in surveillance cameras is the relationship between urban place and human emotion. To connect today’s tour to the readings; one would have to examine the affect of knowing you are being surveyed on emotional responses to a place. I look forward to discussing the psychogeography of surveyed spaces with class.

To apply the study of the affects of geography on emotions and behaviors of individuals to Sepharad ’92, I would examine issues of historical memory and tragic memory and its ability to resonate within a space and affect bodily interaction with the space. There appears to be a connection between the infiltrators and tragic tourism, or the act of visiting spaces with unfavorable pasts. I’m interested in the psychic quality of a space. The ability of human pasts to mark buildings and spaces and the memory to breathe upon visitors well after events have passed.

Posted by Erin Madorsky at 11:47 PM

Scott's Response #6 Surveillance

As a psychiatric social worker I would employ something called the “ecological perspective” in my clinical approach to assessing and diagnosing patients. This basically meant that along with considering biological, psychological, and social factors informing the patient’s level of functioning and health, I would also take into consideration environmental factors. For example, if a client lived in a Single Room Occupancy hotel in a dangerous, poverty-stricken, and unstructured part of town how would this impact her day-to-day emotions and cognitive processes? This environmental inclusion in an approach to the human experience is how I basically interpret Debord’s and Casey’s ideas of “psychogeography.”

Casey asks, “Just how is place constitutive of the self? How does is insinuate itself into the very heart of personal identity?” (2001) He proposes that an individual’s movement in space is the “mediatrix” between the concepts of self-identity and space. As this occurs, space becomes “place,” an “arena of action that is at once physical and historical, social and cultural.” He also proposes that an individual’s identity outside of “place” becomes meaningless, much like a diagnosis ignoring a patient’s physical environment is incomplete.

How does this engagement of geography and philosophy, phenomenology and identity inform any approach to tourist productions? It recognizes that human beings are animals to be viewed in relationship with our environments. Such a view proposes that experience and actual identity are connected to one’s environment and phenomenological experience. In such a view, site-specific tours become more about the experience of walking through space and interacting with it in a biopsychosocial manner than conceiving the tourist production as something to be watched or consumed as a separate entity. This is particularly salient when I look at examples of urban exploration. Individuals who explore “out of bounds” environments reportedly do so for the body experience:

“Urban explorers admit that the appeal of infiltration is often about the thrill of being somewhere you are not supposed to be – or…confronting your fears, going into spaces that are dangerous and very creepy. But despite the adrenaline rushes, many explorers say that it is also the poetry of this pursuit that draws them in.” (Brown, 2001)

The “poetry” of the pursuit echoes Debord’s description of derive, where the individual delves into a liminoid space for a time, engaging with her environment, allowing it to literally and figuratively move her in a certain path and dance.

This parallels my personal approach to environmental theater, where space becomes an integral role in the production, informing the performance as much as text and human action. This approach of human action-and-experience-in-space will be a main component of my research project where “place” and the visitor’s whole body experience is meant to shape perceptions and viewpoints towards the issue of immigration, cultural diversity, and community.

Today’s Surveillance Camera Players’ tour in Washington Square Park can be seen through this lens of human experience in “place.” Integral to the tour was the feeling one gets standing on the park’s corner and being regarded by the impassive eye of a dark bubble camera above. I couldn’t quite decide how I felt about the tour. In one sense, I found various information about cameras and their purported lack of efficacy interesting. I also found Bill’s eccentric obsession amusing. A piece of me also recognized the general seriousness of the topic and appreciated the fact that someone is willing to take the time to bring issues of personal behavior data collection to discussion. I also found myself partly responding to the tour with a “So what? Who cares?” Finally, I found it interesting to think about the meaning of human behavior in collecting and utilizing the vast quantities of electronic surveillance. It is for deterrence? For insurance? For emotional peace of mind? Or simply something to do because everyone else does it?

Arriving home after the tour, I entered my loft building and looked up to see a private security camera tucked away in the upper corner. I looked at it, and sarcastically waved, feeling somewhat different than if I had waved at a blank wall or at an actually person. Perhaps no one would ever watch the tape. Perhaps it wasn’t even taping. Or perhaps someone somewhere would soon be audience to my little performance.

Posted by Scott Wallin at 10:01 PM

Adventures in Baby-Sitting . . . Or Walking, Although I Am Listening To "And Then He Kissed Me" Right Now (And, Yes, I Officially Know WAY Too Much Pop Culture)

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
“This is it. If I take one more step, it’ll be the farthest away from home I’ve ever been.”
“Moving in silent desperation / Keeping an eye on the holy land / A hypothetical destination / say, who is this walking man?”

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
“This is it. If I take one more step, it’ll be the farthest away from home I’ve ever been.”
“Moving in silent desperation / Keeping an eye on the holy land / A hypothetical destination / say, who is this walking man?”

For me, the central pillar of this week’s readings (including the New York Surveillance Camera Tour experience) is Georg Simmel’s deliciously-written essay, The Adventure. Although he teases it out to its fullest extent, Simmel’s elegant and simple premise is that an adventure is something outside of the normal, linear, cause-and-effect flow of everyday life, “a foreign body in our existence which is yet somehow connected with the center.” It is, in many ways, like a piece of art, taking an object – in this case, the world, or whatever aspect of it the adventurer encounters – and finding a new, interesting, and unique way to explore and experience in it (which brings us back to Lucy Lippard – HAH, see, all of you doubters? I DID make her useful again later in the course – and her connection, through the “alternate-angle” way of looking at things, between art and tourism). In the context of this class, of course, we can associate the adventure with travel, with tourism, with encountering “the new,” whatever/wherever that may be. More specifically, though, in the context of this week’s readings, the adventure is associated with walking, with the body propelling itself physically through a space/place/habitude, to borrow from Casey’s Between Geography and Philosophy.

To bring in walking, of course, brings up the walking tour that we experienced as a class – one which, unfortunately, seemed rather light on the walking, and was perhaps more of a “standing around on the corner learning things” tour. However, even if the tour itself wasn’t a very bodily experience, it was entirely about embodied experience. The walking body, the playing body, the sitting body, the love-making body, all under the watchful eye of the NYPD, NYU, and a million other alphabet-agencies forming a giant Big Brother eye-in-the-sky. Although none of the readings for this week directly approach this question, Casey’s article, focusing on how the body and the geographical locale can, indeed must, be brought together, makes me wonder just what resonance there is between the individual physical body and the removed, cold, digital technology. I was extremely taken by the story told on the tour of the couple making love on their rooftop, and how the police voyeuristically spied on them (one – or at least one who is as unafraid of public embarrassment as I am - is reminded of a massive amount of pornographic web-sites specializing in voyeurism, either “real” or staged for the camera). What especially interested me in this story was that the camera in question was utilizing infrared – meaning that it was the heat of the couple, the warmth of their passion, which enabled them to be seen by the police. The erotic sense of this body heat is palpable, and it is almost heart-breaking to know that this private heat is shared, unknowingly, with police officers miles away. What place is there to share and mingle warm bodies when the world is inundated with cold machines? Perhaps iSee gives us the answer to that, but a surveillance helicopter or plane could easily overcome those gaps in permanent camera stations. . .

To take a step back from my sudden (and disturbingly sexual) paranoia, in reading Guy-Ernst Debord’s two essays on this week’s syllabus (again, such great writing this week!), and in devouring the concepts of psychogeography and of the derive, I realized that I had read a lot of these ideas before, in interviews with the author (well, all right, “comic book scribe”) Alan Moore, who penned such literary giants in the “graphic novel” field as Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and From Hell. It was in reading interviews with him about From Hell – which includes a “psychogeographic” walk in chapter 5, in which the soon-to-be Jack-the-Ripper goes on a full-day tour of London, tracing its hidden histories and connections to the arcane mysticism of the Masons, ultimately tracing the path of a pentagram and completing a necessary magic and psychological ritual to prepare for the murders that are to come – that Moore mentioned the concept of psychogeography, tying it most strongly with the writer and novelist Ian Sinclair. I then went on to read some of Sinclair’s work, and I highly recommend it if you are at all interested in psychogeography – he comes the closest to representing the term in a beautiful and amazing collection of amassed verbiage (I’m struggling to avoid calling it “prose,” since I think that flattens out what he’s doing) than anything else I’ve read, including the Debord readings.

Hm . . . comic books, Ian Sinclair, porn, James Taylor, and a Lord of the Rings reference – I’m having a bit too much fun doing these responses

Posted by Andrew Friedenthal at 9:54 PM

Becoming adventurers in a new old place

Washington Square Park can be understood in Edward Casey’s terms as a space, “an encompassing volumetric void” (683), a chunk of landscape delimited by four vectors that are clearly traced and mapped out. However, it can also be understood, especially as members of a community that lives and revolves around this space, as a place, “an arena of action that is at once physical and historical, social and cultural” (683). The fact that the park functions as our “place-world”, a place that we inhabit, have and hold in an embodied way when we cross it every day to get to class, to smoke a cigarette, or to sit on a bench and contemplate passersby, a place that is inevitably liked to our sense of selves, that is constitutive of us and constituted by us as NYU students, a place that is so embedded in our habitus and habitudes, made the Surveillance Camera Players’ Tour all the more intriguing.

The tour aimed to recreate place, to re-contextualize the familiar and the everyday and turn it upside down and inside out. Their project does not seem dissimilar to Guy Debord’s proposal to use psychogeography or dérive as a way to understand people’s emotional relationship to their environment. By focusing our gaze on the eyes of “Big Brother,” the players hope to profoundly alter our relationship to place. They are literally creating a “renovated cartography” (Debord 1955: 3), essentially basing our sense of place on our fear of, discomfort with, or anger at being watched. They displace us by transforming our everyday environment or urban décor (and here perhaps our own relationship to Washington Square Park as its daily inhabitants is all the more meaningful) into a new place-world based on the surveillance cameras located around the square. In many ways, I imagine that Washington Square as place will never be experienced by us in the same way now that we know where the eyes that watch us are placed, as well as how to avoid their gaze. The place has been inscribed in our bodies in a completely new way. A way that will leave its mark on us indefinitely. This echoes Casey’s discussion on the “impressionism of place” beyond our lived experience of place. Indeed, our memory of how it felt to discover that we were being watched, to listen to our tour guide’s anxious and often angry critique of the surveillance system as a warped way of ensuring our security, will remain in us, in our body, beyond the experience of the tour itself. The possibility of being subjected to the misuses of the system will also linger on in us, walking uncomfortably through the square, imagining some bored police officer using the park’s or the buildings’ eyes to direct fleeting glances at our bodies, at our physical markers of self.

Beyond a sense of the tenacity this recontextualization of a familiar place, the tour brought to light the possibility of transgression, of adventure. Perhaps the most obvious place where Simmel’s text came to life is when we were standing in front of the police booth looking at the graffiti on its walls. Our tour guide spoke of the subjection to surveillance as a possibility for play, for game, for gambling and retaliation, but also for subversion through performance. You place a camera, I use the dark of night, you place a sensor, I make a map of where I can escape its reach, you look at me, I look at you. By the very act of taking us on tour, or by going on the tour for that matter, we are offered the chance to be empowered through adventure and exploration. A part of the everyday, our landscape or place-world, is taken outside of that everyday while remaining central to it (Simmel 1). Whether by tagging the police booth, having a costumed dinner party in the subway tunnels, climbing the Brooklyn Bridge, or documenting modern ruins of hospitals and torn down buildings, we are given the opportunity of placing a bet, of gambling, of creating a work of art (in this sense, it is not a coincidence that the work of many of the urban explorers, as well as the Camera Players themselves, have been featured in galleries and art exhibitions), of passively surrendering to chance while simultaneously taking action. In Simmel’s terms, the “constallation of the adventure” has been performed (4). Through becoming tourists in our own stomping grounds, and through recreating our perception of place, we have all become adventurers.

I would like to end my response by expressing a certain dissatisfaction with the tour. As I have described above, I certainly appreciated the experience and do think that it was effective in recreating place and generating a new psychogeography of Washington Square, but I did feel that the Players could have taken this a step further through performance. At the end of our tour, we were thanked for being performers, for using performance as a means to subvert the system, but I felt more like a spectator than a performer. The square was recreated as a spectacle, but I felt that more could have been done to recreate us as actors, as performers, as agents, rather than as viewers with guided gazes. Perhaps I am being too demanding, but the knowledge that the Players have accumulated and recorded, their maps, their performances could certainly go beyond creating awareness. It seems that a project like iSee is doing more with a very similar vantage point, offering alternative maps, giving us agency over our visibility, rather than merely making us aware of it.

Posted by Sandra Rozental at 9:50 PM

You can't be taped playing in the dark

A sacred cave near the city of Takachiho, Kyushu, Japan. The gate separates the inner sanctum of the Shinto shrine—a barrier between the human world and where goddesses like Amaterasu Omikami hide.

Although it is not directly mentioned, one of the key elements in Georg Simmel’s article on adventure is dark play. Simmel writes that in order to have an adventure, one must abandon oneself “to the world with fewer defenses and reserves than in any other relation.” There are multiple ways of abandoning oneself, such as running down a steep hill or going on a date. Yet, in order for adventure to occur, it requires the “complete self-abandonment to the powers and accidents of the world, which can delight us, but in the same breath can also destroy us” (ibid). The possibility of destruction is the key notion in dark play, just as it seems to be in adventure. Yet, let us not forget the inclusion of the word play

Adventure, as defined by Simmel, does not require play.Adventure is far too precious. Beyond abandonment, it requires the enactment of a change. “Only when a stream flowing between the minutest externalities of life and the central source of strength drags them into itself; when the peculiar color, ardor, and rhythm of the life-process become decisive and, as it were, transform its substance—only then does an event change from mere experience to adventure” (ibid).

Play, of course, can be involved, but it is not imperative. What does seem to be necessary is the existence of a liminal state. Play, of course, is a type of liminal state, but so, too, are many other
activities. If adventure is looked at as occurring in liminal states, then it becomes far less precious and rare than the notion of adventure advanced by Simmel. Adventure becomes something that not only an individual can perceive within himself, but also something that whole communities can observe or participate in.

Although Janelle Brown does not mention dark play in the article on the Urban Exploration movement, it perhaps is the main draw for those who go into forbidden areas. Even if the area is not seemingly dangerous, people get a rush from climbing into drainage systems. Why is this satisfying? L. B. Deyo says that, "we don't break locks or bolts or climb over fences; what we're really overcoming is imaginary barriers that are just understood but barely questioned" (qtd. in http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/01/16/infiltration/print.html) It is this crossing of barriers that not only defines Urban Exploration, but also provides its allure of dark play. However, if this kind of activity is so appealing, why aren’t more people involved?

Dean MacCannell writes in his book, The Tourist, that “the possibility that a stranger might penetrate a back region is one major source of social concern in everyday life, as much a concern to the strangers who might do the violating as to the violated” (93). For most people, it would seem, entering into a back area is more uncomfortable for themselves than it is for those who are in control of the back region. People tend to be extremely socially conditioned to uphold the barriers between back and front, public and private. This perhaps explains some of the concerns people have over the inclusion of surveillance cameras that patrol both inside private property, as well as outside, into the public domain.

Cameras, such as the ones inside the Kimmel Center, violate the back/front barrier, in a way that privileges the back. Beyond this, it blurs and creates confusion as to what is back and front, and what is the line between the two. Anxiety is created within the individual, as there is always the possibility of crossing into this back area without being aware. Then again, there are those intrepid adventurers who purposely seek the areas beyond the barriers. Perhaps it will be these people who will re-establish where the lost or blurred barriers exist.

Posted by Lisa Reinke at 9:28 PM

As Maxwell Said, "Somebody's Watching Me!"

This week’s readings and the Surveillance Camera Player’s tour present a wide array of perspectives from a number of disciplines ranging from journalism to social theory and art. Disparate as they might at first appear, a common through-line runs unifies all of these categories, this being an examination of the individual’s relation to social space and the individual and group potential to subvert conventional relationships to social space through alterations in perception and physical movement. What Debord would call a “dérive,” Simmel might term an “adventure,” while Casey would employ the phrase “breaking of habitus, Janelle Brown, “urban exploring,” and Bill Brown “playing.”

The major difference between these texts other than methodology and superficial subject matter is the guiding impetus behind deviations from the norm. While Janelle Brown poses thrill seeking or personal challenge and curiosity, Debord, always politically minded, sees potential on a grander scale with reverberations effecting communities as opposed to the active group or individual alone. Despite his commitment to social change, however, even Debord falls in line with Brown and the rest, as at root his interest lies in steering the individual (and subsequently the masses) towards new perceptions of themselves, their surroundings, and their relationship to their surroundings. Bearing this in mind, I don’t think it unreasonable to suggest that each of these writers is obliquely urging us to become tourists. By altering our relationship to our quotidian surroundings, we can create an increased distance and introduce a strangeness to the familiar that places us in the role of tourist, employing the tourist’s probing, voyeuristic gaze, accompanied by a lack of true inclusion in, and understanding of, the spaces we habitually move through, and the individuals we encounter along the way.

If we accept the notion that we can become tourists in our own homes, so to speak, a number of questions quickly present themselves. If this is the case, why then do we go to such great lengths to find the “other” in faraway places? Is there a fundamental difference between traveling abroad and going on an “adventure” or a “dérive” in one’s hometown, or is this merely a matter of perception? Recalling the writing of DeCerteau as well as the readings for today’s class, if we have the ability to affect others through our choices in social space, what moral responsibilities (if any) do we have towards others, besides those enforced by legislation?

To move back from the general to the specific, I return to Debord’s essay “Introduction to a Critique….” Do we believe that a psychogeographic hermeneutic system could ever be developed? The major problem I see with this is the supposition of a consistent causal link between geography and psychology that ignores subjectivity, the unconscious, and the entire phenomenological project. Ignoring this glaring issue, Debord’s call for a psychogeographic methodology still presupposes that even if an objective causal chain could be determined, that it could, moreover, account for the infinite number of variables present in any interaction between subject and environment, which taxes the capabilities of the scientific method to the extreme.

In closing, I return to today’s tour. While I found Brown’s presentation fascinating (though I must admit, I felt that he sometimes bordered on exhibiting the symptoms of a conspiracy theory paranoiac…did anyone else share this feeling?) Two things struck me most. First, there persisted a major contradiction in his thinking. On the one hand, he was bemoaning the fact that we are constantly being watched and making predictions as to the possibly horrific ramifications of such surveillance systems. On the other hand, he repeatedly made statements pointing to the failings and inadequacies of the surveillance system. The camera aimed at the bush “for years” is a good example. It would seem then, that other than in principle (our civil liberties being infringed upon) we shouldn’t have much concern whatsoever that we’re being watched. In addition, though I’m loath to say it, the contents of the tour speak largely against the efficacy of “playing” to surveillance cameras, as more than likely no one is watching. However, Brown stays committed to his cause. This leads me to wonder if there isn’t some delicious, voyeuristic pleasure not only in watching, but also even in the mere idea that one is being watched, which leads me to consider the reverse of the tourist gaze. Maybe in addition to the pleasure of watching, the tourist seeks out foreign places where she’ll stick out in order to enjoy being watched as well.

Posted by Tyler Sinclair at 9:07 PM

Michelle responds...

These readings provided a terrific framework for my advocacy tourism proposal for the Seward Park Urban Renewal district in the Lower East Side. I have decided to primarily utilize Casey’s piece Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be in the Place-World? In an attempt to focus the enormous implications of a project such as this, I realized that I am deeply interested in what Casey’s essay refers to as the “geographical self.” In other words, I want to analyze/study how the residents of this area on the Lower East Side experience this place. My focus is solely on the experience of those low-income residents in the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area and “the immediate environment of the lived body” (Casey 683). Therefore, my analysis highlights the implications of the place/self relation.

In this project I follow suit with Victor Turner’s concept of liminality and view the failed project of the Seward Park Urban Renewal district as a liminal place, an in-between place. This is further supported by Casey’s use of the term habitus, which he took from Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice. I view Seward Park as a habitus of sorts, as “something improvisational and open to innovation” (Casey 686). This area has the potential to become something wonderful for its low-income residents, and it is them for whom I am advocating for. This advocacy was really illuminated for me during the surveillance tour today. Of course it was not surprising to be reminded that “capitalism does not seek to protect the poor. I pose the question, how can the low-income residents experience this place through economic and residential development and improvement? Thus, how can this place be experienced so that the most intimate relationship between place and self is created?

Newspaper articles that I read concerning the failed project in 2003 clearly reflect Casey’s ideology that “each [self and place] are essential to the being of the other” or that “there is no place without self and no self without place” (Casey 684). Plainly stated, I investigate how one’s place (Seward Park Renewal district) is relational to one’s (low-income residents) personal identity. I propose that this district can increase a positive personal identity to it through the construction of residential and commercial development. The commercial development will provide job opportunity for low-income residents and bring money into this area on the Lower East Side.

My proposal is further strengthened by psychogeographical methods and Debord’s essay on the Theory of the Dérive. Debord states that Chombart de Lauwe’s study paParis et l’agglomération parisienne noted that ‘an urban neighborhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors, but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighborhoods have of it’ (1958). This idea provides support for my proposal and a happy marriage between self and place relational to personal identity. The broad definition and implications given for the psycho-geographical method opens a huge realm of possibilities for the Seward Park Urban renewal district. I intend to check out the New York Psychogeographical Associations work in relation to the practice of psychogeography.

Tentative Biography for Proposal:
Casey, Edward S. “Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be in the Place-World?”, 2001.
Casey, Edward S. Getting back into place: Toward a renewed understanding of the place-world. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1993.
Debord, “Theory of the Dérive.” Internationale Situationniste #2, 1958.

Posted by Michelle Brown at 8:54 PM

Surveillance: Legal issues

For an interesting discussion of the legal issues (4th amendment)and effectiveness of video surveillance, see Marcus Nieto, Public Video Surveillance: Is It An Effective Crime Prevention Tool? (1997). Nieto offers an historical perspective, as well as considering various cities and countries, their practices, attitudes, and degree to which video surveillance is effective.

Posted by BKG at 8:35 PM

Mysterious Cities

A few different thematic strands can be traced through this week's reading selections: (1) the "sacralization" of city space, (2) an emphasis on de-alienating the individual, and (3) a focus on mystery, unpredictability, and danger. These themes inform studies in urban tourism by implicitly proposing a new mode of experiencing city life as a tourist.

Simmel's "Adventure" begins by musing on the form of the adventure, counters it to the “everyday” and applies this dichotomy to a variety of other forms: art, life, gambling, love. Because I am looking at the creative, spontaneous spaces of interaction made possible by the soundwalk tour, Simmel’s juxtaposition of art and adventure was a helpful conceptual device. For him, the adventurer and the artist are both producing experiences and pieces that are bounded yet complete expressions of depth and perceived “Truth.” The work of art and the adventure stand timelessly “over and against life” yet are often assumed to express something essential about life itself. I’m wondering if the same can be said for the tourist and the experience of touring. If tourism is viewed as a kind of adventure – in that it is a “break” from the daily structures of living – then the tourist can be said to be participating in an artistic project.

I am thinking specifically of the Cardiff walk and the soundwalk, both of which center on the individual’s relationship to her scenic surroundings and offer up a kind of alternate, non-everyday experience of urban architecture.

Yet, Simmel’s message in “The Adventure” goes beyond a formal comparison of art and adventuring. After all, he claims to be speaking about “each segment of our conduct and experience.” Life is an adventure, especially for those of us who “sense above its totality a higher unity.” Here, “religious moods” collide with artistic modes, dream states, gambling tendencies and, possibly, tourism. Each site, each moment of our existence is shot through with multiple meanings – religious, aesthetic, political, etc. This is helpful for me in thinking through the relationship between pilgrimage and tourism, especially in regards to a site like ground zero, one that is “crowded” with meanings. Nonetheless, Simmel’s mode of adventuring does seem to assume a willful, privileged, independent masculine figure (a modern man?) which makes one wonder what sorts of “adventuring” Simmel had in mind when constructing this ideal-type. Life, for many, is not best described as an adventure. Despite that fact, the form is helpful for a project on tourism, a voluntary (not coerced) type of traveling filled with life, uncertainty, and a willful desire.

Simmel’s mode of adventuring is supplemented by Debord’s understanding of the derive. Debord focuses in on the urban drifter who passes through the cityscape while remaining aware of the space’s psychogeographical effects. This process seems to amount a profound de-alienation with one’s urban context and a reconstitution of the space as constructed (yet alive!) and infused with meanings, influences, emotions and possibilities, most of which are not charted on the typical city map. This “psychogeographical mapping” is a revolutionary mode in itself, re-visioning the Paris metro map as filled with life, beauty, and possibility, and moving the cityscape forward, away from its original military-minded planning. The city becomes an environment (a term that conjures connotations of “aliveness”) to be sensed. In some ways, it becomes as mysterious and sacred as the “monotheistic desert” of which Debord speaks – urban space is sacralized. And new modes of tourism like the soundwalk seem to build on this model of the derive: one drifts through the space, maps it with the senses, experiences it anew.

Both Debord and Simmel posit an intimate connection between the world and the self; Casey’s piece does something similar, but writes from a more formal philosophical platform and does away with a-historical types. Place and self are mutually constitutive, and the body is the locus of incorporation. I wondered if Casey was exclusively speaking of the post-industrial urban city when referring to “glocalized” thinly-lived spaces, those spaces that put the self to the test. As with Debord, a loss of morality, god, or “determined resolute action” is assumed to occur in these places of postmodern disarray. Therefore, a sort of de-alienation is sought. Like the authors before, Casey re-infuses places and landscapes with “liveness” and sensuality: the body becomes “the vehicle of lived and lively third space between place and self” (687). His concept of “idiolocalization” will become useful in my project since I am interested in the way the site is incorporated and expressed through the senses.

Lastly, Janelle Brown’s article on infiltration brings together the ideas of exploration, city psychogeography, and bodily experience. The fact that most of the places that have become destinations for urban explorers are “off the map” and secret contrasted nicely to our guided tour of those spaces that were heavily watched. Infiltrators are bringing their lives – and, subsequently, “breathing life” – into abandoned buildings, bridges and subway tunnels, marking the mundane and mechanical city with their power and will. One can argue that government and private corporations are doing the same with their surveillance technology. Soon, nothing will be unseen or unmarked. The city is watching, and we are watching it back. The handout we received today from Bill (?) even had a “guide to mapping surveillance” so that you or I could start surveying the surveillance cameras, and map the watchers, so to speak. Also, as I was watching Bill being filmed by the documentary maker, it occurred to me that we, too, are part of the technology of surveillance. Yet, at the same time, we aren’t comfortable being watched – the panopticon and “big brother” are constricting concepts. It seems that urban explorers are pushing the boundaries posited by this age of surveillance society, freeing the body, and flirting with the depths and heights of danger. On a last note, today’s tour also illuminated the fact that city infrastructure is never neutral or static. The surveillance has not necessarily done what it was commissioned to do (i.e., deter crime, watch the world precisely), yet it has inspired groups like the Players to perform in protest in front of them, further demonstrating the dynamic, dangerous, artful, and unpredictable nature of city life.

Posted by Brynn Noelle Saito at 8:15 PM

Eyes Everywhere on the Street, from Leah

It seems to me that our experience on this tour should be considered “psychogeography” but the environment we studied was not simply geographical, by which I mean focused on the earth itself, as the most important elements considered were man-made: different forms of technology and architecture as well as the union of the two.

I was most intrigued and alarmed by the content of the “advanced” tour and the ideas of where surveillance might go next, really is already going, with new wireless capabilities. I have long been interested in the idea that cell phones erase place by making a person accessible or easily located anywhere they happen to be – anywhere, that is, that has cell phone reception. In this sense cell phones obviate the “geographical self.” When we carry cell phones we carry tags that identify us and communication tools that are hard to ignore when others are trying to reach us. This last part of the tour made clear that the expanding capacities of cell phones (or whatever we might eventually call these gadgets, with their multiple capabilities) increase their power not only as tools but as tags; we can be identified and located and connected to key information about ourselves from almost any place on earth. (Identification cards, such as the one Bill was wearing, can function in similar ways.) I am also struck by how successive generations of surveillance technology require less material and fewer connecting wires; this means that there are fewer physical clues in the environment that the surveillance is occurring. Imagine archeologists of the future – how will they be able to reconstruct the surveillance patterns of video cell phones?

Many of our readings emphasized the adventurous, even risqué or forbidden nature of psychogeographical exploration. After this tour I felt that the real inheritors of this philosophy might be the people hired to serve as the human eyes behind the cameras. They are sanctioned by the government or their private employers and, as was so clearly illustrated for us by our tour guide, they may use their secret powers of observation to look where they are not supposed to be looking – infiltration indeed. Even odder, rather than exploring the forgotten or decrepit, they have expanded powers to more closely study and peek into the most mundane, normal and yet private moments of people, including those moments when individuals feel comfortably anonymous in the public streets and spaces of the big city. Still, the activities of these observers are not truly adventures in my mind, since they do not explore these sites so much as spy on them and the people passing through them.

I looked up the definition of the word “player” online at www.m-w.com (Merriam Webster Dictionary) and found the following two definitions (#s 4 and 5 out of 5): 1) a device that produces recorded material from a usually specified medium, 2) one actively involved especially in a competitive field or process. [http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=players, accessed 10-23-05] These definitions contrast with the passivity I felt after the tour as I thought of myself as a pedestrian in the city, a passive participant in the ubiquitous filming and a marked denizen because of the uniqueness of my personal data and the ubiquity of cell phones which could allow for information about myself to be “played” by others, unbeknownst to myself. A final word on “habitus”: what is left of adventure when technology allows us to see anyplace at any time in an instant? And how do we experience place when we sense that we might never be truly anonymous, able to “lose ourselves” for a moment in a particular place?

Posted by BKG at 8:09 PM

NYSC Tour....

While on the tour, I found myself constantly reverting back to the “Online and Underground” article by Janelle Brown. She quotes L.B. Deyo stating, ‘“The whole idea is to look at a sign or an area that’s obviously off limits, where you’re not supposed to go and ask, ‘What exactly is it that’s keeping me out?’” This very comment came to mind when standing in front police/surveillance camera hut, or headquarters (NYPD command office?). I had the urge to knock on the door, or even deepen that boot indentation already there. Seeing the locksmith card tucked into the corner of the sign, as well as the graffiti got me a little frustrated and annoyed. Like mentioned during the tour, whoever completed the acts were bluffing, playing with fire, and they succeeded. Even though I applaud these acts of courage and defiance, it’s very disappointing to know that these surveillance cameras are worthless (yet costly) devices merely used to scare off the potential criminals (or in other cases, to spy on people getting it on!).

Are the New York Surveillance Camera Players practicing “off-limits” tourism? The locations the group visited were not, but was the information? By informing the public of surveillance camera locations and camera capabilities, are the players actually giving the upper hand to the public? The iSEE website provides a list of people who should avoid surveillance cameras, a list which includes EVERYONE. iSEE reinforces the concept that surveillance cameras are most often abused than used for protection of the public. I suppose that if I’m on the list (more than once since I do fall into the categories of minorities and women), then I should know.

The tour definitely put the term pyschogeography into play. The group viewed a couple of NYU buildings in a different light. The Kimmel Center was seen as a post 9/11 building with surveillance cameras galore. The first building we observed (Hayden Residence Hall?) was known as the building with 1st and 2nd generation surveillance cameras with a sensor at the door. I usually walk these streets without really noticing what surrounds me, but today I experienced Washington Square Park on several different levels —those of discomfort, unfamiliarity, and disgust.

I don’t know if it was the weather, but after turning the corner on W 3rd, my ADD kicked in. I was a little disappointed that we didn’t explore more of the NYU area, especially because this is the area that I find myself wandering about during the little free time that I have. I figure now that my interest in surveillance cameras has increased, I can avoid the usual trips to the bookstore and dérive to some other lesser known buildings (or known, I don’t care) and keep my eyes glued to the sky looking for those damn surveillance monsters!

Posted by Alma Guzman at 7:54 PM

Yochi's Response

Observing through the surveillance camera
It was a pleasant experience to join the surveillance tour in the chilly autumn afternoon. The tour also helped me in realizing how fragile and useless the surveillance camera systems are. At the beginning of the tour, I kept on thinking the question that the use of surveillance cameras as a tool which could possibly predict crime and even stop it before it actually take place, however, this function can fail due to personal reasons (like the police officers feel bad about going out of the booth because of the weather condition, or the prejudice/misread of the people who watch the camera images.) After Bill’s introduction about the Kimmel Center, as the example of post-911 building, more questions popped out of my head, including relationship between the price tag of the insurance and the amount of the surveillance cameras, or the distinction between private area and public area in the sense of the using the web-cam.

After reading Edward S. Casey’s essay of Between Geography and Philosophy, Kimmel Centre, as a key site in our surveillance tour, presents the characteristic of the post-911 syndrome led me back to think the building as an object that carries the “outgoing” and “incoming” qualities. Located around the Washington Square Park as a private building of New York University, the density of the surveillance cameras reflected its response to the terrorist action, but also the power of Capitalism as Bill mentioned. The surveillance cameras along the walls present the trace after interacting with the social incidence, while at the same time the ridiculous disposition from one wall to the other also tells the stupidity of the coordination.

The cameras set up by the government can certainly look into the big glass buildings and invade the private space, while the private area can also set up the camera under the name of security and watch over the public places, the blur line between privacy and public in the scoop of the cameras of the ground equipments already created an interesting issue, not even mention the problems of the moving camera installations in the sky. Other than the equipments I mentioned above, the web-cams also made the private area and the public area even more ambiguous in the virtual world. Web-cams on Time Square or Champs Elysees can be grabbed from internet 24 hours a day and become a living picture in a private bedroom, while by simple equipments, anyone can broadcast and exhibit his/her private living space to the public. The power of seeing usually implies the power of knowing, however, while more and more people willing to exhibit their private life to the public, is the power still holds in the hands of those watchers or the power relationship also shifted a little bit to those who is welling to perform in front of the camera, like the individual web-cam owners or the surveillance camera performers?

At our final spot, Bill sketched a future of highly surveillance society, which by using the cell phones or modern monitoring techniques in order to identify the activities of individuals that may come true in the following years. Concerning the issue of the identity theft, it is very fascinating that by looking into the unlimited wireless area through the frequency of the cell phones without the permission of the owner or under the name of the law that protect the tranquility of the society, the government is also acting as the thief, which steals the privacy and identity from individuals. This psychogeogrphic experience of the surveillance camara tour certainly changes my pedestrian knowledge, I do have anxiety after knowing that the stories in the movies of the world is under surveillance is indeed existing around me, and the whole system is operating not under the premises of necessity of security but more related to the insurance bill, however, I have to admit that after knowing we are surrounded by all these cameras, it is a relieve of realizing that most of them are controlled by mal-functioned system and basically useless in most of the time.

Posted by Yo-Chi Li at 7:15 PM

Siobhan's Response

During the tour and throughout the readings I kept thinking, “How is this legal?” I mean I know how, but why. Why can “whoever it is” who controls surveillance get away with what they do? The discrimination, racism, and racial profiling in general that dictates so many cameras (or the men behind the cameras) frustrates me in the highest degree.

It is no shock to me that these cameras pinpoint women, minorities, outsiders, black youth etc. But I was shocked by the piece of information I received today during the tour. Though it makes so much sense that less surveillance cameras are in areas that are heavy populated by the poor (a euphemism for minorities), it scares me to think about the real use of those cameras. It seems like it has less to do with protecting people and more to do with investment in capitalism. The $400,000.00 used to install these cameras could go to actually preventing crimes in areas that are underrepresented. If only ten arrests were made in a 22-month time period of surveillance use in Times Square, imagine how many are made in neighborhoods and cities where there is absolutely no surveillance. Imagine how many people, children, and babies, are killed, raped, robbed etc. in landscapes like Harlem or East Flatbush where I live. I find it even more outraging that when crimes, such as harassment and police brutality are captured on tape; it is ignored when it involves minorities. As a Black woman or the self (two areas of least concern,) I feel the compelling need to become an adventurer, and go to those places that are forbidden, where no cameras can survey me.

Also, I am not sure that I entirely agree with the modernist view of there being no relationship between self and place. I feel that one’s self can be a place. Self like place can be viewed as a sensuous self-presentation as a whole. For example, in previous examples I have discussed how crime is ignored when it involves crimes against minorities. I look at those “minorities” as a presentation, a presentation of self not worthy of protection.

Posted by Siobhan Robinson at 6:11 PM

New York Surveillance Camera Players

Click here for more images of our New York Surveillance Camera tour.

Posted by BKG at 5:47 PM

October 21, 2005

IF YOU SEE SOMETHING…, from Dominika

I know this is very last minute, but I wanted to let you know that tomorrow is the last chance to see Krzysztof Wodiczko's indoor projection "If You See Something". I think this could be very interesting in relation to this week's readings.

IF YOU SEE SOMETHING…
September 10 - October 22, 2005

IF YOU SEE SOMETHING… presents the first large-scale indoor projection by Krzysztof Wodiczko, one of the leading artists of critical new media who is renowned for projections that have challenged authority through the intervention of public space. The exhibition will launch the fall season at Galerie Lelong and opens to the public on Saturday, September 10, from 6 to 8 p.m. The artist will be present at the opening.

A truly interdisciplinary artist, Wodiczko has for three decades merged elements from industrial design, digital media, performance, and architecture to address pertinent issues of politics, sociology, and psychology. He is most known for staging projections onto the facades of public monuments and buildings, using structures at the heart of the city’s identity to tell the stories of citizens often overlooked by society. The artist has also created a complex body of instruments and vehicles that are each designed to communicate and remedy the alienation of a particular group of people.

Alluding in the exhibition’s title to the ubiquitous ads seen on mass transit, Wodiczko continues in IF YOU SEE SOMETHING… his dialogue on the marginalization largely initiated and perpetuated by a society’s fear of “the stranger.” Projected onto the gallery walls will be images of frosted windows, behind which people recount and exchange various stories that each unfold as a compelling witness to the abuse of power. In one story, a young man being beaten by authorities, already defeated, does not protest; in another, family members of an accused terrorist plead for his release, claiming a forced confession. As the intensely emotional and vivid narratives inside the gallery space are juxtaposed with the ambiguous imagery of dark, moving figures behind the windows, blurred are the distinctions between “us” and “them,” between what is assumed and what is real.

Further exploring this duality, the artist will also create a commemorative space devoted to American victims and survivors of the war in Iraq. With these two powerful and vital bodies of work, Wodiczko continues the effort in breaking the codes of silence that prevent a society from progressing and a democracy from thriving.

Since Wodiczko’s last exhibition at Galerie Lelong in 2000, he has worked on a number of collaborative public projects and is a finalist in the design competition for a memorial of the victims of Flight 587 in New York. He participated in SlideShow, organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art; The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere at Mass MoCA; the first Yokahoma Triennale; and Strangers, the first triennial of the International Center of Photography, New York. Major retrospectives will open this year at the Bunkier Sztuki Art Center in Krakow and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, and public projections are planned for Kansas City, Basel, Stockholm, and Warsaw. Wodiczko will be featured in this season of the PBS series Art:21, which airs September 16, 23, 30, and October 7. He continues to serve as both director of MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies and the head of its Interrogative Design Group.

Exhibition: Krzysztof Wodiczko: IF YOU SEE SOMETHING…
Dates: September 10 - October 22, 2005
Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10 am to 6 pm
Contact: Stephanie Joson: 212-315-0470 or stephanie@galerielelong.com

Posted by BKG at 10:27 AM

October 19, 2005

Edward Tufte

Check out Tufte on the visual display of information:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/
Here are his books.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi

Posted by BKG at 1:56 PM

Skype

While we are on the subject of free tools, let's add Skype: http://www.skype.com. It is free telephony! If you call computer to computer (using speakers and a little microphone, often built in to laptops or to a headset or cheaply purchased and plugged into the computer), it is totally free to anywhere in the world. If you call from your computer to someone's phone or cellphone there is a small charge. From computer to phone, it is usually about 2 cents a minute. The sound can be even better than by telephone. You can conference call with about 6 people at a time anywhere in the world.

And, you can chat by typing and retain the history of the chat.

Skype might be a useful tool for doing interviews with people you cannot meet face to face.

Posted by BKG at 1:22 PM

October 18, 2005

Writing fieldnotes

Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)
by Robert M. Emerson, et al (order used from as low as $7.28 a copy)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226206815/102-1294036-8932953?v=glance&n=283155&v=glance
http://www.bookfinder.com/search/?ac=sl&st=sl&qi=FpvPn4I0o4abbEhL4ElNrXh2FXI_0358612450_1:28:140
http://www.fetchbook.info/compare.do?search=0226206815

Posted by BKG at 10:43 AM

October 17, 2005

Refworks, Furl, Wayback, Picasa, and much more...

Refworks FAQ
Refworks is pretty straightforward, so if you would like to get going right away, try the online tutorial.
Sign up for a workshop:
There is one tomorrow Wednesday October 19, 3:00-4:30
And, another Monday November 7, 6:30-8:00

-------------

Accunet/AP Multimedia Archive (Associated Press photo archive). Great resource for images. If you cannot access the site the first time, wait a while and try again, as there is a limit on the number of simultaneous users.
If you like them, you can add Furl and Wayback to the tool bar in your browser:
FURL (archive websites)
Wayback (retrieve earlier versions of dead sites--just enter into the little box on the Wayback site the URL of the site that seems dead)
Picasa (see ALL the images on your drive)

-------------

Methods Workshop with links to everything you could ever want and more....
Research Log Forms
Methods syllabus
Interviewing #1
Interviewing #2
Logging, Transcription, Translation, Analysis #1
Logging, Transcription, Translation, Analysis #2

Posted by BKG at 10:50 PM

Beatlemania lives on in NYC

Site: Fab 4 New York City Walking Tour of Beatles Sites
I will be researching The Beatle Sites’ Walking Tour, a tour offered by Daytrippin’ Rock and Roll Tours, which allows the tourist to “follow in the Beatles’ footsteps” and is led by a Beatles “expert”. The tour visits NYC sites such as Strawberry Fields in Central Park, The Dakota, The Ed Sullivan Theater, Radio City Music Hall, Carnegie Hall, etc.

Research : Looking at Pearson’s “approaches to retrieval”
Except for a few, many sites on the tour can be experienced without any connection to the Beatles. I want to look at relived memory and its connection with the present. Many of the sites that the tour visits have gone through dramatic changes since the heyday of the Beatles presence in New York. Memory, of course, is inevitably linked to personal narrative. In his text Theatre/Archaeology Mike Pearson states, “One thing that the watcher puts into narrative is time, the time of reflection of re-experiencing and inflating the fleeting image by replaying it over and over in the memory” (Pearson, 134). This is especially true for older generation Beatles fans who first experienced “Beatlemania” in 1964 and will use the tour to relive Beatle memories. And also true for younger generation Beatle fans who will utilize the tour and other’s re-experiencing for their present knowledge and memories of the Beatles.

“Meaning always precedes its own production” (Pearson, 144), and when integrating this statement into this project, I would like to know how the Beatles presence in these sites change perceptions of certain landmarks, structures, and memorials. I am curious to know if the majority of tourists are from out-of-town. How many are New Yorkers? Do New Yorkers have different connections to the sites?

Because it is a walking tour, I want to look closely at the relationship between the tour guide and the tourist. How will the tour guide incorporate architecture, space and time into the tour? I want to see how familiarity develops between the guide and visitors. Where and how does the guide insert facts, questions, personal anecdotes, jokes into his performance and how effective are they in making the visitor’s experience a more meaningful one? What makes the guide a Beatles expert?

During this process I will also look into other Beatle tours, the majority being in England.
I want to know how Day Trippin’ Rock and Roll Tours developed the Beatles’ Tour and if it is connected to or structured like any of the Beatle tours offered in other parts of the country, or those offered in England. How do other fans react to these tours? I’ve already downloaded some articles and reviews with tourist reactions from different tours around the world.

I would also like to interview some of tour guides and participants of the tour. Not knowing how willing or available these sources will be, I am prepared to heavily depend on questions asked during the tour. I would also like to interview employees of the sites visited and look into how significant the Beatles’ presence was to that specific site. With repeated visits I hope to familiarize myself with the structure of the tour and develop informed questions and relationships that will be effective for my research.

Themes that will be explored in paper
• Memory, Time, and Change : old generation, new generation
• Re-experience
Subtopics
• Description of tour, sites, path
• Tour guide relationship to sites and tourists
• Tour guide’s “expertise”
I want to incorporate the music (of course!)and I'm hoping that experiencing the tour will help me find a relationship that will link all these topics together.

Working Bibliography

Cohen, Erik. 1985. The Touris Guide: The origins, structures, and dynamamics of a role. Annals of Tourism Research 12, no. 1: 5-30

Fine, Elizabeth and Jean Haskell Speer. 1985. Tour guide performances as sight sacralization. Annals of Tourism Research 12, no. 1:73-95.

Goldsmith, Martin. The Beatles come to America. Hoboken, NJ. : John Wiley & Sons, c2004.

Pearson, Mike, and Julian Thomas. 1994. Theatre/Archaeology. TDR 38, no. 4:133-61

Pond, Kathleen Lingle. 1993. The Professional Guide: Dynamics of Tour Guiding. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Spizer, Bruce. The Beatles are coming!: the birth of Beatlemania in America. New Orleans, La. : 498 Productions, c2003.

http://www.daytrippin.com/fab4nyc.htm tour website
http://www.cnn.com/TRAVEL/NEWS/9808/27/beatles.walk/
http://www.latimes.com/travel/la-tr-liverpool8feb08,1,5217628.story
http://www.cavern-liverpool.co.uk/mmt/ Magical Mystery Tour in Liverpool

Posted by Alma Guzman at 2:17 PM

Moroccan TRIPtych

My two-part project will center on an endeavor of the reconstruction, retrieval and understanding of the complex and multilayered experience of tourism through the use of a particular instance of travel. I intend to use my recent one-week trip to Morocco as the focal point of this analysis. The first part of my project will explore the experience of travel, paying close attention to the ways in which the situational aspects of travel play in the tourist experience. I will consider how expectations, motivations for travel, previous knowledge and relation to the target culture shape the tourist experience.

The first part of my project will consist of written analysis and an attempt at a “thick description” of a trip to Morocco, considering several perspectives of such a visit taken from diverse vantage points. First, I will attempt to reconstruct my first time visit to Morocco, paying particular attention to how my own preconceptions and (mis)understanding of the culture shaped the tourist experience. Here, I am also interested in exploring the – not altogether reliable - role of imagination and memory in the process of understanding and making sense of the tourist experience.

Next, I will consider the experience of an expatriate Moroccan during his first visit to Morocco, after having lived in the United States for ten years. I will take into account the ways in which immigrant experience in the United States, which fashioned a new relation to himself and his homeland, played an integral role in the tourist experience.

Finally, (and this is still a provisional idea that might have to be abandoned because it is so problematic) I will briefly attempt to reflect on the tourist experience of a globetrotting 15 month old. I will explore the ways in which infants and children are treated in Morocco in contrast to the United States and how this influences their experience and perception of the world.

My analysis will explore the themes of hybridity, displacement, estrangement and belonging. In my theoretical examination, I will attempt to answer the question of how these various travel experiences were transformational. Considering a performative tourism, I will explore the ways in which acts of travel did something to the traveler.

My working bibliography includes:

Asad, Muhammad. 1954. The road to Mecca. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Hargraves, Orin. 1995. Culture Shock! Morocco: A Guide to Customs and Etiquette. Portland: Times Editions.

Kapchan, Deborah A. 1996. Gender on the market : Moroccan women and the revoicing of tradition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of piety : the Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Nguyen, Tram. 2005. We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant America After 9/11.Beacon Press.

Pearson, Mike, and Julian Thomas. 1994. Theatre/Archaeology. TDR 38, no. 4:133-161.

Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism.1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books.

Slyomovics, Susan. 2005. The performance of human rights in Morocco. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Urry, John. 1990. The tourist gaze : leisure and travel in contemporary societies. London ; Newbury Park: Sage Publications.

Visweswaran, Kamala. 1994. Fictions of feminist ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

The second part of my project will consist in the production of an art object which will incorporate a collage of a voices and impressions of Morocco. This impressionistic montage of thoughts and reflections will be composed of mixed media and will also be a triptych of narratives. The process of creation will serve as a vehicle for processing the tourist experience. The finished object will become a souvenir, a memory trigger. It is also an attempt to construct an object that will aid in the telling of the narrative(s) of a trip to Morocco. In this sense, it is an alternative or a compliment to the conventional travel books and guides. It will show what the tourist (advertising) industry doesn’t want you to see.

I found the article Theatre/Archeology extremely useful in thinking about both the content and methodological approaches to my project. The dialectical nature of the essay, which includes a discourse between two archeologists of which one is also a theatre practitioner and theorist, is in itself a model for the multi-layered approach to description and analysis I am interested in undertaking. The article co-authored by Mike Pearson and Julian Thomas, not only shows the dialogue between two scholars, but also displays the evolution of the idea of the potential meeting points between the disciplines of theatre and archeology, as it occurs over time. Pearson in particular revises his notions of theatre archeology as a result of the dialogue with Thomas as seen in his second entry in the essay.

Pearson proposes the deployment of the terminology and methodology of description borrowed from the disciplines of archeology, forensic science, and contemporary recording practices of the music industry for the retrieval, reconstruction and (re)presentation of theatre. His discussion of “foreigners” as those “perceiving different orders of connotative meaning, albeit brief, signals potentially interesting approaches in the study and description of cross-cultural tourist experience. (134) His reflections on the reconstruction of performance such as: “One thing that the watcher puts into narrative is time, the time of reflection of reexperiencing and inflating the fleeting image by replaying it over and over in the memory”, can be useful in relation to the description of tourism.

Pearson’s suggests that the archeological “site report” might be an instructive practice for someone attempting to reconstruct ephemeral phenomena such as performance. (136) His description of the “base elements” of performance: space, time, pattern, detail and object, is can be a useful model in approaching the description of the tourist experience. (137, 150) I was particularly interested in reading his discussion of the documentation of performance as an integration of narratives vis a vis my own project of documentation of the travel experience. (146)

Posted by Dominika Bennacer at 2:01 PM

Instructions for conducting a walking tour of the Lower East Side

Here is a very interesting document. Instructions for the guide who conducts the walking tour of the Lower East Side for the LES Tenement Museum. Useful for studying this tour, but also for walking tours more generally, and for those working on the Lower East Side:
http://www.tenement.org/docs/wt_outline.pdf

Posted by BKG at 12:53 PM

Community Tourism in New York

Here is an interesting idea, "community tourism" in New York:

Tourists and New Yorkers alike want to know the "real New York." Thus the need for community tourism. As opposed to mass market tourism, community tourism is organized by the stewards of their communities. These tours take visitors into areas not on the typical tourist map and connect them to local music, immigrant history, parks, waterways, architecture, cuisine, artists, murals, and one-of-a-kind stores.

To help popularize community tourism in New York, we have created this, the City's first online guide.

Congratulations to The Community Tourism Roundtables of Business Enterprises for Sustainable Travel (BEST), an initiative of The Conference Board in association with the World Travel and Tourism Council, which inspired us to undertake this project.

Posted by BKG at 11:21 AM

Central Park Movie Tour

Central Park Movie Tour

New tourism studies explore various ways of constructing tours and itineraries. Different form the “old tourism,” tourists, in the newly constructed tourist productions, does not play a passive role, as spectators. Instead, tourists seek sensory experiences at their destinations. They do things, or participate in activities to experience the culture and the atmosphere of destination. No longer in search of “authenticity,” tourists now go for tours that are well-constructed and sites/scenes that are important to the deployment of plots in novels, TV series, and movies. Their willingness of suspending the disbelief enables them to enjoy the “on location tours.”

I am interested in all kinds of on location tours whose constructions of itineraries are mainly based on the shooting spots of movies and TV series. It is not too reckless to say that such tours take on the narratives of films and TV series, which, one way another, move and/or impress the viewers. Being moved, impressed, or maybe amused, these viewers participate in on location tours to experience the filmic scenes in person.

In my research, I intend to explore the narrative model of these on location tours. As I briefly mentioned in the previous response, the narratives of on location tours, to some extent, follows the narrative model proposed by Bruner in his conference paper, “The Role of Narrative in Tourism.” The concept of the pre-narrative and the meta-narrative seems to be essential to the constructions of such tours. In most cases, the participants of on location tours have already acquired the basic information and the general impression of the sites included in the itineraries. Such knowledge of the sites is from movie viewing and TV watching experiences, which they found enjoyable. They therefore want to experience the mood of the movie or of TV series in a more concrete way.

Central Park has been mythologized by numerous films and has gradually formed, drawing on Mike Pearson’s concept, a “deep map” over time. In addition to the investigation in the narrative model, I also wish to look into how Central Park is used in film-making. I think how the filmmakers depict the Park affects how the viewers perceive this space and their impression of Central Park. And the general public’s perception of the Park, I believe, to a great extent, affects how the Park is used in the filmmaking in reverse. Filmmakers convey messages by their design of scenography, use of score and other filmic elements that conform to the conventions to make the messages detectable, comprehensible to the viewers. I suggest that the tourist productions make use of the mood and impression already embodied in the space to establish their own scenography that reinforces the narrative of the tour.

Research method

My research method will primary base on my personal experience. I intend to participate in Central Park Movie Tour in person to have a better grasp of the structure of the itineraries and the ambiance of the sites under the narrative of the films. After experiencing the tour, I will design a questionnaire in reference to both my personal experience and the tourism studies theories in hope that such questionnaire can capture the experience of other people who also participate in the tour. Owning to my lack of experience in doing primary research, I will probably modify my questionnaire in process to get the most useful comments on the tour from other tourists.

If accessible, I would like to see the films whose scenes are included in the on location tour. Pinpointing the scenes helps to understand how the scenes function in the films and to carry out the investigation in how they are re-contextualize in tourist productions, the on location tours. If inaccessibility of the films occurs, I will find secondary resources that comments on, and/or deals with the films to find out where are the target scenes situated in the filmic context and also the ambiance of such scenes.

Working bibliography

Pearson, Mike. Julian Thomas. “Theatre/Archaeology.” TDR (1988-). Vol. 38, No.4, 1994. 133-61.

Macdonald, Scott. “The Country in the City: Central Park in Joan Mekas’s Walden and William Greaves’s Symbiopsychotaxiplasm .” Journal of American Studies. 31 (1997), 3, 361-84.

Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York. 1994. The Monacelli Press.

Bruner, Edward M.. “The Role of Narrative in Tourism.” Berkeley Conference, On Voyage: New Directions in Tourism Theory, 2005.

Bruner, Edward M.. Culture on Tour. 2005. University of Chicago Press.

The Official Website for Central Park.
http://www.centralparknyc.org/centralparkhistory/ataglance

Posted by Stella Yu-Wen Wang at 9:35 AM

Leah Strigler: High School Reunions

Project Idea, Site Description and Research Focus

My plan is to attend a reunion event at an area Jewish day school – ideally a high school. These are schools which offer dual-curriculum programs in Judaic and general Studies in the context of a full-day school. They may or may not be identified with a particular Jewish religious movement. I have put out feelers to a few schools, but it is hard to connect with staff during this heavy holiday month. I hope to firm up possible sites this week. If these do not turn up likely candidates I may turn to non-Jewish schools in the area, a move which would shift some of my research interests. I anticipate that some schools may be uncomfortable with the project idea unless the identity of the school is suitably masked.

This project idea relates to my dissertation work in alumni relations. In particular, I am interested in how the representatives of educational institutions conceive of and cultivate their relationships with alumni, including but not limited to desires for institutional “advancement” (please read development or fund-raising) and institutional mission. An overarching question might be formulated as “For what purposes do educational institutions such as schools invite their alumni back for formal reunion events?

In the case of Jewish day school reunions I am interested in studying this event of a school reunion as a tourist production. I have five areas of focus for observation:

1] Alumni as return visitors on something of a “nostalgia trip” to the site of their educational experience. In a way they are more a type of honored guests rather than tourists, as well as former “members” of the institution. How do they approach this event and experience? The student organizers are in a slightly different role, serving both as visiting alumni and as event organizers.
2] The school personnel: administrators and teachers. What roles do they play in the reunion event? How do they interact with the visiting alumni?
3] The site itself: how is the school building prepared for this event? What spaces are used for it? What materials are arranged or exhibited for the purpose of this event?
4] (In the case of a Jewish day school) Evidence of Jewish expression or activity, if evident in the event or the communications surrounding it. In particular, are there any evident discrepancies between the religious philosophy of the institution and of its alumni? Are differences of philosophy, opinion or practice evident and, if so, how are they evident? This focus can be seen as an extension of my interest in how alumni do or do not embody the ideals of the institution as articulated in the institution’s mission.
5] The role of narrative in the context of the event: what “official” stories are presented or highlighted? What stories are unique to particular sets of alumni or to this event? How do multiple narratives, especially those represented by different actors in this event, become fused or contrasted via the events of the reunion? What is the interplay between students’ memories and the narrative presented by the site, the event and its activities, or the institution’s staff? What is the content of informal discussions between alumni and staff?

Research Methods

My intention is to see how the theoretical works of tourist studies and performance studies can help in “reading” these events and collecting data. At the moment I am most interested in considering the function of narrative in the event and most focused on Bruner’s work as a result. However, I have a hunch that once I begin my research questions of how “front” and “back” spaces are constructed for alumni will likely come up. In other words, how are such spaces demarcated when inviting “in” those who once knew the institution intimately?

I plan to collect all possible forms of communications and literature (as well as other materials) related to the reunion itself and more generally to keeping alumni in contact with the institutions and keeping them informed of institutional news and developments: e-mails, invitations, official reports, listserv, Web site. In addition I plan to collect basic literature about the school: its mission, history and current characteristics. To the extent possible I will follow communications at least through the immediate follow-up to the event itself. I anticipate that the time line of the project will not allow for much more.

I also plan to interview the school staff in charge of the event, the student coordinators, and some staff or administration who attend the reunion and/or have particular interest in the success of the event, such as the Development Director.

I plan to attend the event as well, ideally as an observer, although I anticipate that determining my exact role and how it is presented for the event may be shifted in negotiating with the particular school. I am inclined to not interview attendees during the event itself because that seems too intrusive – it will certainly shift what I am able to observe and may in fact alter the character of the event itself. Instead, I plan to focus on observing and documenting with as much “thick description” as possible the formal activities and informal interactions that I observe at the event. I will ask if it is possible to interview a few willing participants after the event itself. I also hope to conduct at least one post-event interview with a staff member who attended the event. I intend to focus my interview questions on obtaining details of the planning and development of the event, the history of alumni relations at the institution, perceived value and hoped-for outcomes. My questions will likely parallel the questions I am developing for my own dissertation research.

I should note that one of the schools I have contacted is my own alma mater; if I decide to study this institution then I will need to consider how to present my own identity and relationship to the institution. As a Jewish day school graduate myself it is possible that I need to consider this issue of reflexivity no matter what, especially since I grew up in New York City and am familiar with most schools in the area either as a former student of one or as a Jewish education professional.

Tentative Outline

My outline is constructed chronologically. Perhaps this is so because this relates most easily to the idea of narrative; it also seems to be the easiest way to introduce the reader to the institution and the context of the reunion.

1. Introduction: School Reunions
2. Background: The History of the Institution and its visiting Alumni
3. Pre-Reunion: Communications and Preparation
4. Reunion: The Event Itself
5. Post-Reunion: Evaluation and Institutional Follow-Up
6. The Reunion as Tourist Event

Selected Bibliography:

Web sites:
www.case.org
The Council for Advancement and Support of Education serves university professionals, including those who work in alumni relations.
www.classmates.com
This commercial site allows individuals to post data and connect with former schoolmates.
www.nais.org
The National Association for Independent Schools is the leading national association for these institutions.
www.reunion.com
This site is similar to classmates.com
www.reunionsmag.com
A professional magazine for planning reunions of all kinds.

Scholarly Works
Bruner, Edward M. 2004 Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fox, Seymour, et al, eds. 2003 Visions of Jewish Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ikeda, Keiko. 1999. A Room Full of Mirrors: High School Reunions in Middle America. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
MacCannell, Dean. 1989. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schoken Books.
Ortner, Sherry B. 2003 New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture and the Class of ’58. Durham: Duke University Press.
Vinitzky-Seroussi, Vered. 1998 After Pomp and Circumstance: High School Reunion as an Autobiographical Occasion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

I have been searching for citations of articles that focus on high school reunions as an object of study and analysis; I hope to read through these in the coming week.

Posted by BKG at 6:48 AM

October 16, 2005

Aniko on Stalin Park

After the change of the political system in Hungary, monumental communist statues that had characterized the landscape of Budapest for forty years were removed from their original locations. There was much debate around the future of these mementos of a shameful and accursed past, and eventually the city decided to exhibit the statues in an isolated park built for this purpose in the outskirt of the city, about twenty minutes from downtown Budapest.

Today, the Statue Park is one of the most popular tourist sites both for foreign and domestic tourists in Hungary. In this research paper I intend to examine why these statues, many of which are not masterpieces, attract thousands of people week after week to this tiny park in the middle of nowhere. My aim is to explore how foreign tourists, domestic tourists once used to these statues in their original locations, and domestic tourists of the new generation experience the Statue Park. What is the experience they share and in what sense do their perceptions differ from each other? What are the possible narratives they can read out from this collection of statues and memorials? In order to answer these questions I will analyze the Statue Park from three different aspects:

1. “site report” (after Pearson)

• description of the site
  What is the “Statue Park”? Where and how can tourists find this place and what can they see / experience there? The introduction will provide the necessary background information of the park.
  
• perception of the site
  In this section my aim is to explore the different ways tourists experience the site and the monuments. How does the space structure our visual experience? What is it that we notice first entering to the park? Why are the monuments located in this specific sequence? Can we observe any underlying structure? How does the music that we hear at the entrance of the park influence our experience? Many of the tourists touch the statues as well. What does this sensory experience add to our total perception?
  
• analysis/interpretation of the structure and organization of the site

The analysis is to be based upon my own experiences as well as published critical and analytical writings on the Park, including:

• Apor, Péter, :Az „emberarcú szocializmus“: Szoborpark („Socialism with a Human Face: Statue Park”) Szocreál. Nr.8.
  
• Boros, Géza: Budapesti emlékmű metamorfózisok. („Memorial Metamorphoses in Budapest 1989-2000”) Budapest Negyed 32-33. (2001/2-3)
  
• Fairfax, John: On your Marx, get set… gone http://smh.com.au/articles/2004/11/26/1101219732785.html?oneclick=true
  
• György, Péter: Nixon Pajtás („Nixon Buddy”) Élet és Irodalom. 49./25.
  
• Kovács, Éva: A zsarnokság cinikus és ironikus emlékezete („The Cynical and Ironical Memory of Tyranny”) http://www.argus.hu/2003_10/ta_kovacs_e.html
  
• Krackau, Katja: Jurassic Park des Communismus („The Jurassic Park of Communism”)
  
• Stein, Frank N. Európa reá mene hodu utu reá I. – Szoborpark („Europe Would Go On This Road – Statue Park”) http://www.papirusz.hu/cikkek/?id=1879
  
• Szűcs, Gyögy: A „zsarnokság” szoborparkja (The Statue Park of Tyranny) http://www.bparchiv.hu/magyar/kiadvany/bpn/03/szucs.html

2. “track laying” – The statues in the Park

The analyses of the Park often focus on the Park, on the layout of this new tourist attraction, and they fail to examine the exhibited statues. What makes us go and see these statues? Barely the fact that they were manufactured for the Communist Party, or we also look at them as art works? In order to understand the statues’ effect on visitors, we need to study Social Realism, the characteristics of this artistic style that was an important device for the dominant power (the Communist Party) to bear influence on the people. Besides looking into art historian analyses of this period (twentieth century) and region (Eastern Europe), I would also like to take the following articles into consideration:

• Boros, Géza: Fanelin (“Fanelin”) Mozgó Világ, 2003/7.
  
• Rényi, András: A légből kapott Monumentum. (“The Delusive Monument”) http://falanx.dev.euroweb.hu/webhost/virtual/www.mozgovilag.hu/februa6.htm

3. “deep map” – original location vs. new location, or the social role of statues

In the third part of the essay I would like to reinterpret William Least Heat Moon’s term (quoted by Mike Pearson), the “deep map”. He claims that “deep maps” “combine the geography and natural history of a given location with accounts of the history and lived experience of its inhabitants” (151).This idea takes Pearson to the category of “second-order performances”, which I would like to reintroduce as “second-location sites”. In my analysis of “second-location sites”, I would like to take both the present (natural) location of this site and the earlier experienced or functional locations into consideration.

Pearson differentiates between perfected space and found space. The Statue Park is clearly a perfected (designed and constructed) space for the statues; however, in my opinion, it is just as important to look at the original “found” spaces in order to acquire a better understanding of Hungarian tourists’ reception of this attraction. Statues often play an extremely important role in urban space organization by becoming centers / meeting points or designated places for public events; in other words they establish a common knowledge and experience that the inhabitants of the neighborhood/district/city all share. Therefore, in the analysis of exhibited statues, personal histories in relation to the statues also need to be taken into consideration.

Once significant markers of community centers, today these statues are exiled and segregated from the city life. The Statue Park exhibits the statues without revealing anything about the statues’ past. In my paper, I would like to depict the histories of the monuments. Where did they originally stand? What were those locations famous for? What kind of social roles did they play in the city of Budapest? At the same time, we need to analyze the present location as well. What does this isolation and segregation signify? How can we interpret the fact that the statues had been relocated and closed far enough from the heart and the life of the city? These are all questions that I will attempt to answer by researching old maps, recalling my own memories and interviewing people who lived in the statue’s original neighborhood.

4. “Archeology creates identities” – different readings of the Statue Park

Since the Statue Park does not reveal any of the personal histories I aforementioned, tourists without personal histories and tourists who revisit memories by revisiting the statues will have a very different interpretation of the statue park. In the last section of the paper, I will turn to the present again, to explore to reveal how the present experience of the Statue Park shape the future of Hungarian identity. Here I would like to explore the “meaning” and the “feeling” the Statue Park mediates about the Communist era for those who never experienced life in Communism, i.e. foreign tourists and the young Hungarians.

“People experience material things, appropriate them, and produce a meaning for themselves.” (156) Foreign tourists and local Hungarians appropriate the experience of the Statue Park to very different discourses on Communism. I would like to conceptualize the foreign discourse on the Park in its relation to Communism by analyzing postings and chat rooms of popular travel websites, such as:

• virtualtourist.com (http://www.virtualtourist.com/travel/Europe/Hungary/Budapest_Fovaros/Budapest-436839/Things_To_Do-Budapest-Statue_Park_Szoborpark-BR-1.html)
  
• tripadvisor.com (http://www.virtualtourist.com/travel/Europe/Hungary/Budapest_Fovaros/Budapest-436839/Things_To_Do-Budapest-Statue_Park_Szoborpark-BR-1.html)
  
• travel.yahoo.com (http://travel.yahoo.com/p-travelguide-2781262-statue_park_budapest-i).

History and past always have a great impact on a nation’s identity-formation. Since the change of the political system, there has been an inevitable crisis in the conceptualization of Hungarian national identity. It is still an open question how the forty years of communist dictatorship can and should be incorporated into the nation’s self-identification. Therefore, collective memorial sites, such as the Statue Park, have a crucial role in forming the next generations’ judgement on Communism. In this last section of the paper, I will attempt to locate The Statue Park in the Hungarian Post-Communist discourse. I will introduce the nationalist narrative of the Communist dictatorship and I aim to explore whether the Statue Park contests or underpins this popular and populist attitude of judging the past. I hope that the following historiographical and anthropological writings will help my research:

• Romsics Gergely (2004) Mítosz, kultusz, társadalom. (“Myth, cult, society”) in Mozgó Világ 2004/7.
  
• Romsics Ignác (2003) Mítoszok, legendák, tévhitek a 20. századi Magyar történelemről. (“Myths, Legends, Disbeliefs about the Hungarian History of 20th Century) Budapest, Osiris, 2001
  
• Schöpflin György (2004) Az identitás dilemmái. („The dilemmas of Identity“) Gödöllő. Attraktor.
  
• Selling Communism in Poland
  
• Disgraced Monuments (documentary)
  
• Hoffman, Lily F. and Jiri Musil. 1999. Culture meets commerce: Prague and post-communist tourism. In The Tourist City, eds. Dennis Judd and Susan Fainstein. New Haven: Yale University Press.
  
• Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The future of nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.
  
• Light, D. 2000. Gazing on communism: heritage tourism and post-communist identities in Germany, Hungary and Romania. Tourism Geographies 2 (2): 157-176.
  
• Priban, Jiri. Reconstituting Paradise Lost: the temporal dimension of postcommunist constitution-making.
  
• Hofer, Tamas. Construction of the 'Folk Cultural Heritage' and Rival Versions of National' Identity in Hungary

Conclusion

This paper is the first research of a larger project that would aim to explore how tourist attractions conceptualize Communism in Hungary. My intention is to expand the research by including the analysis of the “House of Terror”, a museum at the location of the former secret police location in the heart of Budapest, which exhibits the two different tyranny Hungary (and the region) was subject to, fascism and communism as well as the permanent exhibition at the National Museum in Budapest on the forty years of communism. As I pointed out earlier, the conceptualization of communism in contemporary Hungarian national identity is an on-going process; therefore, my aim is to demonstrate different tendencies of interpretations and misinterpretations of Communism. It is extremely important to highlight the power of tourist attractions; their ability to manipulate the past and history in order to reshape present identities.

Methodology

Documentation
In the analysis of the Statue Park I primarily intend to rely on my own experiences and observations. I have already finished my on-site research, documented the park and the statues with the help of my digital camera. My only regret is that I could not record the tourists’ conversations. Watching other (both local and foreign) tourists and listening to their conversations on-site for hours and hours proved to be the most effective research tool in discovering and analyzing the Statue Park.

Interviews
I got into contact with the designer (Ákos Előd) and the director (Ákos Réthly) of the park, who are both willing to answer any of my questions. I might interview them in the course of the research via email, primarily about facts and data of the park.
Although oral history plays a very important part in the second section of my research, I will have limited possibility to interview visitors in person. At the moment, my greatest challenge to find a way to interview people via email. I am still working on this concept, I am not sure how can I interview people from Hungary, how could I find and select those people who could help me in my research. Truesdell’s and Baum’s article reminded me that I should only contact people once I can clearly articulate my questions and what I expect from the Hungarian visitors. I think I would need to have an access of their process of reception, something similar to what I found in the posts of foreign tourists on the travel websites. At the same time, I need to remind myself: since I cannot interview a representative sample for this research, I will not be able to support any of my theses by empirical research. Therefore, it is important to emphasize that I am exploring my impressions, perceptions and anticipations, which may be wrong in some cases.

Posted by BKG at 10:05 PM

The Truth about New York City

Every year thousands of people visit New York City and return home with information and photographic documents. In addition to its edifying value, much of this factual information is also scandalous, titillating, and bizarre. How is the truth about New York made? For many, enlightenment is found on the upper deck of a bright red double-decker tour bus. Rocketing past the authentic sites of the different neighborhoods, this is perhaps the most efficient mode of seeing every single requisite site during a short vacation. A guru or a Beatrice-like intermediary accompanies the groups of lost souls on their pilgrimage to Nirvana (or descent into hell depending on their point of view), providing a voice over narrative that weaves tales of the past, present, and where to go for lunch in the near future.

New York City is a large and heterogeneous space --as evinced by the variety of available tours, (eg. the “Brooklyn Loops Tour,” “Holiday Lights Tour,” the “Harlem Gospel Tour,” etc). However, for many, New York City as a site is produced through the two-hour “Essential New York” bus tour, through its route, carefully plotted to connect all the major landmarks, and through the fascinating narration that combines the official facts with unexpected quirky extras -- straight from the mouth of a real live native New Yorker. I myself have been on this tour many times --while entertaining out of town guests, and when trying to shoot NYC B-roll without getting a permit from the Mayor’s office. I have been baffled, mesmerized, and amused by the information given by tour guides –for example the average cost of a Manhattan apartment, stories about “Mole people,” where to get a fake Rolex watch. These tours were not merely distinct from other city tours in content, but in delivery. This unique genre of story-telling not only creates an image of New York through its representations, tour guides perform New Yorkness for outsiders through their deviations from the official story. These racy tidbits about New York are repeated and are destined to be to be repeated “back home.” I consider these performances as a kind of Folkloric performance. And it is an art form that may be in jeopardy given the Daily News article published in September that accuses double decker bus guides of telling “whoppers,” “tall tales,” and “urban myths,” and in light of recent controversial recent legislation that requires licensed New York tour guides to pass a test, answering at least 97 questions correctly out of 150 (64.5%).

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

This project is concerned with the centrality of narrative and performance in producing touristic experiences and the production of “factual knowledge.” More specifically, I am interested in the factual knowledge produced on bus tours of New York.

• What types of information do the tour guides stress? (Historical events, current attractions, where to get a fake Rolex, etc.?)
• Is there a New York City tour narrative genre? How are narratives organized? How many multiple mini-stories are told on the tour? How much direct representation? Is there a structure to this?
• On what facts do the tour guides agree? About what do they disagree?
• How do stories make space meaningful?
• How people perform themselves as tourguides? What different roles do they perform? New Yorkers? Experts?
• What do the tourists remember? What do they ask about?
• What pre-existing, recurrent understandings and expectations seem to exist between tourist and guide?
• How do people perform themselves as tourguides? What roles do they perform? As New Yorkers? As experts?
• What about tips?

METHODS

I will consider this performance from two perspectives: as a ritual and as a text. In order do so, I will employ two distinct approaches.

Ritual - My main method of analyzing the event that occurs through time, what Victor Turner calls a “processual form,” will be Participant Observation. As a tourist with a video camera, I will capture the sights, sounds, and stories of the tour. I will observe the interaction between the participants, the tour’s ritualized components and action chains, and try to find a predictable structure for these events. This will require an experience of multiple tours.

Textual analysis - Regarding the performance as a text, I will employ textual analysis. Following the events, I will analyze my recordings and make transcripts. I will look for reoccurring themes, and pragmatic considerations, such as events on the bus and audience that might account for deviations from the scripts. From an ethno-aesthetic perspective, I will attempt to sort out commonly employed native categorizations from these texts.

Documentation - I will make video and sound recordings of tour guides giving tours, as well as make images of the things they point to. These recordings will be made from the point of view of the tourist. Although they are recorded, they are more situated observations rather than objective recordings.

Interviews – In order to supplement my analysis of the event, I will solicit interviews. When possible I will interview with the tour guides and tourists following the performance. If they will allow me, I will record it, other wise I will take notes.

I am interested in learning from the tour guides’ perspective:
• how they chose the information they disseminate
• were they instructed to tell certain stories by the company,
• do they change their performances, and if so, why and under what circumstances,
• how they react dialogically to the audience demands and reactions.
• In their opinions, what makes a good tour guide.

Follwing the tour, when possible, I will ask audience members:
• Was this your first time to New York?
• What were you expecting to see when you got here?
• What was the most interesting thing you learned on the tour?
• What sights have you seen in New York?
• Did you manage to see everything on your itinerary?

I will elicit native categories from the ticket seller with regard to the nature of the different tours offered.

ANALYSIS AND PRESENTATION

Clifford Geertz distinction between “thick” and “thin” description is useful. Observational video is both a document and a means of presentation. Hours of unanalyzed footage provides a thin description and when analyzed and organized in such a ways as to create new meanings and interpretations, the end product is more similar to a thick description. Recordings can serve as field notes, and when edited, they resemble written ethnography. Edited film becomes a new text to read.

I will first study this footage and the transcripts to develop an understanding of the underlying conventions and structure. I will then attempt to capture this information and the indescribable feel, by creating a second-order performance from my recordings. I will edit this footage to create a video that metacommunicativly transmits the conventions of the genre, in terms of information, style.

I will follow the chronology of the tour. I hope the narrative arc of the film can utilize the narrative arc of the narrative journey on which the tour guides take the tourists. My final product will be a 10-20 minute will be a verite style documentary film edited from approximately 10 hours of video and sound recording.

ANTICIPATED DIFFICULTIES

I foresee two unrelated challenges and have developed a Plan B and a Plan C as a result.

1) Owing to the fact that is has been raining so much lately, this will be no easy task. I have seen the busses going by with tourists under plastic sheets. This would be tragic from a technical standpoint. It could become a sound piece accompanies by photos.

2) The problem with many films is that they are boring. From my prior experience, about every 3rd tour guide is a dud. I would like to film 5 tours and use 3. My back up plan is to write a paper on this topic.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adler, Judith. 1989. Travel as performed art. American Journal of Sociology 94, no. 6: 1366-91.
Adler, Margot. “Test for New York City's Tour Guides Revamped. New Exam Excites Passions over Big Apple's True Identity.” http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1277720
Ap and Wong, 2001 J. Ap and K. Wong, Case Study on Tour Guiding: Professionalism, Issues and Problems, Tourism Management 22 (2001), pp. 551–563.
Bendix, Regina. “Tourism and Cultural Displays: Inventing Traditions for Whom?” The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 102, No. 404. (Apr. - Jun., 1989), pp. 131-146.
Breuer, Franz, and Wolff-Michael Roth. 2003. Subjectivity and Reflexivity in the Social Sciences: Epistemic Windows and Methodical Consequences. Forum: Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research 4, no. 2: 30.
Bruner, Edward M. 2004. Culture on tour: ethnographies of travel. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, pp. 1-123, 191-252.
--2005. The role of narrative in tourism. Unpublished conference paper. On Voyage: New Directions in Tourism Theory, Berkeley.
Cohen, Erik. 1984. The Sociology of Tourism: Approaches, Issues, and Findings. Annual Review of Sociology 10: 373-92.
--1985. The tourist guide: the origins, structures, and dynamics of a role. Annals of Tourism Research 12, no. 1: 5-30.
Edensor, Tim. Performing tourism, staging tourism,Tourist Studies 1, no. 1 (2001): 59-81.
Dahles, 2002 H. Dahles, The Politics of Tour Guiding: Image Management in Indonesia, Annals of Tourism Research 29 (2002), pp. 783–800.
Feiden, Douglas. “Takin' tourists for a ride: News puts city's tourist guides to the truth test – and guess what?” New York Daily News. September 24, 2005. http://www.nydailynews.com/09-25-2005/news/local/story/349505p-298201c.html
Ferate, Justin.“Testing the Tourguides.” Gotham Gazette. July 14, 2003.http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/issueoftheweek/20030714/200/451
**Fine, Elizabeth and Haskell Speer, Jean. “Tour Guide performances as sight sacralization.” Annals of Tourism Research. Volume 12, Issue 1 , 1985, Pages 73-95
Franklin, Adrian and Michael Crang, The trouble with tourism and travel theory? Tourist Studies 1, no. 1 (2001): 5-22.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. Thick description. The interpretation of cultures: selected essays. 3-30. New York: Basic Books.
Harkin, M. 1995. Modernist Anthropology and the Tourism of the Authentic.Annals of Tourism Research 22: 650-670.
**Holloway, Christopher. “The guided tour a sociological approach.” Annals of Tourism Research. Volume 8, Issue 3 , 1981. Pages 377-402.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett,Ciraj Rassool, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto.
“ “Theorizing Heritage” Ethnomusicology, Vol. 39, n.3 1995.
MacCannell, Dean. 1973. Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings. American Journal of Sociology 79, no. 3: 589-603.
-- 1999 [1976]. The Tourist. Berkeley: University of Califormia Press.
Nash, Dennison. 1981. Tourism as an Anthropological Subject. Current Anthropology 22, no. 5: 461-81.
New York City Department of Consumer Affairs. “Consumer Affairs Creates New More Accurate Professional Tour Guide Test.” News From DCA. Press Releases. http://www.nyc.gov/html/dca/html/news/tour_test.shtml
-- “Consumer Affairs Announces Out-of-Town Tour Companies Now Required to Use only Licensed Tour Guides.” January 30, 2004 http://www.nyc.gov/html/dca/html/news/pr_13004.shtml
“New York City Sight-seeing tours.” http://www.grayline.com/franchise.cfm/action/details/id/22
Oder, Norman. “The Tour Guides Complain.” Gotham Gazette. July 14, 2003. http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/20030714/200/450
Pearson, Mike, and Julian Thomas. 1994. Theatre/Archaeology. TDR 38, no. 4: 133-61.
Pearce, 1984 P. Pearce, Tourist-Guide Interaction, Annals of Tourism Research 11 (1984), pp. 129–146.
Resources for Tour Guides http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/issueoftheweek/20030714/200/456\
Salazar, Neol. “Tourism and glocalization “Local” Tour Guiding.” Annals of Tourism Research. Volume 32, Issue 3 , July 2005. 628-646.
Scannell, Paddy. 2001. Authenticity and experience. Discourse Studies 3, 4: 405-411.
Sims, Amy. “Tour Guide Testing Gets Tough.” Fox News. Monday, June 30, 2003. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,90719,00.html
Simmel, Georg. 2002. The Metropolis and Mental Life. In The Blackwell City Reader. eds.Gary
--1950 [1908]. The stranger. The sociology of Georg Simmel. trans. Kurt Wolff. New York: Free Press.
Taylor , John P. 2001. Authenticity and sincerity in tourism. Annals of Tourism Research 28, no. 1: 7-26.
Urry, John. 2002. The tourist gaze. 2nd ed. London , Newbury Park : Sage Publications.
Veblen. Thorstein 1899. The Theory of the Leisure Class.

Posted by Pilar Rau at 6:21 PM | TrackBack

Excavation: Her Long Black Hair

We begin sitting on the bench. Actually, we were sitting on the bench even before Janet Cardiff instructed us to. A motley crew of workday lunchers, people watchers, readers, and phone talkers brought together by a casual commonality. There are a few among us from our performance class, sitting in a row, mirroring the line of pedicab drivers opposite – a jovial group.

So we begin by sitting down. An assault of sounds from all directions augments those of the city beyond my headphones. Sirens wail, heading west along Fifty-ninth Street. Applause from an unseen audience. A lively marching bank strikes up behind me, somewhere down by the pond, and then fades away. I know that Her Long Black Hair utilises binaural recording. I laugh at Cardiff’s cleverness, aware of the technology. But still can’t help turning around to check what is (not) really there. A taste of what is to come: events from the near and far past combine with those made in the moment. Sounds from all directions – spatially, temporally – dis/orientate us to the rules of our new environment. We are going places. (Even here on the bench.)

____________

Her Long Black Hair is a 45-minute audio walking tour of Central Park by Canadian artist Janet Cardiff, presented by the Public Art Fund originally in 2004, and again in 2005.

The aim of my project is a reconstruction of my experience of Her Long Black Hair, in order to discover how the tour is constructed, in all its complexity, from three initial players: the park, the audio recording, and the participant. That is, how is the tour working on me? My reconstruction will build on Mike Pearson’s proposal of Theatre/Archaeology, utilizing the process of excavation and synthesis. I will reconstitute my experience in multiple ways as a way of making a “creative process in the present.” (133) A working outline for my reconstruction is as follows:

Paper:
1. The first account: partial rememberings
2. Excavating the layers
- The score
- Analysis of a section
3. Tempo, elastic temporality, time travel
4. Space, the park, maps
5. The body walking
6. From near and far: intimacy and synchronicity

Conference presentation:
Short reading of partial rememberings; summation of project findings; and simultaneous short video.

Archaeology will prove to be an important metaphor here. I posit that we could look at Cardiff as an archaeologist, and Her Long Black Hair as a performance of archaeological excavation and exposition. In this vein, the watcher is active participant; the tour is a production of what the participant brings to it – her physicality, her time (in a literal sense, your 45 minutes makes the performance occur, but also in terms of your previous experiences, your history) – built around the trope of travel (in time, through space, and within the self).

The focus of my study will be personal. I will be using extensive notes and written rememberings from my two experiences of the tour during Summer 2005. I also plan to transcribe the audio recording and to re-experience the walk route through Central Park without the recording. I will reconstruct a version of the tour through scoring the many threads or ‘tracks’ that are present (narratives, actions of the park, spatial relationships, stops, real time noises, recorded noises, personal memories, exercises, coincidences, sensory experiences, temporal leaps, the pulse of walking, etc), and will analyse one section (of perhaps 3-5 minutes) in detail. I have contacted the Public Art Fund regarding access to Cardiff’s recording and am awaiting response. At this time I do not plan to interview others about their experiences of Her Long Black Hair, as my study will focus on a reconstitution of my experience, however, I am aware that I have a large pool of possible interviewees available from the class.

Other research will include readings on Cardiff and her work (in particular her other walking tours, eg. The missing voice: case study b, In Real Time, her writing and interviews with her), phenomenology, space, walking, walking in the city, and other artists concerned with walking, and travel as art. I am also interested in seeing how the writing of Georg Simmel, Guy-Ernst Debord, and Allen Weiss may inform this study. I am currently working through a rather large list of readings with the hope of developing more specific questions to guide my analysis. I feel the key is in the personal, the intimate, and the physicality of walking. This may be an area in which I could use assistance.
____________

A very large bibliography that I am currently working from, but which will be refined, includes:

Methods
Pearson, Mike, and Julian Thomas. 1994. “Theatre/Archaeology.” TDR 38, no. 4: 133-61.
The metaphor of archaeology will be a major organising idea for my study. Julian Thomas writes in his response, “Archaeology is all about absences, about writing around what is obstinately not there – which is why archaeology should be poetic. Poetics here involves a labour of production/creation/transformation, but is also means attending to things in an intimate way…” (142) How does this relate to Her Long Black Hair? How are absences and intimacy produced?

Bruner, Edward M. 2004. Culture on tour: ethnographies of travel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
A model for self-reflexive writing.

Travel as art
Adler, Judith. 1989. “Travel as performed art.” American Journal of Sociology 94, no. 6: 1366-91.

* Fitzpatrick, Robert, ed. 2005. Universal experience: art, life and the tourist's eye. Chicago : Museum of Contemporary Art, DAP.

Cardiff, Janet.
* 2005. The walk book. Koln: Verlag Der Buchhandlung Walther Konig.

* 1999. The Missing Voice: case study b. London: Artangel.

* Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn. Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works Including Collaborations with George Bures Miller. Long Island City, NY: P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center. 2002.

Egoyan, Atom. 2002. “Janet Cardiff.” Bomb Magazine (spring).

Biagioli, Monica. 2000. “Janet Cardiff: The missing voice (Case Study B: An Audio Walk).” ArtFocus 68 (spring).

no author. Carnegie Museum of Art site
“CI:99/00: Artists: Janet Cardiff.” http://www.cmoa.org/international/html/art/cardiff.htm
“CI:99/00: On-line Forums: Ask the Artists: Janet Cardiff.” http://www.cmoa.org/international/html/forum/cardiffresponse.htm

Blogs:
http://blog.veer.com/archives/000816.html

Caspesyan, Cedric. 2005. http://zekesgallery.blogspot.com/2005/06/janet-cardiff-e-flux-canadian-art-ad.html

Simmel, Georg.
1919 [1911]. “The adventure.” Translated by David Kettler from Das Abenteuer, Philosophische Kultur. Gesammelte Essais, 2nd ed. Leipzig: Alfred Kroner.

2002. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In The Blackwell City Reader. eds.Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson. 11-19. Oxford: Blackwell.

1950 [1908]. “The stranger.” The sociology of Georg Simmel. trans. Kurt Wolff. New York: Free Press.

* Debord, Guy-Ernst.
1955. “Introduction to a critique of urban geography.” First appeared in Les Lèvres Nues #6 (September).

1956. “Theory of the dérive.” First appeared in Les Lèvres Nues #9 (November) along with accounts of two dérives.

1961. “Perspectives for conscious alterations of everyday life.”

1956. “Methods of détournement.” Les Lèvres Nues #8 (May).

* Weiss, Allen S.
1995. Phantasmic radio. Durham, NC : Duke University Press.

2002. Breathless: Sound Recording, Disembodiment, and the Transformation of Lyrical Nostalgia. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

1998. Unnatural Horizons: Paradox and Contradiction in Landscape Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

* Phenomenology
Csordas, Thomas J. 1993. “Somatic Modes of Attention.” Cultural Anthropology 8, no. 2: 135-56

Howes, David, ed. 2005. Empire of the senses: the sensual culture reader. Oxford, New York : Berg. See especially the following essays: Consciousness as 'feeling in the body'; Places sensed, senses placed: Towards a sensuous epistemology of environments.

Bull, Michael, and Les Back, eds. 2003. The auditory culture reader. Oxford, New York : Berg. See especially the following essays: A rainforest acoustemology; The sonic composition of the city.

* Space, Psychogeography
Simonsen, K. 2005. “Bodies, Sensations, Space and Time: The Contribution from Henri Lefebvre.” Geografiska Annaler Series B-Human Geography 87B, no. 1: 1-14.

Casey, E. S. 2001. “Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be in the Place-World?” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91, no. 4: 683-93.

Sinclair, Ian. 1997. “Skating on thin eyes; the first walk.” Lights out for the territory: 9 excursions in the secret history of London. London: Granta.

Hou Je Bek, Wilfried. 2004. “Do-It-Yourself Urbanism: Psychogeography, Generosity, Serendipity and Turriphilia.” Archilab Catalogue

Walking
de Certeau, Michel. 1984. “Walking in the City.” The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

* Edensor, Tim. 2000. “Walking in the British Countryside: Reflexivity, Embodied Practices and Ways to Escape.” Body & Society 6, no. 3: 81-106.

* Careri, Francesco. 2002. Walkscapes: walking as an aesthetic practice. Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gilli, SA.

* Drobnick, Jim. 1995. “Mock Excursions and Twisted Itineraries: Tour Guide Performances.” Parachute 80 (October/December): 31-37.

* Chatwin, Bruce. 1987. The songlines. London : Cape.

Solnit, Rebecca. 2000. Wanderlust: a history of walking. New York: Viking.

Mauss, Marcel (1979) Sociology and Psychology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

* Horoder, Stuart, and Judith Richards. 2002. Walk ways. New York: Independent Curators International.
____________

* areas needing further reading.

PS – I have just noticed Tyler’s post, and am aware of one of Andre Lepecki’s students who is also studying Cardiff. It would be useful to compare thoughts – in particular, I am thinking it might be interesting for Tyler and I to compare ‘scores.’ Did we map the same things?

Posted by Justine Shih Pearson at 2:48 PM

Old Bethpage Village Restoration as an Environmentally Immersive Site

Evil avatar of capitalism at its worst or not, there is little doubting that the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida is one of the most impressive and successful business ventures of the past fifty years. Operated under the auspices of the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the entirety of Disney World consists of a conglomeration of theme parks, shopping districts, entertainment/club districts, water parks, hotels, restaurants, “backstage” office buildings, and even an experimental community called “Celebration.” In many ways, then, the Walt Disney Corporation created, controls, and operates its own separate mini-nation. The micro-management of every area of this “territory” is what allows the corporation to create something more than just an entertaining theme park along the lines of a Six Flags park – rather, they create an entire experience, which has as much in common with Richard Schechner’s idea of environmental theater as it does with a park full of roller-coasters. The experience is wholly immersive, with every aspect of life (including, in the case of Celebration, such things as grocery stores and school systems) controlled by the corporation in order to create a “magical” experience that separates life inside the boundaries of the “Resort” from life outside of it. This environmentally immersive experience is, of course, brought to its biggest height inside of the various theme parks (and water parks, as well) within the Resort – fully-created worlds of fantasy, science fiction, Hollywood film sets, African safaris, etc.

This January, I will be tagging along with my family on a trip to Walt Disney World, and hope to use the information and analysis I gather at that time as a part of my spring Masters projects. I hope to use this paper as a preparation for that project, focusing my analytical and theoretical lens upon a tourist site within the New York area – specifically, the Old Bethpage Village Restoration located on Bethpage, Long Island. Like Colonial Williamsburg and Plymouth Plantation, Old Bethpage is a “heritage site,” recreating “Long Island’s past [ . . . ] closer than you think!” Through architectural recreations (or, in the terminology of the Old Bethpage website - http://www.oldbethpage.org/home.htm - “restoration”) of historic Long Island buildings (I am having trouble finding the exact date that Old Bethpage is meant to represent), and volunteer costumed tour guides, Old Bethpage attempts to create an experience inside its borders completely different from the world outside, in this case as a site removed in history rather than one removed in geography or imagination (as is the case with the Disney World theme parks). As such, and given its close location to me and easy accessibility during the fall (it is the host to the Long Island fair, and has several events recreating historical Long Island Halloween and Thanksgiving), it is the perfect site to analyze as “environmentally immersive,” as preparation for my larger work on Disney World. My general research question, then, is to explore, “How does Old Bethpage effectively create an environment to totally differentiate its internal world, entered through the visitor center, from the external world of the parking lot and beyond?”

Capturing the Experience: I intend to visit Old Bethpage Village Restoration personally next weekend, along with a few friends and relatives, and to take notes on the sensory, affective, and environmental experience of actually being present there in the fall foliage. I will spend as much of the day there as I can, first recording my initial experiences as a visitor (later bolstered by interviews with the rest of my party who will not have the theoretical bias I come in with), and then later re-examining the village with a more trained, analytical/theoretical eye.

Documentation and Analysis: While at the site, most documentation will come from notes (either written into a notebook or recorded as separate MP3 files on my iPod recorder) and photographs, which I will later look at in conjunction with the official “visitor’s information” – maps, schedule of daily events, any gift shop items with an informational quality to them, etc. However, the question of, “How is the experience produced?” is a bit too complex for me to answer just yet, because that is, indeed, the central question/quest of my paper, discovering how Old Bethpage structures, creates, and produces its immersive experience.

Interviews: I have already contacted Old Bethpage, although have received no response, about organizing an interview with a costumed tour guide, a member of the architectural restoration team, and a curator/director of some sort for the site. Following the guidelines laid down by Barbara Truesdall and Willa Baum, I will prepare an organized, structured series of questions in advance based on continuing specific research about Old Bethpage gathered in the next few days. Additionally, I hope to interview the friends and family members who will accompany me to the site, focusing my questions on how they were affected by what they experienced at the site.

Ephemera, Material Culture, Documents, Other Sources: Again, I hope to attain a great deal of information by visiting the site, but I also can hopefully search through old archives of Long Island’s NEWSDAY daily newspaper for old articles about the conception, building, and opening of Old Bethpage. I also intend to engage in the classic “gift-shop research” method of purchasing any informational brochure/booklet/book at the actual site that I can, for later reading and analysis. Of course, I also intend to take a great deal of photographs on my visit.

Difficulties and Help: So far, most of my work has been simple preparatory tasks of contacting Old Bethpage for an interview, gathering books of interest, and some theoretical thinking/musing. In terms of difficulties, I have to wonder if I’ll actually be able to organize an interview or not, and whether one visit to the site will be enough to actually gather all the data I require. As such, some help I might be able to receive is volunteers to come with me to the site, take pictures, record their sensory experience, submit to interviews, etc.

Annotated (To A Degree) Bibliography

*Disney World – These are books I have already gathered for my upcoming Disney World project, several of which (such as the Baudrillard and Schechner) utilize theoretical lenses that can easily be applied to Old Bethpage

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Sheila Faria Glaser, trans. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. 1994.

Birnbaum’s Walt Disney World, 2006. Birnbaum/Disney Editions, 2005.

Doctorow, Cory. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. New York: Tor, 2003.

Koenig, David. Mouse Tales: A Behind-The-Ears Look at Disneyland. Irvine, CA: Bonaventure Press, 1995.

Schechner, Richard. Environmental Theater. New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc. 1973.

*Heritage Sites – These books examine other, similar heritage sites, and several – particularly Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s chapter on Plimoth Plantation and Handler/Gable’s entire study – serve as examples for my study, though none fully examine these sites as sources of “environmental theater,” which is the focus of my own study, a sort of remix of various studies (though similar, in a certain degree, to Tucker’s study on Flintstones theming in Turkey).

Handler, Richard & Eric Gable. The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Lippard, Lucy R. On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art, and Place. New York: The New Press, 1999.

Old Bethpage Village Restoration Homepage. http://www.oldbethpage.org/home.htm.
Last consulted on 9/16/05.

The Restoration of Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. New York: F.W. Dodge Corporation, 1935. Reprinted from The Architectural Record, Issue of December,
1935.

Tucker, Hazel. “Welcome to Flintstones-Land: Contesting Places and Identity in Goreme, Central Turkey.” In Tourism: Between Place and Performance, Simon Coleman and Mike Crang, ed. New York: Berghahm Books, 2002.

Posted by Andrew Friedenthal at 1:44 PM

Yochi's Project Proposal

The Merchant's House Museum
29 E.4th Street

Historical background
Merchant’s House Museum was built in 1832, located on Bond Street area (now E.4th Street), as one of the most well-preserved residence of the mid-19th century. At the time when the House was built, the area is one of the fashionable locations, which provide the successful merchants to escape from the noise and congestions of the downtown area. In 1853, Seabury Tredwell, the merchant in furniture import business moved in with his wife, Eliza, and seven children. Mrs. Tredwell gave the birth of their eighth child, Gertrude, in this house. Unlike the most of their neighbors, who moved uptown in search of more elegant residence the Tredwells stayed in the Bond Street area. The family resides in this house for almost one hundred years at the time Gertrude, the last child of the family, died in 1933 at the age of 93.

The House Itself
The Merchant’s House stands along as a survivor of old New York of 19th century. The formal Greek Revival double parlors with marble mantelpieces, Ionic Columns, mahogany pocket doors, elaborate ornamental plasterwork and gas chandeliers demonstrated the life in the 19th century. Many of the personal belongings of the family members are still in the house, unfinished needlework, family photographs, chamber pots and clothes. This is a house filled with the memory of the old New York architecture and also the memory of a no-longer-exist family.

From residence to museum
After Gertrude’s death, one of the family’s relatives realized the importance of the preservation of the house, and therefore asked professionals to precede renovation and set it up as a museum, which opens to the public. In order to be more authentic, they tired down Gertrude’s restroom, which she added in the last renovation by the Tredwell’s family. Although the museum served as the demonstration of the Tredwell’s life in the mid-19th century, they also accept free donations from public, which means not necessarily all the items we see in the house belonged to the Tredwell’s. The Museum also staged itself as one of the most haunted house in the New York City, which I will talk about more in the following paragraph. The most recent exhibition is called the Coffin and Crepe, which they brought in the coffin and black drops to imitate the scenario of the house when Mr. Tredwell past away in 1865. Mr. Tredwell past away in his bedroom on the second floor and his funeral was held in the front parlor. The Museum even used one of their staff’s faces to mold a wax statue as the dead Mr. Tredwell and put him in his bed, which surrounded by chairs that explains the social customs of bereavement and death. They way they exhibit the death in the house, where the death really happened also enhanced the quality of death and memory of the Tredwell family, who is still occupying the house.

Haunted house legend
There are rumors that Gertrude is still roaming in the house after her death in 1933. The Museum took the advantage of this and set up a series activity, which related to death and spiritual experience, such as the exhibition I mentioned above, the Coffin and Crepe, the Ghostly Tales and Tours by Candlelight and the Psychic night. With the coming of Halloween, the season of ghost is in town, these activities reflect the way of exhibiting death and memory, with the comparison of different kind of narrations of ghost story, I believe the merchant’s house can be a very interesting spot of dark tourism.

I am expecting an appointment arrangement in the following week, in order to talk to the director of the museum. And I would also like to talk to other staff in the Museum, one of them is the costume conservator Helen Kapodistrias, she is continuing working on the conserving the costume collection of the Tredwells, I would also like to talk to Alison Clark, who is working on the items unearthed in a dig in the early 1990s, and the book collection, which includes many of the Tredwell family inscription.
In order to compare different kind of ways of exhibiting a residence, I would like to join the tour of the Tenement Museum, which I would like to examine the morality of different places in exhibiting authenticity, and the commodification of the memory. In the ghost season, I am also planning to join several ghost tours in order to find more similarities or difference in different kinds of haunted stories, which also reflected the richness of urban legend and the quality of memory.

Reference
Grider, Sylvia
1999 “The Haunted House in Literature, Popular Culture and Tradition: A
Consist Image.” Contamporary Legend. (2) 1999
Lennon, John and Malcolm Foley
2000 Dark Tourism. International Thomson Business Press.
Marx, Karl
1992 Capital. Penguin Classics.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara
1998 Destination Culture. University of California Press.
MacCannell, Dean
1976 The Tourist. University of California Press.
Yates, Frances A.
1966 The Art of Memory. University of Chicago Press.

Posted by Yo-Chi Li at 12:50 PM

The Soundwalks of Hasidic Williamsburg

The Hasidic community of Williamsburg is a stronghold against the forces of assimilation within the metropolis of New York City. Started by ultra-orthodox members of the Eastern European Jewish population after they came to the United States in 1945, the Williamsburg Hasidim has managed to create a self-sustaining and flourishing community. This community recreates many aspects of their Eastern European homeland, in terms of dress, customs, etc. Analyzing the soundwalks both for women and men of Hasidic Williamsburg, the film Divan (2003) by Pearl Gluck, and interviewing Pearl Gluck, I will explore how the soundwalks create an experiential tourist production. How is this tourist production created and how does it functions within a “closed,” or “insular” community? How do you make a tour for “outsiders” when the outsider/insider distinction in actively enforced by the community? How is the soundwalk format helpful (or not) in providing an experiential understanding of this insular community? In addition, I will explore the differences between the male and female soundwalks and how these differences reflect the separate roles for men and women within the Hasidic community. In order to bound my research I will choose one of these two themes to focus on, insider/outside, or gender, depending on what I discover.

In terms of documenting and analyzing the site I will first go to Williamsburg at a time when many people in the community will be out, for example a Saturday morning before synagogue. I will walk around neighborhood getting a feel for different sections. I will take notice and record my visceral reactions to the site: how to I feel in the neighborhood? Am I drawn to certain areas? What strikes me? Surprises me? To capture the experience I will use a small microphone, worn discretely, to record words or images, “memory triggers,” that will allow me to remember my experience. After getting an intuitive feelings for the area, I will do the soundwalk for women and the soundwalk for men. I will analyze the particular construction of this walk in the context of experiential tourism and soundwalks in particular.

Bruner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s framework for analyzing a site in Culture on Tour of the Mayers Ranch Massai Production will be helpful for analyzing the soundwalk within the context of Hasidic Williamsburg. What narrative is being created? What historical context is it framed in? How is the Hasidic community framed within the larger community of Williamsburg?

Watching Divan, I was struck by its humor and self-reflexive tone. Was the tone necessary to provide a protective layer for Pearl in the precarious position she was in between these two worlds? It will be interesting to see whether the female soundwalk has a similar tone. In the examples of “progressive tourism” we have looked at -- Bruner in Culture on Tour, Lippard in On the Beaten Track and Cardiff’s Central Park walk -- tone and a recognition that the boundaries between the tourist and the tourist attraction are more malleable that at first glance have been key elements. Using Divan as an example of progressive tourism, or progressive travelogue, I will explore how it compares with the soundwalk in terms of its self-reflexive qualities and malleability of narrative. Bruner’s “The role of narrative in tourism” will provide a helpful lens to examine narrative construction.

I will interview Pearl Gluck; Barbara Truesdell’s “Oral History Techniques” and Willa Baum’s “Tips for Interviews” will be helpful for how to prepare, conduct and process the interview. In my interview with Pearl, I will explore what experience she wanted to give the listener and how she dealt with the questions of insider/outsider and gender. Maybe I will also interview a man that used to live in the Hasidic community and does not anymore, or the man who narrates the men’s tour, Joseph Piekarski.

It is important that I keep my project bounded and to that end I will focus on either the insider/outsider or the gender question. After I walk around Williamsburg this week and do the soundwalks then I will have a clearer idea of exactly how I want to focus by research. I am in email correspondence with Pearl; she is excited about the project and has forwarded my email to the soundwalk people about being a beta-tester.

On the one hand, I am Jewish so I have a certain amount of access to and a background in Judaism, on the other hand my knowledge is not as extensive as some and therefore I can augment my knowledge as need be as my project progresses.

Working bibliography
Methodology
Sklar, Deidre. “Can Bodylore Be Brought to Its Senses?” The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 107, No. 423, Bodylore (Winter, 1994), 9-22.
Using embodied knowledge to conduct research

Bruner, Edward M. 2005 The Role of Narrative in Tourism unpublished conference paper.
Bruner, Edward M. 2004 Culture on Tour: ethnographies of travel. Chicago : University of Chicago Press
Helpful for research methodology and the use of narrative

Experiential tourism/soundwalks
Hildegard, Westerkamp. “Soundwalking” Sound Heritage, Vol. III Number 4, Victoria, B.C. 1974, revised 2001
http://cec.concordia.ca/econtact/Soundwalk/Soundwalking.htm
provides an overview of soundwalks, including how to make your own and is helpful to inform how soundwalks are constructed
Egoyan, Atom. 2002. Janet Cardiff. Bomb Magazine (spring).
Biagioli, Monica. 2000. Janet Cardiff: The missing voice (Case Study B: An Audio Walk). ArtFocus 68 (spring). -- Both articles deal with Cardiff’s work and will inform my analysis of the soundwalks

Hasidic Community of Williamsburg
Poll, Solomon. The Hasidic Community of Williamsburg
Kranzler, George. Hasidic Williamsburg: A Contemporary American Hasidic Community.
Kranzler, George. The Face of Faith; An American Hassidic Community.
These books will provide background knowledge about the Hasidic community.

Harris, Liz. Holy Days: The World of a Hasidic Family
This book will give me some background knowledge about the Hasidic world. It will also be interesting to see what her tone and narrative is as a non-Hasidic woman.

Photography of Irving Herzberg (1915-1992)
Photographed Hasidic Williamsburg community, question of representation

Zakutinsky, Rivika and Yaffa Leba. Around Sarah’s Table.
10 Hasidic women’s stories -- helpful in my exploration of gender

Posted by Sarah Zoogman at 12:47 PM

Siobhan's research proposal: Slavery in New York

For most of its history, New York has been the largest most diverse, and most economically ambitious city in the nation. No place on earth has welcomed human enterprise more warmly. New York was also, paradoxically, the capital for American slavery for more than two centuries. In October, 2005, The New York-Historical Society begins an unprecedented two year exploration of this largely unknown chapter of the city’s history. http://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/tour_galleries.htm

Slavery in New York, is the first of two exhibitions spanning from the 1600’s to 1827 when slavery was legally abolished in New York State. This exhibit focuses on the rediscovery of the collective and personal experiences of descendents of the African Diaspora. I will begin this project by first visiting the exhibit, not as a researcher but simply as an African American visitor interested in seeing such an interesting display. After this initial visit I will record general observations of what my experience was like. Upon the second and consecutive visits I will begin to analyze and record the exhibit. In Destination Culture the chapter on Ellis Island, Plymouth, and Secrets of Encounters gives me a great example of how to analyze an exhibit. I will be looking at factors such as space, narratives, the way materials are installed, the way the visitors are dressed, etc. I find that observation and experience are the basis of my project, much of which is incorporated into my research questions.

(R1) How did the exhibition come to be?
(R2) What was the process of creating it? For this question I would like to explore the input of communities, controversies, and debates.
(R3) Who designed the exhibit? What plans of the designers were not used? What were the designer’s instructions on creating the exhibit?
(R4) How do the creators of the exhibit understand their audience?
(R5) What are some current events (like hurricane Katrina) that shape the way the exhibit is perceived?
(R5)What is the press coverage saying concerning the exhibit (ie: NY Times, African American Press)?

These questions will guide my research and my overall analysis of the exhibit. I am looking at this exhibit as a kind of theater performance, and I found that Mike Pearson gave some objectives in theater archaeology that are explicit in my research. One of the objectives of theater archaeology is finding useful ways of describing what is going on in a performance. I attempt to do this in the initial observation process when I visit the exhibit as an interested member of the community. The second objective incorporated in my research is to achieve a synthesis of the narratives of the watchers and the watched. The watchers are basically everybody including myself. They are the press, the visitors, the guards, the community, and even the creators. I feel the watched will only pertain to those people visiting the exhibit. What narratives come from their viewing from those who are viewing them? I think this is an interesting aspect to explore.

Site and context, of course, are an integral part of my research. Site is defined as a locality with limited boundaries. The New-York Historical Society is located at 170 Central Park West. I have not yet visited the museum, but I am sure, tantamount to any other museums, that there are parts of it which cannot be explored, or parts that are prohibited for visitors to go (a place where only staff are allowed) that make the site a limited boundary. I think a confined space to explore something like slavery is ideal for my project. It pushes the audience to confront a phenomenon that most people, black and white alike, do not wish to explore. I find that most people either want to be alone or in a spacious setting when confronting the atrocity of slavery so their emotions, discontent, or contentment can be expressed freely without others noticing. Being in such an enclosed space pushes a level of discomfort for the performed and the performed to, which could be interesting for me to study.

Context is seen as the political or social setting of a performance. I will be looking at both. The political aspect will be incorporated when I start looking at issues like hurricane Katrina and its relevance to the Slavery exhibition, what the press is saying concerning the exhibit as well as what the community is saying. Slavery has always been a hot political topic that most people try to avoid when in “mixed” company, and I think it would be beneficial to the research of my project. The social setting of course is explicitly inherent in my research questions. It will begin with what the visitor experience is like. Do people go to the exhibit with friends, family, or “mixed” company? How does this setting change the dynamics of such groups? Do people general go with people of a similar cultural, racial, or ethnic background? All of these will determine the social setting of the exhibit.

In conclusion, I would like to say that I do not just consider this a research project, but also an oral history project. I will be collecting many stories from everyone directly and indirectly involved in this project. It is my hope that this project will contribute to some body of literature in history, oral history, performance studies, or a range of many other disciplines where slavery in New York has never been explored. I use the term explore quite often because that is the way in which I am approaching this project. It is completely exploration, and upon the ending of this exploration, I will have hoped to contribute to a field currently undiscovered.

Bibliography

Apel, Dora. 2004. Imagery of Lynching, Black Men, White Women, and the Mob. Rutgers University Press.

Baum, Willa. Tips for Interviewers. http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/resources/rohotips.html

Hartman, Saidiya. 1997. Scenes of Subjection. Oxford University Press.

Kirshenblatt-Giblett, Barbara. 1998. Destination Culture Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. The University of California Press.

New York Historical Society Website.
http://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/tour_galleries.htm

Pearson, Mike, and Julian Thomas. 1994. Theater/Archaeology. TDR 38, no. 4: 133-61.

Truesdell, Barbara. Oral History Techniques.

Posted by Siobhan Robinson at 11:51 AM

Hornbill festival

The Site
The Hornbill festival that has been taking place annually since the year 2000 in Kohima, the capital town of Nagaland (a state in the north-eastern tip of India bordering Myanmar). A 5-day festival instituted by the Government of Nagaland, it represents the sixteen tribes of Nagaland through display of architecture, handicrafts, dance, music and cuisine. Over the past five years the festival has progressively become bigger and more popular. After the first two years of using an outdoor stadium as the site, the festival has found its permanent ‘home’ on the side of a mountain, now called the festival complex. The latest press release from the Government on October 13 of this year announces plans to turn the Hornbill Festival into a “commercial hub with the aim of recreating a ‘Mini Nagaland’. A permanent shopping arcade to sell and promote indigenous produce with an adjacent food court, complete with all traditional delicacies is also in the offing.” http://www.kuknalim.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2076

Significance
Traditional festivals in Nagaland have never been inter-tribal, and always centered around harvesting, planting, nature cycles. The Hornbill festival for the first time brings all the tribes together to display, and perform their customs, for the purpose of boosting the economy, national identity, and ‘recovering’ past traditional forms of art and dance.

What else does this festival represent consciously or unconsciously? In what other ways can the festival be vital? Is the festival with an implicit intention of reversing the decline of traditional practices of dance and art actually an explicit instrument of alienation for the Nagas? A representation of alienation or of revitalization? Does the participation in a collective existence within the framing of the festival event, affect other forms of cultural expression outside of the festival boundaries? How does it contribute to historical revaluation? Is a new art form in the process of being shaped? With a christianized colonized transformed people, how is this ‘Naganess’ experienced, and is it fragile or taking root? Is ‘Naganess’ being made ‘fashionable’? Is the festival a ‘stabilizing’ agency amidst political turmoil, insurgency, disappearing past memory? Can it be the voice that gives expression to common ideals? Does it reveal the culture’s truest character or is it the opposite? What is the promise of the Hornbill festival to participants and ‘spectators’? Does it threaten to become a theme park? Is it a primordial experience or a contemporary experience given that the Nagas are popularly known for being headhunters? How does the atmosphere of the festival seep into the affect of the performance and thereby the affect of performance and practice outside the boundaries of the festival? And in turn how does affectual constructions transform a genre and how does expression itself restructure and reshape experience?

Methodology
As a methodological lens I would actually like to focus on a documentary film that was made of the ‘Hornbill festival’. I particularly want to focus on the sounds of the film – the background and the foreground sounds. The seemingly incongruous juxtapositioning of music in this film (background music of Swanee River and Camp Town Races) accompanying the actual sounds and traditional music of the festival, provides for me an entry point as well as an interesting commentary on ‘capturing the experience’ of the festival. Given that the festival is a reconstruction and a recontextualization of Naga life and culture, how is this encoded and narrated in what I want to think as the extended ‘site’ of the film itself? What else is the film consciously or unconsciously communicating through the conjunction of visual and auditory signals both non-verbal systems of communication?

Theoretical framework
I am interested in understanding culture and experience from a sensory perspective. When I study music I want to study it from the emotive, affectual point of view, likewise when I study festival I would like to look at it from the point of view of bodily, multi-sensory affectual experience. One of the many questions Lippard raised was just how feasible is it to separate tourist culture from ‘real’ embodied culture? I would like to examine the continuing threads of ‘feeling’ and experience in the constant metamorphosis of cultural practices.

Documentation and analysis
I will begin with documenting my own thoughts and reflections on the Hornbill festival (as I have indeed already started in the questions I have raised), its literature, pamphlets, advertising on websites and blogs such as this http://www.greatoutdoors.com/published/travel/international/journeytonagaland/, wherein this traveler calls the Hornbill festival the ‘great’ festival of “bizarre rituals” completely lost in his own exoticization of the Nagas ending off his blog with what he calls a return back to civilization leaving the headhunters behind! The more perspectives the better. Various articles of BKG that I just read gives me great ideas of how to approach an idea and articulate it clearly through rigorous research and perspectives, and importantly to see how tourism structures experience, to recognize culture transmitted as a series of dispositions, to recognize distinctions between desired and manifested outcomes, the various factors at play coupled with economic arrangements that creates ‘heritage’, the varying quality of experiences in events and performances, all the while never losing sight of my main thesis and question. I would like to follow Bruner’s example of looking at various perspectives, and importantly, look at tourist practices as social practice to be studied in its own right, and not something as a representation or metaphor. I would like to keep in mind the role of the narrative for the Hornbill festival itself and the film that I want to focus on. How does the narrative begin and end or continue outside of the borderzone of the festival. And in the process, what is being created materially, physically, as a community like Franklin and Crang suggest, and most importantly for my own research, what kinds of affectual sensory changes happen or are created. I believe my approach will be more interrogative and suggestive examining varying insights. Eventually as Csorda suggests I would attempt to understand the body as the existential ground of culture, not necessarily the Hornbill festival or the film. To understand this process more I will read more of Merleau-Ponty’s work to get a grasp on the body’s intentional grip on its physical and social environment, and the bodily orientations and sensations that direct experience. I am interested in the “unconscious” processes, as opposed to the conscious models that are intended to explain and perpetuate a phenomenon as seen in the festival. The film and the experience it engenders strikes a curious balance of the unconscious and the conscious processes. I want to explore Raymond Williams work and I expect it will guide me in looking at art and culture as always a formative process in a specific active present, and to perhaps look at the articulation of feeling and affect always emergent and primary in cultural transformations.
I have tried to put together a bibliography that I expect will help me understand culture from a sensual context, the interior dimensions of perception, as well as examine the potential for individual variations within a society. I am increasingly aware of the sensory value of perception and the sensuous interrelationship of mind-body-environment, and the affectual processes that are systems of learning, transmitting and storing knowledge. I want to be aware at the same time of what kinds of sensory awareness are privileged in the competing layers of conscious and unconscious experience at a time when Nagas want to think globally and act locally.

Interviews
I will interview the film maker Temjen, and ask him about his intentions in the film making and the background music, the distribution of his films availability etc. I will also interview other Nagas in Nagaland about their experience of the festival, their reaction to the film (via telephone, email or skype). I would also like to interview a couple of people here in NYC to see what they think about the film after giving them a background of what the festival is about. They would probably be fellow grad students.

Difficulties
Most of my interviews will be long-distance.
I do not have first-hand experience of the festival. I am relying on secondary sources.

The main thesis.
How is tourism reshaping a Naga’s experience of being Naga - the shifting sensibilities towards an ever-forming feelingful generation.

Working Bibliography
Bruner, Edward M. 2004. Culture on tour: ethnographies of travel. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.

Csordas, Thomas J. 1993. Somatic Modes of Attention. Cultural Anthropology 8, no. 2: 135-56

Geertz, Clifford. 1973. Thick description. The interpretation of cultures: selected essays. 3-30. New York: Basic Books.

Howes, David, ed. 2005. Empire of the senses: the sensual culture reader. Oxford, New York : Berg

Hufford, Mary. 1994. Conserving Culture. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Katz, Jack. 2001. From how to why: On luminous description and causal inference in ethnography (Part I). Ethnography 2, no. 4: 443-73.

Katz, Jack. 2002. From how to why: On luminous description and causal inference in ethnography (Part 2). Ethnography 3, no. 1: 63-90.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1998. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Los Angeles and Berkeley : University of California Press.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara; Goldberg, Harvey and Heilman, Samuel. The Israel Experience: Studies in Youth Travel and Jewish Identity (Jerusalem: Studio Kavgraph, 2002).

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. Sounds of Sensibility. Judaism; Winter 1998; 47, 1; Research library page 41.

Lanfant, Marie-Francoise. Allock, John B., and Bruner, Edward M. 1995. International Tourism; identity and change. London: Sage Publications Ltd.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1963. The Structure of Behavior. Boston: Beacon Press.

Pearson, Mike, and Julian Thomas. 1994. Theatre/Archaeology. TDR 38, no. 4: 133-61.

Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Turner, Victor W. and Bruner, Edward M. 1986. The Anthropology of Experience. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Posted by Senti Toy at 11:22 AM

Pier 21: Canada's Immigration Museum

Often billed as “Canada’s Ellis Island”, Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is an Immigration museum housed in the “last standing immigration shed” in the country. Between the years of 1928 and 1971, the immigration shed processed over a million immigrants who arrived in Canada by boat. After plane travel became widely available, Halifax (a port city) was no longer a hub for immigration and the shed was defunct. Until 1999, Pier 21 was basically an abandoned building, reportedly overrun with rats and disintegrating, like many buildings along this part of the Halifax waterfront. The waterfront is now being developed at an increasing rate, and the ‘restoration’ of Pier 21 6 years ago was an early part of this development.

I visited Pier 21 several times last week to gather data for this project. I experienced the museum, as suggested, first as a tourist myself; I followed a short guided tour and saw the ‘main attraction’, a multimedia theatrical film presentation housed in a mock-up of a ship at the back of the exhibition space. I wandered the exhibition. On subsequent visits I spent more time listening carefully to the audio features of the museum, which were both played over speakers near the ceiling, or stimulated by the push of a button. I later made my research motives known, and requested an interview with a staff member.

I recorded two interviews, keeping in mind the guidelines outlined by Barbara Truesdell and Willa Baum. I suppose the latest visit was the “recording” visit - I recorded interviews, gathered materials such as flyers and questionnaires, and took notes and photographs. I have made a valuable contact (Carrie-Ann Smith, manager of Research) who knows and has access to a lot of information about the history of Pier 21 the immigration shed, as well as the more recent history of Pier 21 the Immigration Museum, and the Strategic Plan for expanding Pier 21 in the next 2 years. She works in the resource center, where many people come to look up their names or the names of their family members in immigration records.

I have isolated four areas which I would like to investigate further in my research and thinking.

1. The history of the Pier 21 Museum in context: the larger development of the south-end waterfront, (related) increasing numbers of cruise ships, the “saving” of Pier 21 from disrepair, the debates about the displacement of artists whose studios had been housed in Pier 21 until the restoration began.

2. The construction of the Pier 21 visitor experience. Some interesting aspects I have isolated so far: the explicitly stated attempt to ‘recreate’ the immigrants experience, through the narrativization of the space with the use of audio, photo, video, models and paper sculptures; the ‘Pier 21 Alumni’ program (for visitors who actually came through Pier 21 between 1928 and 1971); activities to engage children (such as buying a ‘passport’ at the admissions desk and later getting stamped with a ‘landed immigrant’ stamp; and the hiring policy (a partnership with the government’s “Welcome Home to Canada” program) which serves as a job-training-and preparation program for young immigrants to Canada - the young international staff embody the link between immigration past and present. These are just a few experiential/dramaturgical aspects of the museum that may prove interesting for my paper, but I will not list them all here.

3. Pier 21 as a multi-purpose facility with competing uses and narratives. In addition to being a museum, the building rents space for special events such as weddings, proms, and conferences. As it is a non-profit society, this dual function of the space helps to sustain the museum. In addition to this, it is also a site for political leaders to speak. Because of its location, its structure, and its Canadian history content and relevance, it has served as a stage for both Prime Minister Paul Martin and President Bush. The many types of users makes for some interesting if surreal moments; you will have older visitors who came through Pier 21 (“Pier 21 alumni”), for whom visiting the space may be a very emotional experience; you will have a corporate party mingling in the area between the exhibit and the rental hall, and you will have tourists fresh off the cruise ship, who have wandered in from the cruise ship arrival facility, likely have a very limited amount of time before there bus tour or ship departs, and generally do not know that the museum is there, or what it commemorates. You may have all three at once - one day that I was there, my contemplation of the video testimonies of Pier 21 alumni was interrupted by a photographer who wanted to take a portrait of some people associated with the wedding party inside the train mock-up where the videos are played. I asked around to find out if the wedding party had any connection to the Pier’s immigration history, and staff either answered that they didn’t know, or that there was no connection. It seems that this type of multiple-use or flexible-use facility is becoming more common for the construction of new museums. Down the road, on the northerly end of the tourist portion of the waterfront, the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic has plans for expansion which includes a conference center - not only does the revenue from “unrelated” weddings or conferences help the museum, but visits from high profile politicians gives the site wide exposure and connects its own nation building message with current national and international politics.

4. The plans to expand Pier 21’s exhibits to include the “broader” Canadian immigration story - starting with the first “immigrants” to Canada, the indigenous people who crossed the Bering Strait thousands of years ago. In the Pier 21 Strategic Plan there is acknowledgment that the expansion of the idea of immigration presented in the museum must be carefully implemented so as not to disturb the integrity of the site AS the site of immigration to Canada between 1928 and 1971; I am very interested to gather more information (hopefully with the help of Carrie-Ann Smith) about the ideas and plans for how these two immigration narratives are to cohabitate.

I have already completed as much on-site research as will be possible (for this incarnation of the paper at least), and I hope to obtain more information through communication with Carrie-Ann, especially for the areas described above - the history of the museum, the multi-purpose space, and the plans for future expansion. She spend a month at the Ellis Island Museum researching, and I have to double check, but I suspect that it was research, at least in part, for the expansion plan (which among the other things I described, will include an expansion of the resource center). It may prove useful for me to visit the Ellis Island museum, not as a comparison per se, but because it may illuminate the ways in which Pier 21 has been modeled on this influential american site.

As you can see, I am a bit overwhelmed with information at the moment, so I’m still stuck somewhere between the ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions. It is also possible that the areas of investigation I describe above are too broad-ranging to fit them all in - but I hope to narrow the scope a bit as I continue working. In terms of a bibliography, much of what I have found so far that relates directly to the site are newspaper and magazine articles, which can be useful both for outlining the debates that formed prior to the restoration of the pier, and as exposure/promotional material (press releases, reviews, documentation of politicians’ visits etc.). As you will see, I still need to build out the theoretical side of my bibliography. I have found two dissertations on Pier 21, but this is the only academic writing which relates directly to it that I have found so far. It is unlikely that there will be much more, but I need to collect more writing that may not be directly on the topic of the site, but on topics such as history, memory and site, the narrative uses of space in museums, and multiple uses of space and competing narratives in contemporary museum production.

Working Bibliography

Pearson, Mike, and Julian Thomas. 1994. Theatre/Archaeology. TDR 38, no. 4: 133-61.
Pearson’s notion of second order performance may prove useful in this research, as a double archaeology is happening here; the museums’ restoration and reorganization of images and objects relating to the site’s original role as an immigration center, and my reorganization of the materials and experiences of visiting the museum.

Bruner, Edward M. 2005 The Role of Narrative in Tourism unpublished conference paper.
Bruner, Edward M. 2004 Culture on Tour: ethnographies of travel. Chicago : University of Chicago Press
Bruner’s examination of competing narratives at a site may help my investigation of narratives of multi-purpose space.

Zorde, Izida. 2001 Constructing National History at Pier 21 (an MA thesis at OISE, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada)

Vukov, Tamara. 2000 Imagining Canada, Imagining the Desirable Immigrant: Immigration Spectacle as Settler Postcolonialism. (an MA thesis in the Dept. of Communication Studies at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada)

These two MA theses may give me insights into possible methodological approaches to further investigating Pier 21 (beyond site research).

(Author unknown) The Pier 21 Strategic Plan 2003-2007 (a power point presentation for funders and partners of the Pier 21 society)

Various Newspaper articles:
(I am not sure how to do newspaper citations but will learn by next class but here are two examples)

Nickerson, Colin, from the Boston Blobe, August 13, 1999: Canada reopens gate to the past; refurbished Pier 21 celebrates nation’s immigrant history.

Adilman, Sid, from the Toronto Star, November 9,1996: ‘Canada’s Ellis Island’ gets powerful support.

Posted by Sarah Klein at 10:48 AM

Sepharad ’92 – Commemorate or Celebrate?

As it goes, in 1492, Columbus backed by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, set sail to discover America. In 1992, several communities marked the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ discoveries. While the Italian and Spanish communities of the world sought to celebrate Columbus’ accomplishments, many communities viewed the anniversary with a more somber tone , the world Jewish community being one of those groups. The year 1992 also marked the 500th anniversary of King Ferdinand’s and Queen Isabella’s Edict of Expulsion which forced the removal of 200,000 Jews from Spain. Spain, Israel and the United States joined cultural forces to create Sepharad ’92, an international collaboration of year long events designed to mark the 500th anniversary of Jewish expulsion from Spain.

Sepharad ‘92 was at once a festival, an exhibition, cousin to a world’s fair, a historical recreation, an international committee, and overall, a tourist production. If one were to plot the events and locations of Sepharad ’92 on a map, they would end up with a densely marked network of sites that all together form a tourist production of great magnitude. The programs of Sepharad ’92 included: educational events (curriculum design, student exchange, seminars, lectures, academic publications), political events (policy changes); performances (cooking events, concerts, multimedia shows, dance productions); exhibitions (photography, art, ethnography); movements (interfaith gatherings, tours, travel programs, processions, parades); and art production (manuscript facsimile, sculpture, commemorative poster). What was produced in sum out of the parts? By who was it produced? And to what larger function did the production of Sepharad ’92 fulfill?

Stated in press publications from 1987 through 1992, the objectives for Sepharad ‘92 were for Spain to publicly and politically reconcile with the Jewish community and for the Jewish community to commemorate painful communal memory through a celebration of Spanish Jewish heritage. The irony is evident immediately. Using the story of religious intolerance, forced conversions, subsequent expulsion, and probable death to celebrate cultural flourishing, or vice versa, is oddly paradoxical. Despite stated intentions, the byproduct of these commemoration/celebrations, was dissemination of a Sephardic Jewish image based primarily on exotic cultural characteristics, characteristics that offered a less banal version of Judaism to the masses, characteristics that emphasized cultural Judaism and not spiritual Judaism. Emphasis on art and freedom implies de-emphasis on scripture, discipline, and the appearance of a rigid religion that may not have been resonating with Jews of the time. Borrowing from Said’s Orientalism, I’d like to label this process by which Sephardic Jewry was presented as an exotic option to world Jewry as “Sephardiism.” Just as Said describes the Orient as having been created or orientalized, Sepharad was created or Sepharadiized. The image of Sepharad created in modernity, as portrayed in Sepharad ‘92 is one in which culture was used to create an other that might better solidify a Jewish community in need.

In Iberia & Beyond, Hispanic Jews between Cultures, a collection of essays published from the Proceedings of a Symposium designed to mark the 5th centennial, techniques for academic wrestling with Spanish Jewish history are revealed. Bernard Dov Cooperman, the editor, introduces the volume as a critical look at what is often portrayed as an overly optimistic period of history, coined the “Golden Age” of Jewry, a moment contemporaneous with a uniquely peaceful interfaith coexistence in Spain. As shown in this collection, academia works to chip away at this myth and demystify “this historiographical overstatement” (Dov Cooperman, 3). I use the academic output of the time as a springboard for contrast. Comparing the content of essays in such volumes, or the history, to the theme and feeling of the events of Sepharad ’92, or the heritage helps to reveal the myth making involved in the celebration. The marketing becomes clearer. The shallowness of Sephardic description becomes clearer. And the need for popular consumption of the myth becomes clearer. In Sepharad ’92 history was fabelized to invent heritage.

I have already put together how Sepharad ’92 was organized in practical terms, physical and economic. Five separate groups with individual plans for marking the occasion formed: The Spanish government sponsored Sepharad ‘92 led by Manuel Sassot; The Spanish Jewish community’s Sepharad ‘92 National Jewish Commission; the World Sephardi Federation’s International Jewish Committee Sepharad ‘92 headed by Mauricio Hatchwell Toledano; Israel, Europe and the United States’ International Jewish Forum formed by former Israeli President, Yitzhak Navon; and the Quincentennial Foundation of Istanbul (Kreimerman 28). How Sepharad ’92 meandered through a religious space, a cultural space, a political space is what I will set out to describe. What did a participant in a Sepharad ’92 event get from the event and how much of what was extracted was deliberate vs. incidental?

There are several possible ways for this project to unfold and it seems to me that I am sitting on multiple paper topics. I need help narrowing in on the topic and setting the argument within a context of the correct theoretical literature. I can either empirically gather information regarding the events and locations that took place, evaluating trends and making conclusions based on trends of exposure and reaction to exposures. Or, I can narrow in on a few key events that exemplify particular themes. One possible focus event is: "Golden Threads: A Tapestry of Sephardic Experience," the exhibition that began at the Smithsonian and traveled to Spain, Israel, Turkey, France, Canada, and S. America. This event exemplifies the use of art, object, and museum in constituting a cultural statement. It would exemplify the overly exotic emphasis employed in portraying Sephardim. And it would discuss the role of art versus ethnography in portraying Sephardi Jews. The second possible focus event would be the Sephardi Odyssey Cruise sponsored by the American Sephardi Federation. I would look at who this event was marketed to and what sites were included. I would relate this cruise to a larger trend of Jewish heritage tours in Spain analyzing what is included in tours and why, utilizing travel guides for analysis as well. In this focus, I would factor in several press publications from 1992 that detailed Jewish archeological sites of interest in Spain.

I am simultaneously interested in the worldwide events as a map, as well as the events on an individual basis. I want to explore the global impact of the events, yet the individual experienced Sepharad ’92 on an a site by site basis, probably more from a bubble perspective related to the local community than to the overall package I want to describe. How did the impact of the event change when perceived as an isolated site as opposed to the distanced global image I am looking at?

Potential interviews include leaders of the organizations involved, those involved in events on the local community level, and participants in the events. Perhaps ambitious, from the senior organizational level this could include: Manuel Sassot, Head of the Spanish organization Sepharad ’92; Mauricio Hatchwell Toledano, Head of International Jewish Committee for Sepharad '92; and Hal M Lewis, Chair of international committee for Sepharad ’92 and EVP of the American Sephardi Federation. I will attempt contact with people who had active roles in lower level planning and organization of events. I would like to speak to a planner of the Smithsonian exhibition; to Raphael Abecassis, the artist chosen to create the poster representing Sepharad ’92; and to Deborah Kaufman, co director of the San Francisco Jewish film festival that traveled to Madrid. Information I will gather will be about issues that came up in planning; goals that were trying to be achieved, and factors that determined the format for which things were designed. Crucial to the study is impressions from participants, how the events were digested. What did they take away as memory? What were the impressions of the participants/viewers?

As such an elaborate production, I will explore the relationship of Sepharad ’92 to two main theoretical arenas: a border zone of Tragic Tourism and Heritage/History Tourism; and the constitution of an exotic denominational (religion/cultural) option. References include:

1. Kershenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. Destination Culture, Tourism, Museums and Heritage. University of California Press: Berkeley, 1998

Since “representations are constitutive” (Kershenblatt-Gimblett, 80), what was Sepharad ‘92 able to constitute through its representation of Sephardic Jewry? What issues arose from how the Jewish community displayed themselves and to whom? What specific decisions were made regarding the form of the events and exhibitions based on agenda?

2. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Vintage Books: New York, 1979

Said describes “configurations of power” (Said, 5) involved in cultures and histories. Sepharad ‘92 may have been sponsored by Sephardic organizations but where it took place, who hosted the events and who viewed them were not dominantly Sephardic. What power configurations were at work in order to invest Sephardic culture with enough worth to commit international personal leisure time to?

3. MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York : Schocken Books, 1989

MacCannel argues, cultural productions establish a model worth copying or present new combinations of culture. In Sepharad ‘92, a model worth copying is established out of a new combination of elements; the pain of expulsion is combined with the pleasure of material culture, the historical blemish is combined with the cultural accomplishments in order to devise a new format for Sephardic culture that could better be appropriated and digested by the world’s Jewish community. How this new Sephardic picture was digested by multiple groups needs exploration. What were the affects on Israeli Jews, American Jews, Spanish Jews, Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and non Jews?

Additional references:

Anguilar, Manuel. Jewish Spain a Guide. Altalena: New York, 1984

Biederman, Patricia Ward. “Artist Uses Historic Year to Commemorate Sephardic Jews' Expulsion Columbus: Raphael Abecassis recount events in Spain, where a century of persecution culminated in forced conversion, exile or death in 1492.” Los Angeles Times 2Feb. 1992: 5

Chaim, Raphael. “Sepharad '92 Observations” Commentary 93:3 (1992:Mar.) 44

Cooperman, Bernard Dov. In Iberia & Beyond, Hispanic Jews between Cultures. University of Delaware Press: Newark, 1998

Hargrove, Cheryl M. “Celebrating the Quincentennial.” APT Bulletin 22, 3 (1990), 5-6

Shohat, Ella. “Rethinking Jews and Muslims: Quincentennial Reflections” Middle East Report 178 (1992:Sep./Oct.) 25

Shohat, Ella. "Sephardi in Israel: Zionism from the standpoint of its Jewish victims" Social Text 19/20 (1988:Fall) 1-35

Posted by Erin Madorsky at 10:22 AM

Producing Park Slope: A Case Study of Place-Making

The scene is set in Brooklyn, right outside my window, in fact. Park Slope, a physical space that can be described through geographical coordinates in relation to meridians and poles, a set of streets, parks, buildings and people that can be located on a map, but also a neighborhood, a community that is alive, a social being that is experienced daily by its present inhabitants, remembered by its former “natives”, traversed on the way to somewhere else by casual subway users, as well as visited and toured by curious strangers. This is what makes Park Slope a “place” and a collection of places all at once. It is a place that functions as a “locus of narratives,” historical and contemporary (Pearson and Thomas 1994: 152). It is discussed in the local press, inscribed in memory, debated on blogs and online forums, peppered with official and less official landmarks, trekked by locals and visitors during various walking and bus tours of culinary treats, historic sites and ethnic beats. It has maps, histories, many lives. It is loved, hated, envied, desired. It evokes multiple meanings and feelings for individuals and groups alike.

The borough itself, as well as several community based initiatives and non-profits working in the New York area have attempted to trace, or at least survey how Park Slope, one of many neighborhoods in Brooklyn, becomes a meaningful place. Some look to history, architecture, urban beauty, ethnic exoticism or esoteric lore, while others seek explanations within the fluid and nebulous realms of identity, memory, affect, and longing. Some function as money-making tourist productions, others as virtual paths in space and time, and others yet as activist databases. By documenting and analyzing these different projects that produce Park Slope, I hope to gain a better understanding of the various ways a place can be created, experienced, resignified, and recontextualized. I hope to detail the ways in which these productions “work”, what they do and how they do it. Important questions that I expect to touch upon, are: what places matter? Why do they matter? To whom do they matter? And hopefully what places don’t matter and why? In other words, by exploring several layers of narratives on Park Slope as a place, I hope to shed light on the different value systems of place, of history and of heritage, that function to recreate it as such in the eye of the beholder. I will briefly describe initiatives that I have selected in order to explore how Park Slope is experienced and described as a place.

The first initiative to mark Park Slope as a place seems to have happened during the early seventies when the Park Slope Historic District was created, a zone delimited on the map and physically marked with landmark signs that still stand proud on the sidewalks, providing information on buildings, neighborhood who’s whos, and general trivia. The signs are there to be glanced at during a Sunday walk, or can be followed in an ordered manner as guides to the district. A similar but different way of marking space through walking is provided by the many walking tours of Park Slope that are organized by companies such as Big Onion and New York Like a Native, where a guide takes walkers to the main sites while providing eclectic narratives about Park Slope as a place. More specialized tours include a New York Architecture tour with an online catalogue with photographs and architectural information of many of Park Slope’s buildings, and Exploring the Park Slope Religious Community, also an online tour of the multiple churches that have baptized Brooklyn as the “Borough of Churches.”

The internet seems to be an important way in which residents can express how they experience place, as in the Forgotten NY webpage where Kevin Walsh posts his personal memories, pathways and finds around the city, including a section called 5 Alive, about Park Slope’s Fifth Avenue that figures photographs, community history, and personal memory. Two other online projects stand out as interesting ways to look at how place is interpreted and experienced: Place Matters, a project co-produced by the Metropolitan Arts Society and Citylore; and PPS or Project for Public Space, a nation-wide non-profit. Both organizations focus on mapping space through alternative senses and value systems of place. Place Matters has created an online census as a tool for place preservation and revival in New York City, where anyone can nominate a place that matters to them or their community, document and propose ways of protecting it (according to this census, 9 places “matter” in Park Slope). Project for Public Space functions in a similar way, offering people a site where they can nominate “great” public spaces that build community. Such a nomination is considered a strategy that is generative, a form of place-making, but also a way to motivate preservation (Park Slope in its entirety has been nominated with a list of its important public spaces and sites).

In order to complete this project, the research methodology that I intend to follow is firstly that of my own experience of these different recontextualizations of Park Slope, using writing and photography as my mediums to record, describe, analyze and compare how each initiative creates a sense of place. Thus, I will aim to produce a “site report” in the sense discussed by Mike Pearson and Julian Thomas (1994: 150, 158). I will tour the neighborhood following the paths designed by the different productions, either through walking guided tours, ordered landmark signs, casual markings on the urban landscape, or virtual tours and printed maps. I would also like to interview both producers (tour operators and guides, people who run or work in the organizations, individuals who create webpages and virtual tours) and participants (neighbors, tourists, walkers, nominators), although I realize the first will be more accessible than the latter, since they are a larger sample, and require quite a greater deal of participant observation than this project allows for. Perhaps inviting colleagues, friends and other neighborhood acquaintances on these Park Slope adventures might be a way to remedy this difficulty. Finally, I hope to look at some of the documents that have been published on Park Slope as a place that matters, such as guidebooks, historic district maps, local media, etc.

I would also like to use this project as a case study to discuss some of the literature that exists on sense of place and local heritage, mostly in the fields of anthropology, geography, sociology and philosophy (see proposed bibliography). I am not familiar with this literature and would welcome any suggestions that anyone in the class would have on where else to look. My wider interests concern issues of local/national/global heritage and the importance of tourism in defining place in any of these frames, so if this does not make the project too wide in scope, I might look at some of the literature on global projects of heritage/place-making such as the UNESCO world heritage sites initiatives as a comparative model to the Park Slope projects.

Bibliography:
Park Slope Historic District Designation Report. City of New York, Parks, Recreation and
Cultural Affairs Administration, Landmarks Preservation Commission, 1973.
Benjamin, Walter. “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” in Reflections: Essays,
Afforsims, Autibiographical Writtings. New York: Schocken Books, 1978.
Çelik, Zeynep, Diane G. Favro, and Richard Ingersoll, eds. Streets: Critical Perspectives on
Public Space. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
De Certeau, Michel. “Spacial Stories” in The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley:
University of Claifornia Press, 1984.
Feld, Steven and Keith H. Brasso. ed. Senses of Place. Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1996.
Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson. “Beyond Culture: Space , Identity and the Politics of
Difference,” in Cultural Anthropology Vol. 7, n. 1, 1992.
Hayden, Dolores. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1995.
Hirsch, Eric and Michael O'Hanlon. The Anthropology of Landscape : Perspectives on
Place and Space. New York : Oxford University Press, 1995.
Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1994.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara “World Heritage and Cultural Economics” Forthcoming in
Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, edited by Ivan Karp and Corinne Kratz, with Gustavo Buntinx, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett,Ciraj Rassool, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto.
“ “Theorizing Heritage” in Ethnomusicology, Vol. 39, n.3, Autumn 1995.

Posted by Sandra Rozental at 9:48 AM

Attunement: The Ground Zero Memorial Soundwalk

Described the New York Times as a “funeral march for the World Trade Center, with stops along the way for eulogies,” the audio walking tour of Ground Zero is a 50-minute guided experience issued by the company Soundwalk. Soundwalk claims to “bring tourism to a new level” by appealing to the individual rather than the group by allowing the “non-tourist” to enter into the narrator’s mind through is voice. “For fifty minutes,” states the website, “one is immersed in a subreality of sounds, smells, and sights.” I am in interested in investigating these claims, especially the ones that propose to push conventional tourism to a new level via holistic bodily experience. Here, the question is fairly straightforward: what sort of “experience” (collective or individual) is the Ground Zero Memorial Soundwalk? Furthermore, as ongoing news reports suggest, the entire effort to rebuild the World Trade Center site is one plagued with political and social contestations. At the center of this national and international conflict is the pressing question pertaining to memory: how is this socially sanctified space to be remembered? Therefore, I am interested in how the soundwalk contributes to this process of consolidating or, possibly, fragmenting the memorial space. How are memories mediated, managed, and produced by the soundwalk? Lastly, along the lines of inquiry initiated by our discussion of “Her Long Black Hair,” I would like to investigate the soundwalk space as a “borderzone” of creativity that is conditioned by what we bring to it. If, as Lucy Lippard states, “the tourist experience is a kind of art form if it is… its own way of organizing the landscape and our sense of it,” can the soundwalk provide a “sensualized” space for a different kind of knowledge acquisition, one that is predicated on an intimate artistic experience?

Capturing the Experience: As the conventional experience of sightseeing turns into a kind of “place-sensing,” I anticipate that the work of phenomenology will become relevant to this element of my project. With this mode of place-sensing in mind, I will perform the soundwalk while using a method of thick description in noting and charting my own observances, thoughts, and feelings. This, of course, cannot be the “ethnography of one.” Therefore, I’d like to be able to “capture” the experience of others who have performed and participated in the walk. Pearson and Thomas’ notion of recording “observations which focus tightly and sensitively on particular conjunctions and instants” rather than seeking to construct a total narrative of a singular experience seems helpful here (12). Being attuned to the flow of sounds, sights, and environment in this way opens up the possibility of thinking of the soundwalk space as inherently creative and disruptive. (Incidentally, I have downloaded the recording and listened to a small part of it – I am reluctant to listen to it in full until I can take a trip down to the site. I am sure I will have a better sense of my entire project once I have performed the walk myself).

Documentation and Analysis: Here, the question of site mediation becomes relevant. I will look at the promotional literature for the soundwalk, as well as the downloadable text that was purchased from the soundwalk site. Most importantly, I will analyze the recording itself – how do sound and space merge? What are the sensual, emotional, and memorial effects of listening to actual cell phone calls saved by Verizon on the morning of September 11th of 2001? How is the story of the site being told, narrated, lived and relived and how is the past being retrieved in the present? In formulating a connection between archeology and theater, Pearson and Thomas note that every site generates multiple narratives; these narratives are synthesized in a second-order performance that reconstitutes and re-imagines the past in the present moment (14). The question, then, is how does the narrative of September 11th, 2001 replay and re-enter the present moment through the soundwalk? How is it retrieved and how are memories consolidated through sensing, listening, walking, and watching?

Interviews: All “significant” sites are somewhat sacralized by their human sensors (the ones moving through the site). I would like to conduct interviews with persons who have participated in the soundwalk. What draws these people to an audio-guided tour experience? And what draws them to ground zero in particular? More succinctly, I am interested in whether or not the soundwalk is perceived as a more “authentic” (immediate, moving, or “real”) tour of the World Trade Center site. I would also like to investigate National Public Radio's Lost and Found Sound project, directed by Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, who created the “Sonic Memorial Project” upon which the soundwalk was based. It is pertinent to get a sense of the original intentions of the makers of the soundwalk, where they receive funding, and how the project came into fruition.

Ephemera, Material Culture, Documents, etc.: My project – my reconstitution of the site and the soundwalk – will involve what Pearson and Thomas refer to as “deep maps,” those retrieval techniques that “combine geography and natural history along with lived history (20).” Though my “maps” won’t be incredibly deep, I do like this archeological idea as an organizing principle. In this vein, I will address the significance of the site, the making and remaking of the land, and the different interests converging on this “hallowed” ground, as one journalist called it. I will rely on recent news reporting to trace this narrative strand. A “touristic” device like the soundwalk memorial is all the more interesting considering the ways in which meanings are constantly being contested at ground zero.

Outline and … Any Suggestions? I am still a bit unclear as to how I would like to construct my project. On the one hand, I could start with the background of the site/walk, pose theoretical questions, move on to a description of the walk itself, and interpret and analyze the site/walk. On the other hand, I am interested in staging my own report as a performative piece of writing, one that brings a poetics and a sensitivity to the phenomenon at hand. In writing about the soundwalk, I am converting sounds and experience into words and typeface – my perspective of the site and narrative I tell about it is but another voice vying for place on the table of traces, artifacts, and evidence. I’d like to follow Pearson and Thomas’ lead and stay true to the idea of creative (yet thorough) reconstruction.

Lastly, does anyone know Paul Auster? : ) As I am continuing to formulate and flesh out my project, I would welcome any suggestions. Particularly, I would like to acquire a better understanding of “dark” tourism, audibility/orality, and phenomenological aspects pertaining to being-in-the-world through the immediate senses. It also seems that upcoming course literature will become relevant to my inquiry. Basically, I am in need of more theoretical grounding and I am searching for other case studies that parallel mine.

Working Bibliography

Boxer, Sarah. “An Audio Walking Tour of the World Trade Center, With Stops for Eulogies.” New York Times. 9/11/04.

Casey, Edward. Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does it Mean to be in the Place-World? Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 91(4), 2001.

Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1989.

Debord, Guy. "Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.” Les Lèvres Nues #6 (September 1955).

Fine, Elizabeth and Jean Haskell Speer. 1985. Tour guide performances as sight sacralization. Annals of Tourism Research 12, no. 1:73-95.

Howes, David. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford and New York: Berg. 2004

Lippard, Lucy R. 1999. On the beaten track tourism, art, and place. New York: New Press.

MacCannell, Dean. 1989. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken Books

Scott, Joan. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17.4 (Summer, 1991): 773-797.

Pearson, Mike, and Michael Shanks. 2001. Theatre/archaeology disciplinary dialogues. London, New York : Routledge

Posted by Brynn Noelle Saito at 1:53 AM

Hot-dogs? Sunbathing? Holocaust?

Case Study: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, Germany.

Historically, most memorials have been asked to perform one main task: perpetuate the memory of those who died in a tragic event, whether a war, an accident or a natural disaster, whether the victims were soldiers or civilians. Holocaust memorials often include an educational dimension and carry the message “never again” [will such a tragedy happen], and may act as a surrogate cemetery to mourn the victims whose bodies were never recovered.
Numerous Holocaust memorials exist all over the world, and the most recent one was built in the land of the perpetrators, Germany. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by American star architect Peter Eisenman and unveiled in May 2005, is the first national monument dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust in Germany, and is located in the heart of Berlin, a stone-throw away from the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate, Unter den Linden, and Western embassies. Since its opening to the public, it looks like this memorial is not only performing memory and serving as an educational site, but has been assigned new functions by the hundreds of visitors who come daily: a playground, a meeting place, a tourism attraction, a recreation area, and a political statement. Can a memorial handle so many different tasks? Are some conflicting with others, and how? How is the performance of memory transformed by the other performances taking place on this very site? Should the activities unfolding at a public Holocaust memorial be regulated, and how? As a concluding question, we will see if Eisenman’s design succeeds (or fails) at performing old and new functions, and how his memorial differs from other Holocaust memorials that preceded it.

Method:
James Young’s work on Holocaust memorials serves as a good model of analysis for a start, but his literary and historical approach needs to be supplemented by other perspectives, such as tourism studies, postmodern architecture, urban studies, and performance studies. My paper will also benefit from extensive fieldwork that I conducted last May in the few days before, during and after the unveiling of the memorial (observation, interviews, visits of local Holocaust memorials in Berlin, collection of press clips and monitoring of German press online on this subject). I have also collected almost every article and book in English and German that examines this memorial but that, to my relief, follow traditional patterns of analysis such as history, art history, I hope to use this paper as a laboratory experience for my larger dissertation project, and take the opportunity to synthesize notes, theory, and empirical research: focusing on one site in order to explore all its dimensions, complexities and contradictions will hopefully allow me to create a model of analysis for other contemporary memorials that deal with the delicate issue of absent bodies and, at the same time, are trying to fulfill a number of social, psychological, political and esthetic functions. Whether they are successful or not remains the essential question I will try to answer.
While memorials (and especially Holocaust monuments) have been extensively analyzed, I hope to offer a different and original perspective to the field with a performance studies approach, which borrows from various disciplines, combines theory and fieldwork and dares juxtapose, unpack and confront findings that can inform a known site with a fresh look. At the same time, I think that performance studies could benefit from research traditionally examined by other disciplines (in this case history, art history or trauma studies), and also be enriched by the study of hybrid sites and events that stand at the intersection of the mundane and the solemn, the secular and the religious, the public and the private.

Outline:
1. Introduction: brief survey of existing Holocaust memorials in Berlin and brief history of the process that led to the Eisenman memorial

2. Eisenman Memorial: How is it different from other Holocaust memorials? (architecture, location, national dimension, information center, etc.)

3. What does it intend to do? (Eisenman’s vision, political statements, press releases, rules, monument v./and information center)

4. What does it actually do? (violation of rules; tourism; entertainment; public discourse, Jewish discourse)

5. Confronting intention and reality: dilemmas and possibilities

6. Conclusion: Is the memorial a success or a failure, and if partially so, how?

Bibliography:
• Georges Bensoussan: Auschwitz en Héritage? Du bon usage de la mémoire. Paris: Mille et Une Nuits, 1998.

• Caroline Gay: “The Politics of Cultural Remembrance: The Holocaust Memorial Monument in Berlin”. International Journal of Cultural Policy, vol. 9 (2), 2003, p. 153-166

• Shelley Hornstein: “Grounds for Mediation: The Marked Field and Eisenman’s Paths in the Present” in: Peter Eisenman, Two Projects, Catalogue to the exhibition at Temple gallery/Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, 2002.

• Rudy Koshar: From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870-1990. Berkeley, University of California Press: 2000.

• Claus Leggewie & Erik Meyer: “Ein Ort, an den man gerne geht”: Das Holocaust-Manhmal und die deutsche Geschichtspolitik nach 1989. Munich: Hanser, 2005.

• John Lennon & Malcolm Foley: Dark Tourism. London: Continuum: 2001.

• Materials on the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Berlin: Nicolai, 2005.

• Pierre Nora: “Entre Mémoire et Histoire,” and “L’Ère de la Commémoration,” in: Les Lieux de Mémoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. p.23-43, and 4687-4719.

• Oren Baruch Stier: Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust. Amherst & Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003.

• Karen Till: The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

• Gérard Wajcman: L’Objet du siècle. Paris: Verdier, 1998.

• Caroline Wiedmer: The Claims of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Germany and France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

• James E. Young: The Texture of Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

• http://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/

Posted by Brigitte Sion at 12:40 AM

October 15, 2005

Michelle Brown: Seward Park Urban Renewal Area

Seward Park, located on the Lower East Side, contains the largest city-owned underdeveloped site in Manhattan south of 96 St. Plans for Seward Park affordable housing have been abandoned, ceasing the Economic Development Corporation and the Housing Preservation Department’s construction of 400,000 square feet of affordable housing and 400,000 square feet of commercial space in the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area. The proposal includes 400 units of housing for low-income tenants earning approximately $20,000 a year and middle-income tenants earning between $40,000 and $80,000 a year. The city’s proposal also included a 66,000 square feet community facility for the Seward Park Urban Renewal site between Grand and Delancey Streets.

The Downtown Express newspaper’s reporter Brenda Kaysen attributed the failure of the execution of the proposal, first presented in November of 2003, to a lack of community consensus and support. She also reported that Mayor Blumberg is not the first mayor to fail in his attempt in developing this site, which is a part of the mayor’s commitment to residential development.

Frustration over affordable housing in Seward Park dates as far back as 1967, when 2,000 apartments in the renewal area were demolished. Most of the displaced tenants at this time in this area were low-income persons. They were promised in writing that they could return upon the building of new housing, however, after three decades, only a portion of the site has been rebuilt with affordable housing. Five remaining vacant sites in the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area are used for parking. As of yet the city has not unveiled an alternative to the mayor’s latest proposal.

Upon analysis of Mayor Blumberg’s proposal, I propose a mixing of both worlds. Why not include residential development as well as commercial development for the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area? This would enable investors and others in the economic market to tour the site and propose new commercial developments. This is reflective of advocacy tourism. At the heart of my proposal is breathing economic life back into the Seward Park area so that even individuals in the lowest-income bracket, $15,000 a year, will be helped. This proposal will engender the evolution of Seward Park into a mini-tourist attraction complete with new housing, unique restaurants and shops.

The biggest achievement, however, will be the gateway this proposal attempts to open up with employment or job opportunities for the current residents, primarily low-income persons in this area. This approach will resemble that of interpretive anthropology, making answers available that others have given (Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture). This new proposal will also include construction of a website, which will present before and potential after pictures of the new Seward Park area. I would also model my posters after posters used for Mayor Blumberg’s proposal in 2003, and ultimately model this proposal after Blumberg’s with the addition of commercial development.

In order to have a successful adoption of the proposal, community support and cooperation is crucial. Lack of community support was reported to be the demise of Blumberg’s proposal. In fact, critics from both ends voiced concerns. Those in favor of the low-income housing expressed that Mayor Blumberg’s plan did not do enough. Downtown Express reporter Ronda Kaysen documented Margaret Hughes, the executive director of Good Old Lower East Side, a neighborhood housing and preservation organization, as saying, “ Overall, Mayor Blumberg’s plan [for affordable housing] has not reached down into the lowest income bracket (Volume 17, Issue 32). In this same issue, Councilmember Margarita Lopez stated, “What is needed is a mixed-use plan for low- and middle-income housing interspersed with retail development. We need to be very smart about how we develop that site.” Others, like resident William Rockwell, did not support the proposal or the city’s plan for low-income housing, because he felt that “ We already have a huge amount of low-income housing. Without market rate, we will never have proper development that other neighborhoods have” (Downtown Express, Volume 16). Following suit, a portion of residents feared that the low-income housing would “ghettoize” the neighborhood.

I would like to interview Councilmember Lopez and the reporters of both Volumes of the Downtown Express from 2003. Ideally, I would interview Mayor Blumberg, but I believe that this might be difficult to do. The individuals sited in this proposal would make for nice interviews. I anticipate difficulty not only with getting an interview with Blumberg, but also with the focus of this proposal.

Although my outline is tentative and the proposal rough, I do not want to ‘bite off more than I can chew.” This project must be something I can engage in for a short period of time. I will incorporate the interview tips and even conduct my interviews in such a way to reflect a narrative. I admit that I need help in my hypothesis for this project proposal and defining a concrete tourist angle in my approach for the proposal.

Therefore, I will utilize the article by Barbara Truesdell on Oral History Techniques, the website for ROHO (Regional Oral History Office) at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, and I still need help in finding theoretical literature on advocacy tourism. Overall, this project proposal is embedded with huge implications for the future of the Seward Park area. I desire to be knowledgeable of its history, present, and future. I particularly want to focus my attention on the residents, being that I am an outsider. I believe that many of them, especially those in the housing projects in the area, have powerful stories to tell. I have a passion for capturing or bringing to light, their voice. I will use the utmost precautions to have a productive research project when entering areas that I am not very familiar with.

Outline

I. Introduction
A. Seward Park housing plan
1. Failed attempt/Reasons for failure
2. Past of Seward Park’s housing and commercial development
II. Best of both worlds: Analysis of Proposal for Development
B. Advocacy Tourism/Hypothesis for Developed Site
1. Residential Development
2. Commercial Development
3. Gathering Evidence/Documenting the Development of Site
III. Obstacles that hinder development of site
C. Testimonials/Experiences
1. Residents
2. Government
IV. Interviews
V. Anticipated Difficulties
D. Previous studies/Theoretical Literature
VI. Conclusion

Posted by Michelle Brown at 11:54 PM

Lisa's Proposal: Washington Square Park

Washington Square Park is a sight of intangible cultural heritage that has sparked recent debates over its planned $16 million restoration and reconstruction. While plans are close to finalization, the controversy has already lasted over two years (with some sources carrying the controversy back forty years). What are the various competing values that Washington Square Park holds and how are those values being negotiated in the planning phases of the renovation? These questions will be the focus of my research, however I also plan to examine how the values of the park have changed over the years, paying particular attention to the observations recorded by Sally Harrison-Pepper from the years 1980-1984. For this later area of research, I plan to replicate the area studies done by Harrison-Pepper, as well as interviewing park residents to find out the different usages of the park.

Currently, the major changes to the architecture of the park are being negotiated between Community Board 2 and George Vellonakis, the Parks Department landscape architect in charge of the renovation project.Numerous coalitions have formed to voice their opinion on park changes. I contacted Jonathan Greenberg of the Open Washington Square Park Coalition, who feels that there is no need for a major renovation of the park.“What’s wrong with the existing design of the park?” he asks.

George Vellonakis, however, feels that there are a number of problems that need to be fixed. These problems, he says, are addressed in his plans. “It hasn’t been repaired or renovated in 40 years, so there’s so much that needs to be done,” Vellonakis said. Yet, many feel that changes to the park are merely arbitrary and capricious. I hope to continue my interview with Mr. Vellonakis on another day when he is less indisposed due to the flooding problems of the past week.

My primary modes of investigation will involve interviews with various people connected to the controversy. I plan to speak with more representatives from the various coalitions, including The Mounds People (in favor of saving the concrete mounds found in the southwest section of the park), as well as those concerned about the dog walks and playgrounds.

In addition, I want to interview Luther Harris, park historian and primary spokesperson for The Emergency Coalition Organization to Save Washington Square Park. This group filed a lawsuit, which has since been dropped, to stop the renovation of the park. In a newspaper interview Luther Harris said, “The general opposition is based on the fact that what Parks is trying to do is impose a Disneyfied design that has about as much to do with Greenwich Village as Wal-Mart” qtd. in Montefinise A8). Hopefully I will be able to make necessary contacts at the monthly Community Board Meeting that deals with Washington Square Park matters.

Beyond exploring the needs that each interviewee wants the park to fulfill, I will also examine how the current park fits those needs, and where those needs fall short. In addition, I will look at the various iterations of the proposed designs. In looking at the numerous changes in plans for Washington Square Park, I hope to discover the factors that caused the inclusion and/or deletion of various park elements.

While it will be tough to work out the chronology of the plans made, I should be able to come up with a rough idea using newspaper articles and Community Board 2 meeting minutes before further contacting the architect.

History cannot be divorced from this project since controversy is not a stranger to Washington Square Park. Throughout its history, the space has gone through various iterations, including a potter’s field, public hanging site, and parade ground, before it officially became a park in 1827. More importantly, perhaps, is its history of successful community resistance. In the 1950s, the community stopped the plan, by Robert Moses, to direct more car traffic through the arch. In the 1960s, community efforts closed the arch completely to any further traffic by denying bus route access into the square. Also, in the 1970s, there was a bid by the Parks Department to install more fencing, but this bid was eventually defeated. The controversy concerning the fence is still a hot topic today, as public outcry has already prevented gates that would allow the park to be locked, and the Parks Department is still receiving complaints about the fence that will be added to surround the perimeter of the park.

Parks are frequent sources of contention within New York City. Looking at the history of city parks, one can find recurring subjects of dispute. These hot spots include dealing with the ownership, occupancy and use of private and public space, the control of individual behavior, and the role of regulatory authorities like the police and parks department. Underlying the skirmishes that take place are deep cleavages of personal and social morality, the meaning of community, the nature and power of rights, and the proper role of the state. While my project will not be so wide in scope as to cover all of these areas, I feel that examining the process of a park in the midst of massive changes will provide a kind of perspective that is needed when dealing with contested sites.

Working Annotated Bibliography

Abu-Lughod, Janet. From Urban Village to East Village: The Battle for New York’s Lower East Side. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1994. Deals with Tompkins Square Park controversy, and provides some insight into the roles that parks in the East Village have served throughout history.

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. His concept of the local authority as well as limiting access to the
local authority may prove useful for dealing with movement within the park, and the power of the community in park affairs.

Harris, Luther. Around Washington Square: An Illustrated History of Greenwich Village. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Contains the history of Washington Square Park and is written by one of the coalition leaders.

Harrison-Pepper, Sally. Drawing a Circle in the Square : Street Performing in New York's Washington Square Park. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. She has a detailed study of how Washington Square Park was used during the 1980s.

Montefinise, Angela. “City’s ‘Arch’ Foes; Group Sues to Block Washington Square Park.” New York Post 24 July 2005, A8. Just one of a million useful articles which together may provide an evolutionary chart to the controversy.

Posted by Lisa Reinke at 9:01 PM

Scott's Project Proposal: Lower East Side Tenement Museum

Lower East Side Tenement Museum's: The Confino Family Apartment, located in an historic tenement building at 97 Orchard Street.

The 1 hour apartment tour, described as a “living history,” is based on a Sephardic-Jewish family from Kastoria who immigrated to the U.S. in 1913. A costumed interpreter performs the historical character of teenage Victoria Confino. She welcomes museum visitors as if they are recently arrived immigrants, teaching them how to adapt to America. The production is interactive with the opportunity to touch items in the apartment, dress in period clothing, and dance to period music. The tour ends with an optional hour discussion of experience in a nearby kitchen with snacks.

Capturing the Experience

I plan to visit the site multiple times, first as a regular museum patron in order to gain an overall organic and personal response to the experience. I will then return with colleagues from our Tourist Productions seminar where I will be able to engage in a more reflexive analysis (i.e. looking at myself and others experiencing the production.) Following the tour there is a post-tour kitchen conversation—which in itself could be viewed as a production—that I will utilize to gain insight into others’ reported experiences of the Confino tour. In addition to these conversations I will solicit individual interviews with colleagues and/or friends who are willing to share their thoughts and experiences with the production. I will also request an interview from the museum employee or employees who perform the role of Victoria. Finally, I will attempt to contact the director/curator/supervisor of the production in order to obtain data regarding the museum’s “living history” philosophy, educational and other goals of the production, and preparation for and maintenance of the site.

I have read over the guidelines by Truesdell and Baum regarding interviewing, and plan to prepare questions as well as provide general topics of discussion to interviewees before the meeting. I think that I will wait until I first tour the site before compiling the list.

Documentation and analysis

Drawing from the Theater/Archeology proposal by Mike Person, I will attempt to recognize and record the site by categorization or “track laying” with the delineated concepts of space, time, pattern, and detail. I will attempt to do this in a systematic manner as opposed to looking for data through a lens of site analysis. This data will then be available for analysis through various modes: Schechner’s Restoration of Behavior and Environmental Theater, Kirby’s Continuum of Acting, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s Objects of Enthnography, the art of mimesis, and concepts of exhibition of the fragment in situ, MacCannell’s ideas of authenticity in response to Goffman’s concept of Backstage/Front stage, Goffman’s performance of everyday life, and finally Bruner’s use of narrative in constructing meaning and experience in tourist productions. This list contains, of course, too many different approaches to flesh out in one paper. However, I will wait until I first experience the production and begin collecting data before deciding which modes to emphasize.

In Between Theater and Anthropology Schechner discusses a frame of analysis toward performance where “strips of behavior” can be considered independent of the casual systems that brought them into existence. In this manner, human action can be studied in a “processual” manner and describe emergent behavior as developing out of rehearsal. This will be useful in viewing the tourist production from various angles, such as history, ethnography, education, authenticity, and environmental theater. This method of analysis has been useful in viewing other tourist productions such as Plimoth Plantation. Comparing the Tenement Museum to this Plimoth Plantation and others may be helpful in understanding similarities and deviations.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s work on objects of ethnography, the art of mimesis, and exhibition in situ can be used to shed light on the site production’s goals and accomplishments. What meaning and value is attributed to the objects and room itself when they are framed as “living history?” How does theatrical spectacle play against or with curatorial intentions? Although the site offers a “complete” historical environment, the fact remains that it a reconstruction, not true restoration. How were the choices made regarding what to include and what to leave out of the room? Merging this approach with Schechner’s, one may apply this question to behavior and acting choices as well.

Schechner’s Environmental Theater work will be particularly useful since the “watchers” of this site are actively creating the experience. As they move through the space, trying on clothes, dancing, and apparently acting in fictive narratives with the interpreter, the audience becomes authors of the site as well. In order to investigate this, the production must be considered in terms the role of the space, audience/performer interaction, and group dynamics. This approach can also enter in dialogue with exhibition in situ. What happens when the tourists become de facto curators? Finally, perhaps the main “star” of the show is the building itself. How does the building as a museum or historical marker take on meaning? Through architectural distinctness? Because it is exhibited in context? Does the contextual meaning of the space add flavor to the performance?

Since the production relies heavily on narrative, Bruner’s work in this area will be helpful. In “living history” productions, narrative is central to meaning. There appears to be multiple narratives running simultaneously throughout the Confino Apartment Tour: historical narrative embodied in primary documents of the historical Confinos, created narratives of the general immigrant experience held by museum staff and visitors, created narrative of the character Victoria as interpreted by the museum employee, narrative of immediate experience created in real time, pre-tour narrative as offered by website and instructional materials to be given to teachers and students before arrival, pre-tour narratives manufactured by individual patrons, post-tour narratives created during Kitchen conversations, and post-tour narratives individually created each time a patron relates the experience to a third party.

Finally, authenticity is central to museum productions and tourist productions in general. Everyone wants to know that they are seeing authentic or “accurate” presentations. The desire for authenticity works with and against a “living history” production where one strives for truth and seamless representation but in doing so may actually obscure facts or fabricate falsehoods. Goffman’s work on frontstage/backstage, and his general approach towards everyday life behavior as performance may be helpful in this manner of regarding the site. How does the issue of authenticity impact the site’s goals and the patrons’ experiences? How does the museum use patron willingness to perform in the role of immigrant create empathy towards those who perform the role in real life? Also, how do the various roles performed by actor and visitor relate? Is it always clear who is performing what at any specific time (e.g. museum employee performing role of employee, Victoria, personal self, entertainer, or educator; visitor playing role of museum patron, immigrant, peer in kitchen while discussing playing other roles?)

I hope to organize and display the information in various ways, including floorplans, movement scores, time-line, relational diagrams, and photos.

Ephemera, material culture, documents, other sources

Data will be collected in the following modes: personal writing of first-hand experience by researcher, quotes and paraphrases from fellow patrons, audio recording of formal interviews from employee/actor, administrator, and patrons; photos of production, primary web-site information, and printed material available to visitors. I will also request the museum administrators for access to strategic and operational material regarding site preparation, interpreter training and supervision, and data on demographics of visitors.

Assistance Required

At this early stage, I do not know what specific assistance will be needed. I hope to provide a working draft of the paper before it is due for submission in order to get critical feedback on use of theory, organization of ideas, and clarity.

I have not yet come up with a systematic approach to data collection that would be faithful to Pearson’s concept of forensic site collection. Hopefully we will talk about this on Monday.

Regarding Relevant Literature

I have a basic understanding of most of the following work, but will need to closely revisit everything. I have not yet read Destination Culture, but it appears to be quite promising for this project, since the title alone addresses three main components of the site. I have also not read Goffman (although have read several others referring to him) and thus believe it is high time that I did so. I have only briefly scanned Scannell’s (ha!) thoughts on authenticity, but it may be helpful to the site study, and appears to be relevant to my theater work in general.

Tentative Outline of Paper

I’m a little unsure about creating an outline this early into the project. However, I think that a straightforward, detailed description of the site would be the first component. A “site report” would include demarcation of locality and context within larger community and society. I would then include data in the form of “track laying” as mentioned above. Pearson ambitiously calls for a “retrieval and reconstitution of performance” that includes two narratives. The first, of the watchers (patrons), would include oral description and opinioned values of experience and the site. This section would also include my experiences as a watcher. The second, by the watched (employees), would include strategic and operational documents, oral narratives, official information released for public, and perhaps instructional information for other curators and museum projects. I don’t know if I should color the site description immediately through the analytical lenses mentioned above or wait to do that afterwards. I assume that the paper should include a research question to be answered. Currently, my goal is to document the site (what is happening, how is it being done?) and then discuss how this can be seen through various lenses that may draw out relationships that might otherwise go unnoticed. So, aside from what I mentioned above regarding analysis, I don’t know how I would frame a hypothesis or research question. Happy to hear suggestions!

Working Bibliography

Baum, Willa. “Tips for Interviewers” http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/resources/rohotips.html

Bruner, E. (2004). Culture on tour: ethnographies of travel. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.

Bruner, E. (2005) “The Role of Narrative in Tourism” Berkeley conference, On Voyage: New Directions in Tourism Theory, October 7-8, 2005

Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday.

Kirby, M. (1987) A Formalist Theatre. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (1991) “Objects of Ethnography” in I. Karp and S. Levine Exhibiting Cultures. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (1998) Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press

MacCannell, D. 1999 [1976]. The Tourist. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Pearson, M, and Thomas, J. 1994. “Theater/Archeology” TDR 38, no. 4: 133-61

Scannell, P. 2001. “Authenticity and Experience” Discourse Studies 3, 4: 405-411.

Schechner, R. (1985) Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvanina Press.

Schechner, R. (1994) [1973] Environmental Theater, New Edition. New York, NY: Applause.

Truesdell, B. “Oral History Techniques: How to Organize and Conduct Oral History Interviews” http://www.indiana.edu/%7Ecshm/techniques.html

Posted by Scott Wallin at 8:24 PM

Taking off our Glasses and Putting our Headphones: Tourism of the Ear and Janet Cardiff's "Her Long Black Hair"

Tourist Studies and the Arts have long privileged vision. However, Janet Cardiff’s “Her Long Black Hair,” billed as both a walking tour and an artwork uses sound as its primary medium. Cardiff’s work doesn’t negate one’s sense of sight. Instead, she uses sound as a means of expanding one’s vision and heightening one’s engagement with and observation of the world around them. Paradoxically, one of the most intriguing aspects of Cardiff’s work is its ability to hold participants’ attention while simultaneously slipping into the background. Participants focus more on their surroundings than on the recording, though the recording is the catalyst enabling them to mentally transcend time and space, reality and imagination, the fantastic and the everyday, all during a walk in the walk in the park.

I hypothesize that Cardiff’s work manages to be so affecting due to the floating nature of the recording, which is only loosely tied to one’s physical surroundings. Cardiff’s use of binaural technology; a wide range of musical genres; a cinematically non-linear narrative structure; a layering of temporally diverse narratives; and a profound knowledge of the walk’s route that leads to uncanny coincidences, combine to provide participants with an episodic experience not unlike the natural function of one’s perception and memory. Like few other artistic experiences, the sound walk can lead to tears, elation, or harsh denunciation, but doesn’t leave participants ambivalent. I aim to examine the methods Cardiff uses in constructing her recording in order to develop a better understanding of precisely how the sound-walk works, and why it’s so powerful.

My primary site of investigation will be Cardiff’s audio recording for the sound-walk, with the photographs and actual walking route playing a secondary role. In documenting these “sites,” I will utilize personal experiences from two previous trips, in addition to a close analysis of the sound recording outside of it’s intended environment. Obviously my sense of hearing will be most useful in pursuing these studies, though visceral and emotional responses, as well as paying close attention to my thought patterns while listening to the recording will also prove of service.

I present the following as a preliminary framework for my investigation. First, I will revisit my notes and memories of the sound-walk to generate a list of particular areas of investigations and specific questions. For example, what effect, if any, does Cardiff’s use of a wide range of musical genres from Opera to Indie Rock to Gospel serve? Armed with this set of inquiries, I’ll closely examine the recording itself, dissecting its different threads in an attempt to map its structure and reverse- engineer a “score” of the piece for further analysis. This will include diagramming the structure of the recording and possibly overlaying a “map” of the recording unto a map of the walking route. I’ll then use these items as touchstones for the development of a list of interview questions. In order to broaden my discussion, I’ll interview others who have taken the tour.

That I might take into consideration as many experiences as possible, I may create a questionnaire to be circulated via e-mail in addition to conducting interviews in person. I should also like to interview someone at the Public Arts Fund to discuss how the piece came into being, and to garner a more general sense of how it has been received. It would be interesting, for example, to obtain a clearer picture of how the piece was brought back for another season, how many people wrote the P.A.F., and the nature of their reasoning. In all of the former endeavors, the writings of Truesdell and Baum will provide useful guidelines. I should also like to situate this sound-walk within Cardiff’s greater oeuvre, and potentially alongside other sound-walks, such as the one at Ground Zero. Having collected a large of body of data and a deeper understanding of the work itself, at this point I shall begin the bulk of my theoretical analysis, bringing in secondary sources and expanding my discussion of the artwork to include its theoretical resonances in the areas of phenomenology, the social construction and use of space, and conceptions of the body-image. The thrust of all this work is to better understand how Cardiff has created such a powerful work, how it differs from other artistic media, and why it is so effective.

Thus far, I have taken a substantial amount of notes on the sound-walk after two trips. I have read several articles germane to my investigation, conducted background research on Cardiff’s work online, and written a short paper on the sound-walk to begin exploring some of my ideas. In addition, I have contacted the Public Art Fund’s archive center by both e-mail and phone, enquiring as to the possibility of my gaining access to a copy of the sound recording for further research. This raises a possible obstacle to my investigation. Should I be denied access, I may have to devise a new approach to the material, or select another sound-walk as my primary focus. I might be able to use some help in this area. As Cardiff’s work is my main interest, if someone has either a personal copy of the recording, or a connection to the Public Art Fund, either might be of great help to my research.

Here follows a tentative outline for my paper, with subsequent bibliography.

• A brief personal account of experiencing Cardiff’s sound-walk and my interest in it.
  
• history, and within Cardiff’s body of work in specific in an effort to highlight the unique elements of this particular work.
  
• A detailed analysis of the sound-walk’s structure with close analysis of the recording.
  
• Theoretical analysis interweaving information from interviews as well as secondary sources.
  
• A recapitulation of the unique elements of Cardiff’s walk and how and why they give it a power beyond that of museum audio tours, tours at sights such as Ellis Island or Stonehenge.
  
• Thoughts on how one might take Cardiff’s work further in use or content.
  

Bibliography

Cardiff, Janet. “Her Long Black Hair.” Commissioned by the Public Art Fund and the James Family Foundation. NY, NY. 2003.

Cardiff, Janet. “Interview with Hirshhorn Curator Kelly Gordon.”
http://hirshhorn.si.edu/exhibitions/description.asp?Type=&ID=20. July. 2005.
Provides a brief history of Cardiff’s relationship with sound walks and the process through which she creates them.

Casey, Edward. Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does it Mean to be in the Place-World? Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 91(4), 2001, pp.683-693. 2001.
Casey discusses the relationship between one’s body and place. This should be helpful in discussing the unique roll that place plays in Cardiff’s sound walk and the ways in which she manipulates each participant’s relationship to their surroundings.

Moon, William Least Heat. Prairy Erth. London: Andrew Deutsch. 1991.
Though I haven’t read it yet, Pearson’s mention of Moon’s conception of a “deep map” seems closely related to Cardiff’s creations.

Massumi, Brian. The Evolutionary Alchemy of Reason. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press. Durham, 2002.
Using Australian artist Stelarc as a centerpiece, Massumi discusses alternative conceptions of the body and means of transcending our normal conception. This text will serve as a point of contact between Cardiff’s sound walk and its phenomenological implications.

Pearson, Mike. Theatre/Archaeology. TDR The Drama Review 38, 4 (t144), Winter 1994.
An interesting exploration of the relationship between performance scholarship and archaeology along with possibilities for furthering the overlap between the methodologies of these two disciplines. Will be useful in demarcating my “site” and representing it linguistically. Also the passage on “Track Laying” offers some ideas for how to approach Cardiff’s recording. Also introduces interesting notions of the watcher’s role in creating a performance, an aspect central to Cardiff’s work.

Schilder, Paul. The Image and Appearance of the Human Body: Studies in the Constructive Energies of the Psyche. International Universities Press, Inc. New York, 1950.
Like Massumi, Schilder explores alternative conceptions of the body and its construction through social processes. This again ties to the
phenomenological aspects of Cardiff’s sound walk.

Simonsen, Kirsten. Bodies, Sensations, Space and Time: The Contribution from Henri Lefebvre. Annals of Geography 87 B (1): pp.11-14. 2005.
Simonsen explicates the phenomenological writings of Henri Lefebvre in relation to Merleau-Ponty, Nietszche, and Lacan, among others. She also introduces ideas concerning the body’s interpretation of the world, and the relationship of the body to space and time. All of these areas obliquely figure largely into Cardiff’s sound walk. Thus, Simonson should be useful in exploring the “why” of Cardiff’s sound walk, and how it affects our bodies and perceptions.

http://www.gothamist.com/archives/2005/06/16/janet_cardiff_in_central_park.php
Provides links to a couple of weblogs that mention Cardiff’s piece. Could be useful for contacting people outside the department regarding interviews, as well as simply reading different perspectives.

http://www.gallerieswest.ca/Departments/ArtistPortraits/6-96051.html
Briefly gives background on “40-part Motet,” and provides some comparison between this work and Cardiff’s sound walks in the words of the artist herself.

http://www.bombmagazine.com/cardiff/cardiff.html
Extended interview with Atom Egoyan of Bomb magazine. Gives background on a number of Cardiff’s works, her goals, and her views of her works with relation to other mediums.

Posted by Tyler Sinclair at 8:01 PM

October 11, 2005

Project ideas

Looking for interesting project ideas? How about:

Museum of Sex
Madame Tussauds
Manhattan Hell House, 220 Church St. through Oct 31. plus info on evangelical hell houses more generally and panel discussion on October 14.
Forgotten New York
Poetics of decay
Central Park Movie Walking Tour and other movie and tv location tours from On Location Tours, including Sex in the City and The Sopranos.
Big Onion Tours
Big Apple Greeter
Municipal Art Society Walking Tours
Place Matters
Talking Street: Cell Phone Tours: Lower East Side and Lower Manhattan.
New York Celebrates Halloween
NYC Heritage Tourism Center
Historic Richmond Town, Staten Island
Historic houses in New York City
Thomas Alva Edison Memorial Tower and Menlo Park Museum
New York City Marathon
Chocolate Show

Food Tours
Noshwalks
New York Culinary Tours
Savory Sojourns

Posted by BKG at 11:39 PM

October 10, 2005

Holocaust souvenirs

Williams, Alan. 2005. Possessing the dispossessed: packaging the Holocaust for your home and garden, thoughts on the selling of Holocaust souvenirs. The Simon (January 20). Responding to Andreas Tzortzis, At the Gift Shop: Souvenirs of Buchenwald. New York Times (Late Edition (East Coast)). Sep 15, 2004. E.1

Posted by BKG at 9:22 PM

"New tourist sites bloom in New Orleans"

New tourist sites bloom in New Orleans. (2005, October 9). The Roanoke Times, p.16A.

Even the breaks in the levees that flooded most of the city are now attractions.

New Orleans - There's a new kind of tourism in New Orleans. Forget photos of elegant French Quarter balconies, street musicians or even college girls flashing their breasts.

These days, relief workers, National Guardsmen, firefighters and police officers are snapping pictures of the destruction from Hurricane Katrina: piles of garbage still rotting in the hot sun, cars crushed by toppled walls and rows of shattered buildings.

"I wish we were taking pictures with strippers on Bourbon Street," said Stephen Lawrence of the Costilla County, Colo., sheriff's department. "But the things we're seeing are interesting. It's a part of history."

Boston University sociology professor Daniel Mondi said the lure of such a disaster is common. Just as the World Trade Center site in New York became a tourist draw after the Sept. 11 attacks, the aftermath of Katrina has the same appeal.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence," Mondi said. "I don't know that we've ever had a natural disaster that affected such a large part of the country. People want to recall it, to memorialize it."

Favorite tourist spots have even developed. Visitors are making regular pilgrimages to two cars on the edge of the French Quarter that are still under the pile of fallen bricks that crushed them in the storm.

"It's compact parking," joked Steve Dicketts, a private security agent from Virginia Beach, Va. "Quite a sight."

Dicketts has visited New Orleans before, but his pictures from that trip are nothing like the ones he's taking now.

"This isn't the same city," he said. "You will never see this again. They will take it away and rebuild, so you want to get it now."

Even the breaks in the levees that flooded most of the city are now attractions. And when 40 firetrucks and crews from around the country responded to a small fire, the firefighters linked arms and posed for pictures in front of the tiny puff of smoke.

Posted by BKG at 7:08 PM

Readings on souvenirs

Hitchcock, M. and Teague, K., eds. 2000. Souvenirs: The material culture of tourism. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Stewart, Susan. 1984. On longing: narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Love, Lisa L. and Sheldon, P. S. 1998. Souvenirs: Messengers of meaning. Advances in Consumer Research 25: 170-175.

Love, Lisa L. and Nathaniel Kohn. 2001. This, that, and the other: fraught possibilities of the souvenir. Text and Performance Quarterly 21, 1: 47-63.

Gordon, B. 1986. The souvenir: Messenger of the extraordinary. Journal of Popular Culture 20, 3: 135-146.

Shenhav-Keller, Shelly. 1993. The Israeli souvenir: its text and context. Annals of Tourism Research 20: 182-196.

Jules-Rosette, B. 1984. The Message of Tourist Art: An African Semiotic System in Comparative Perspective. New York: Plenum Press.

Belk, Russell W., Melanie Wallendorf, and John F. Sherry, Jr. 1989. The Sacred and the Profane in Consumer Behavior: Theodicy on the Odyssey. Journal of Consumer Research 16 (June): 1-38.

O'Guinn, Thomas C., and Russell W. Belk. 1989. Heaven on Earth: Consumption at Heritage Village, USA. Journal of Consumer Research 16, no. 2: 227-38.

Williams, Alan. 2005. Possessing the dispossessed: packaging the Holocaust for your home and garden, thoughts on the selling of Holocaust souvenirs. The Simon (January 20). Responding to Andreas Tzortzis, At the Gift Shop: Souvenirs of Buchenwald. New York Times (Late Edition (East Coast)). Sep 15, 2004. E.1

Posted by BKG at 4:11 PM

Readings on travel photography

Vernacular practices

So you want to take great vacation pictures

Kodak: Photographing vacations & travel

Magellan: Take great vacation photos

Photo travelers

Fodor: How to take travel photos like a pro

DT&G Photographic: Digital photo vacation

Studies

Osborne, Peter. 2000. Traveling light: photography, travel, and visual culture. Manchester, UK; New York: Manchester University Press.

Albers, P. C. and James, W. R. 1988. Travel photography: A methodological approach. Annals of Tourism Research 15: 134-158.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. Photography: A Middle Brow Art. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Buck, R. C. (1977). The ubiquitous tourist brochure: Explorations in its intended and unintended use. Annals of Tourism Research, 4, 195-207.

Cohen, E. 1995. The representation of Arabs and Jews on postcards in Israel. History of Photography 19, 3: 210-220.

Cohen, E., Nir, Y. and Almagor, U. 1992. Stranger-local interaction in photography. Annals of Tourism Research 19: 213-233.

Collier, J. and Collier, M. 1986. Visual anthropology: Photography as a research method. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.

Crawshaw, C. and Urry. J. 1997. Tourism and the photographic eye. In Rojek, C. And Urry, J. (eds) Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory. London: Routledge. On reserve.

Posted by BKG at 3:40 PM

Readings on tour guides

Pond, Kathleen Lingle. 1993. The Professional Guide: Dynamics of Tour Guiding. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Cohen, Erik. 1985. The tourist guide: the origins, structures, and dynamics of a role. Annals of Tourism Research 12, no. 1: 5-30.

Fine, Elizabeth and Jean Haskell Speer. 1985. Tour guide performances as sight sacralization. Annals of Tourism Research 12, no. 1:73-95.

Posted by BKG at 3:36 PM

October 7, 2005

Travel documentation

Dominika will be visiting Morocco and keeping a travel diary and experimenting with its form. For recent artists' projects related to tourism, see Bonami, Francesco. 2005. Universal experience: art, life, and the tourist's eye. Chicago, IL: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Distributed Art Publishers, New York. Available at NYU Book Center. Review.

Travel writing about Morocco

History of travel writing

Women's travel writing

Posted by BKG at 3:15 PM

Phenomenological approaches

Tylor asked about how to link phenomenology to performance. One way might be to think about the senses:

Check out the Sensory Formations series at Berg.

Howes, David. ed. 2004. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford and New York: Berg.

Also: Casey, Edward. S. 2001. Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be in the Place-World? Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91, no. 4: 683-93.

Simonsen, K. 2005. Bodies, Sensations, Space and Time: the Contribution From Henri Lefebvre. Geografiska Annaler Series B-Human Geography 87B, no. 1: 1-14.

Posted by BKG at 2:34 PM

Exhibiting slavery

Siobhan is interested in working on the new exhibition, Slavery in New York, which just opened at the New-York Historical Society. See the review in today's New York Times.

Fred Wilson: Mining the Museum; images.

African Burial Ground

Fath Davis Ruffins:

"Revisiting the Old Plantation: Reparations, Reconciliation, and Museumizing American Slavery.” Museums Frictions. Eds. Ivan Karp and Corrine Kratz. In press. Comments on emerging museums of slavery and their efforts to put that history on exhibition.

“Sites of Memory, Sites of Struggle: The ‘Materials’ of History,” Major Problems in African American History. Volume 1: From Slavery to Freedom, 1619–1865. eds. Thomas Holt and Elsa Barkley Brown. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999. Brief analysis of issues involved in earlier attempts to put an African American museum on the mall.

"Culture Wars Won and Lost: Ethnic Museums on the Mall," Radical History Review. Two-part article. No. 68, Spring, 1997 and No. 70 Winter, 1998. (Part One: The Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National Museum of the American Indian. Part Two: The African American Museum on the Mall Project.) Comparison of the work in the 1980s and 1990s to found the National Museum of the American Indian, the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. and the earlier unsuccessful attempt to pass legislation to put an African American Museum on the Mall.

"Mythos, Memory, and History: African American Preservation Efforts, 1820-1990." Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. Eds. Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D. Lavine. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992. Detailed analysis of the preservation of objects, folklore, music, governmental records over the 19th and 20th centuries.

"A Faithful Witness': Afro-American Public History in Historical Perspective," with Jeffrey Stewart. Presenting the Past: Critical Perspectives on History and the Public. Eds. Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig. Temple University Press, 1986. Detailed analysis of the relationship between professional historians and "organic historians" of the African American experience.

Posted by BKG at 1:41 PM

Out of bounds

Scott is exploring several different project ideas:

Urban Exploration: Urban Exploration webring, Urban Speleology, Urban Exploration New York, Urban Exporers Network, Zone Tour, Infiltration, Jinx, Online and Underground
Soundwalks: Ground Zero; Williamsburg (2 tours, both Hasidic, 1 for men, 1 for women); Bronx (Hip Hop tour); and many more. Downloadable as mp3 files. Sign up to be a beta tester.
Kramer's Reality Tour: Reichman, Deborah Gar. 2003. Realizing sitcomes: Kramer's Reality Tour and the fine line between fiction and reality in television's most disparaged genre. M.A. thesis, New York University.
Institute for Applied Autonomy: Un-Surveillance Tour using iSee.
Confino Family Apartment, Lower East Side Tenement Museum

Posted by BKG at 12:31 PM

Post-Communist tourism

Aniko is working on post-Communist tourism. Here are resources relevant to her project:

Hoffman, Lily F. and Jiri Musil. 1999. Culture meets commerce: Prague and post-communist tourism. In The Tourist City, eds. Dennis Judd and Susan Fainstein. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The future of nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.

Light, D. 2000. Gazing on communism: heritage tourism and post-communist identities in Germany, Hungary and Romania. Tourism Geographies 2 (2): 157-176.

Priban, Jiri. Reconstituting Paradise Lost: the temporal dimension of postcommunist constitution-making.

Hofer, Tamas. Construction of the 'Folk Cultural Heritage' and Rival Versions of National' Identity in Hungary. Wilson Center. Request a copy from ees@wwic.si.edu

Stalin Museum, Georgia

Stalin World, Lithuania

Posted by BKG at 11:50 AM

City Brain

"After Lights out for the Territory, a man sent me an X ray of his brain tumour. He'd superimposed it over a map of London and was trying to heal himself by walking out its routes through the city." Interview with Iain Sinclair, an avid walker and writer about walking.

Posted by BKG at 10:13 AM

October 6, 2005

Creationist tourism or "reading the rocks"

Seeing Creation and Evolution in Grand Canyon
By JODI WILGOREN
Twin rafting trips down the Colorado River epitomize the opposite ends of the growing creation-evolution debate.
New York Times, October 6, 2005. To access article longterm, go to Lexus-Nexus or Proquest from NYU Home.

October 6, 2005
Seeing Creation and Evolution in Grand Canyon
By JODI WILGOREN

GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, Ariz. - Tom Vail, who has been leading rafting trips down the Colorado River here for 23 years, corralled his charges under a rocky outcrop at Carbon Creek and pointed out the remarkable 90-degree folds in the cliff overhead.

Geologists date this sandstone to 550 million years ago and explain the folding as a result of pressure from shifting faults underneath. But to Mr. Vail, the folds suggest the Grand Canyon was carved 4,500 years ago by the great global flood described in Genesis as God's punishment for humanity's sin.

"You see any cracks in that?" he asked. "Instead of bending like that, it should have cracked." The material "had to be soft" to bend, Mr. Vail said, imagining its formation in the flood. When somebody suggested that pressure over time could create plasticity in the rocks, Mr. Vail said, "That's just a theory."

"It's all theory, right?" asked Jack Aiken, 63, an Assemblies of God minister in Alaska who has a master's degree in geology. "Except what's in the Good Book."

For Mr. Vail and 29 guests on his Canyon Ministries trip, this was vacation as religious pilgrimage, an expedition in search of evidence that God created the earth in six days 6,000 years ago, just as Scripture says.

That same week, a few miles upriver, a decidedly different group of 24 rafters surveyed the same rock formations - but through the lens of science rather than what Mr. Vail calls "biblical glasses." Sponsored by the National Center for Science Education, the chief challenger to creationists' influence in public schools, this trip was a floating geology seminar, charting the canyon's evolution through eons of erosion.

"Look at the weathering, look at the size of the pieces," Eugenie C. Scott, the center director, said of markings in Black Tail Canyon. "To a standard geologist, to somebody who actually studies geology, this just shouts out at you: This is really old; this is really gradual."

Two groups examining the same evidence. Traveling nearly identical itineraries, snoozing under the same stars and bathing in the same chocolate-colored river. Yet, standing at opposite ends of the growing creation-evolution debate, they seemed to speak in different tongues.

Science unequivocally dates the earth's age at 4.5 billion years, and the canyon's layers at some two billion years. Even the intelligent design movement, which argues that evolution alone cannot explain life's complexity, does not challenge the long history of the earth.

But a core of creationists like Mr. Vail continue to champion a Bible-based theory of the canyon's carving. And polls show many Americans are unconvinced by scientific knowledge.

Though it did not ask specifically about the global flood or six-day creation, a November 2004 Gallup survey found that a third of the public believes the Bible is the actual word of God that should be taken literally and that 45 percent think God created human beings "pretty much in their present form" within the last 10,000 years.

Gallup found in another poll that 5 percent of scientists, and fewer than 1 percent of earth and life scientists, adopted the "Young Earth" view.

The twin rafting trips epitomize the parallel universes often inhabited by Americans with polarized positions. Members of both groups said they had signed up for these charters to be surrounded by like-minded people. Indeed, all the American adults on Mr. Vail's boats voted for President Bush last fall, while all but two on the evolutionists' rafts cast ballots for Senator John Kerry.

When not running the rapids, Mr. Vail's group, which included three pastors, sat in makeshift sanctuaries of sand and stone to offer psalms and prayers of praise for their surroundings.

Some were committed creationists and others were still asking questions. But all began with a literal interpretation of the Bible, seeking examples in the rocks to support its story that God did it all in less than a week.

When they made camp, Dr. Scott's rafters, nearly half with Ph.D.'s in science, had evening discussions of tidal patterns and plateau shifts, as well as tutorials on tactics in the evolution debate. Most of them ardently secular, a few practicing believers, they started with what they see as unchallengeable facts about the Earth's age, and dismissed creationism as unscientific. After each "geology moment," Dr. Scott play-acted the creationists, saying sarcastically of their evidence, "My part of the lesson is always a lot shorter and less detailed."

Mr. Vail, whose book on the Grand Canyon scientists tried to ban from park stores last year, describes this natural wonder as "Exhibit A" for Young Earth creationists. Dr. Scott calls it a scientists' Louvre.

To Kathryn Crotts, 56, a pastor's wife from Greensboro, N.C. , touching the canyon's basement rock was a spiritual moment.

"In the book of Genesis, it talks about God walking the face of the earth," Mrs. Crotts explained. "Maybe His footprints are there."

But to Charlie Webb, 58, an emergency-room doctor in Colorado Springs, it is evolution that answers "the great philosophical questions why are we here, where did we come from."

"Evolution is the basis of biology, biology is the basis of medicine," said Dr. Webb, dismissing the flood explanation as childish and pathetic. "You're messing with something important when you mess with evolution."

For eight days and 280 miles, with a reporter along for half of each journey, the groups relaxed on motorized rafts, hiked the hills, dined on Dutch-oven delicacies, frolicked in waterfalls and admired rainbows, each awed by what they see as truth.

Origins of Two Journeys

About 4.5 million people visit the Grand Canyon each year, peering over the rim and perhaps popping into a gift shop, where Mr. Vail's book, "The Grand Canyon: A Different View," ranked 17th among 800 products sold last year. Some 22,000 hardy souls raft its river.

Mr. Vail, 57, a former corporate computer manager, took his first trip in 1980, and soon "turned in my three-piece suit for a pair of flip-flops." He had been guiding full time a dozen years when a pilot celebrating her 40th birthday rode on his raft and whispered the Gospel in his ear.

That fall, in a tent in the Himalayas, he recited the Sinner's Prayer in the Bible she had sent with him, and, he said, "I came home a child of Christ."

Back on the river, Mr. Vail said, "I started asking, 'How does what I see here in the canyon relate to what I read in God's word?' " He attended creationist seminars, married the airline pilot, and in 1997 founded Canyon Ministries, which brings some 200 Christians to the river each year.

His 2003 book, a coffee-table-quality photo gallery with quotations from Scripture, has sold 40,000 copies, despite science organizations' protests of its sale in park shops.

Dr. Scott, 59, first chartered a canyon expedition in 1999. A former professor of physical anthropology, she has run the National Center for Science Education, a 3,800-member advocacy group based in Oakland, Calif., for 17 years.

Among the rafters on this year's trip were Susan Epperson, 64, a former high school biology teacher who was the plaintiff in the 1967 Supreme Court case that found Arkansas' law banning the teaching of evolution unconstitutional, and Ken Saladin, 56, a professor at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville who has been protesting any mix of church and state for 30 years.

"I won't defend evolution," Dr. Scott said in exasperation one evening. "We don't defend the spherical Earth. We need to stop defending, as they put it, Darwinism, and just make them show they have a scientific view."

At orientation, when the rafters wrote their names on mugs, Libbi Hendley, 52, who owns a newsstand in Boone, N.C., with her husband, marked hers with the Christian fish symbol. In the other group, Eric Hildeman, 34, a Milwaukee seminarian turned atheist accountant, wore a cap with the same symbol, filled with the word "Darwin."

Worship in a Glorious Cathedral

"Isn't this a wonderful cathedral to meet in?" the Rev. Stephen Crotts, a pastor in Greensboro, N.C., asked the congregation encircling him on a Sunday morning.

The worshipers sat on the ground, many of them barefoot. The rushing river and canyon wrens accompanied the impromptu choir along with Mr. Vail's wife, Paula, on flute and 17-year-old Andrew Panes, who brought a guitar from England. The preacher had three days' growth.

"What is this place that God created saying to you and me?" asked Mr. Crotts, 55. "One of the things it says to me is I'm small and God and the world He created is huge. This is a man-dwarfing place."

Religion permeated Mr. Vail's trip, the group bowing heads before meals and hikes. At lunch one day, four women clustered in a tight hug, praying for one who had multiple sclerosis.

"We just need to talk to the only person who can do anything about it," said Linda Lomax, 58.

When Lucy Panes, 20, shouted, "Oh my God!" after a guide doused her with river water, she immediately covered her mouth, only to be admonished by her mother, Diana, "Please don't shout that."

Diana Panes began questioning evolution, which she had studied in school like most everyone else, seven years ago when Andrew came home from school asking whether Genesis was fable or history, and about dinosaurs dating back millions of years.

"I was gobsmacked," Mrs. Panes recalled.

So she started reading, attending lectures, watching creationist videos. "I don't want to believe in fairy tales. I'm interested in truth," Mrs. Panes said.

Convinced that Jesus himself believed the global flood and genealogy of Genesis were true historical accounts, "the whole thing becomes his reputation at stake," Mrs. Panes, 54, said of why she felt compelled to come to the canyon to see for herself. "For years there were huge areas I couldn't answer. My faith was devotional."

Of the explanations offered by Mr. Vail and other creationists, she said, "For me it was just the most immense relief that it didn't have to remain a mystery forever."

Questions and More Questions

But Brenda Melvin, 46, a nurse practitioner, was not so sure. "My Christian heart wanted to believe, but my scientific mind had questions," Ms. Melvin said. "I believe totally that God created heaven and Earth - I don't know how he did it, I don't know exactly when he did it. I don't know that we're ever going to learn the answers here."

Her pastor, Paul Phillips, also did not accept Mr. Vail's explanations of rock layers and fossil remnants without question. "Whatever he says, I'm just trying to think: There's a really smart person, there's tons of really smart people, that think the other side," he said.

For Mr. Phillips, 42, the most profound revelation came not about when the canyon was carved, but why: Genesis recounts the great flood as God's harsh judgment on a world filled with sin.

"If I'm a sinner, and this is the punishment for sin, then I might want to rethink my position before God," he said. "If you acknowledge a creator and a designer, then you have to deal with that entity. If it just happened, then I don't have to worry about an entity that ripped apart the earth."

Faith in Science

"I've always believed in evolution," Irene Rosenthal, 71, a semiretired psychologist, said over soup one night.

"Accepted evolution," interjected George H. Griffin, 58, a retired law enforcement officer in Colorado. "That's what Genie wants us to say," he said, referring to Dr. Scott. "Genie said anyone who said 'believed' would have to walk home."

Dr. Scott and others cringe at creationists' charge that Darwin's theories have become dogmatic faith, that creationism and evolution are just two parallel belief systems, equally plausible and unprovable. "We have faith in science, but it's not a religion," said Herb Masters, a retired firefighter. "It's a faith in a body of knowledge."

While the creationists sang hymns, Dr. Scott taught her crew a biologist's ditty about the amphioxus, a fishlike invertebrate in the human evolutionary line, to the tune of "It's a Long Way From Tipperary":

It's a long way from amphioxus - it's a long way to us.

It's a long way from amphioxus to the meanest human cuss.

Goodbye fins and gill slits,

Hello lungs and hair!

It's a long, long way from amphioxus,

But we come from there.

Most on the science trip were atheists or agnostics, dismissive and at times disrespectful of religion. Standing under a gushing waterfall, they joked about baptism. When a white dove appeared after a harrowing hike, Dr. Scott teased, "It's a sign!"

But six of the rafters said they belonged to churches or synagogues, four attending weekly. Alan Gishlick, with silver-painted toenails sticking out of his Tevas and a shoulder tattoo of a Buddhist word puzzle meaning "Knowledge makes me content," said he was a "devout Christian."

"Ultimately, creationism is not just bad science to me, it's bad Christianity, it's Bible worship," said Mr. Gishlick, 32, a paleontology Ph.D. "There's just no reason to look at these patterns of layered sediment, or in the fossil record, or at the stars, and think that what you're seeing isn't what you're seeing. God doesn't require you to be stupid, to deny what you see, to deny what you know."

Ms. Epperson, who sings in the choir at her Presbyterian church and brought her Bible along on the trip, said, "The more you learn about science, the more magnificent God is.

"I can look at a rainbow, and I know that white light can hit water droplets and it gets dispersed and the light spreads out and has lots of different colors," she said, "and I also say, 'Thank you, God, for the rainbow.' "

She said she asked God whether her role as an evolution advocate was meant to be her mission. "I say, 'God, if this is wrong, if I'm wrong, please strike me with lightning, because I don't want to be walking down the wrong path.' "

Same Object, Different Views

Walking along a path in the Redwall limestone, Mr. Vail splashed water on fossilized outlines of nautiloids, large aquatic critters that present one of creationists' chief complaints about standard canyon geology.

Mr. Vail said fossils preserved death without decay, suggesting catastrophe, and that huge numbers of nautiloids in a six-foot layer spreading some 5,700 square miles could only be the result of a massive flood.

Examining a vertical outline of a nautiloid, Mr. Vail ridiculed the geology explanation, saying it would have had to "stand there like that for tens of thousands of years while it got buried."

"Anybody want to buy that one?" he added.

A similar question came to the science group from a creationist student of Professor Saladin who had sent him a long e-mail message to ponder on his trip. Mr. Gishlick said scientists had not documented the billions of nautiloids creationists cite and had found no stunning pattern in their orientation, citing the very vertical fossil Mr. Vail had mentioned.

"These guys don't look like they were buried in something chaotic," he said. "They look like they floated down to the bottom."

Some around the circle complained about the credence being given to the creationist argument in order to answer it.

"I don't really care how they reconcile Noah's flood with scientific things - it's about religion," protested Mary Murray, 54, an artist from Laguna Beach, Calif., who came with her biology-professor husband. "We shouldn't be talking about religion at all in the public schools."

Through four days, Mr. Vail mentioned public schools only once, saying that 80 percent of Christians walked away from their faith when studying science that confounded the creation story. "It's foundational to our faith," he said, throwing a stick into the sand in frustration. "We're raising a generation of confused children, and it's the public schools that are doing it!"

That morning, Mr. Vail led his troops up a rocky overlook to scout Hance Rapid before running through its 30-foot drop.

"As you look at the rapid from up here, you can see the run," he pointed out. "You can see where the rocks are. You can see the bump - that's obviously somewhere you don't want to go. You can pick your way through the waves.

"When you're back on the boat, look at the rapid as you're coming into it and see how much you can see," he continued. "We can read God's word and we know what we're supposed to do. It's real clear up here what we're supposed to do."

Posted by BKG at 7:37 AM

October 5, 2005

Research methods

For research guidance, see:

Pavis, Patrice. 2003. Analyzing performance: theater, dance, and film. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. On reserve.
Katz, Jack. 2001. From how to why: On luminous description and causal inference in ethnography (Part I). Ethnography 2, no. 4: 443-73.
Katz, Jack. 2002. From how to why: On luminous description and causal inference in ethnography (Part 2). Ethnography 3, no. 1: 63-90.
Performance Studies Methods syllabus. See especially the sections on interviewing (#1, #2) and participant observation (#1, #2).

An excellent case study is one of the books ordered for the course and on reserve, Susan Davis, Spectacular Nature. Watch here for other examples.

Posted by BKG at 8:30 PM

Immersion

Immersive experiences have a long history. Several people expressed an interest in reading the work of Oliver Grau, who has been exploring the relationship between high tech virtuality and older media.

Oliver Grau's webpage
Oliver Grau Interview. 2003. The Image--from Real to Virtual. Switch 18.
Grau, Oliver. 2003. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Grau, Oliver. 2000. History of Telepresence: Automata, Illusion, and Rejecting the Body. In The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology on the Internet. Ed. Ken Goldberg. 226-246. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Posted by BKG at 8:06 PM

October 4, 2005

Foraging with Wildman Steve Brill

Wildman Steve Brill with knotweed. Well worth going on a foraging tour in a New York City park with legendary Wildman Steve Brill.

Posted by BKG at 6:36 PM

October 3, 2005

"Where is home?"

“Actually, all visitors and all newcomers are tourists. So are many who have lived in a place for years” (Lippard 4). I find this statement to be painstakingly accurate. When often asked, “where is home?”, I give the standard response of “well, I was born in South Carolina.” However, I feel as if I am and will always be a tourist, because I feel somewhat disconnected to the United States. As a African-American female navigating through the unique experience of being both of African ancestry and engulfed in the American experience, I find that neither place is home for me. Aware of my past, I feel that my American experience is adaptive. The imminent presence of “othering” resides with me, indelibly embedded on the surface of my brain. Some might say that the United States is my home, because I was born and raised here, however, I often wonder what it would have been like if my ancestors had not been involuntarily displaced, if I had been allowed to be raised in Africa. This deepens my internal conflict more so, for I do not feel entirely connected with Africa as “home” either. It seems as if my plight is one in which I remain suspended in the proverbial liminal space, neither here nor there. This is not entirely melancholic or a complete loss, because it opens a realm of possibilities.

In light of the fact that I do not identify with a “home” here in this earthly realm, I find hope in a heavenly paradise. This spiritual concept does not seem to neatly fit in the theories within tourist studies. Upon death and the afterlife, I seek to reach Heaven, Paradise. “Paradise is a place where all your needs are met effortlessly. Paradise is a place where you are not allowed to feel pain” (Drexler in Lippard, 6). This is what I imagine Heaven to be like. When here, I will have crossed over through the realm of liminality and entered a real and eternal home. I will not feel as if I am a tourist, and will know that this is where I belong.

Posted by Michelle Brown at 2:54 PM

October 2, 2005

Her Long Black Hair

Click on the thumbnails. The Cardiff walk is one of several interesting interventions using mobile digital technology, many of them focusing on the sound of the environment. Other interesting projects include: eRuv: A Street History in Semacode; Talking Street: Discover Where You Are; Soundwalks; Pedestrian: A Walking Tour for Multiple Voices and Portable Phones; The Walking Project: Desire Lines, Walking and Mapping Across Continents; Walk and Squawk performance project; Walking as Knowing as Making: A Peripatetic Investigation of Place; Generative Psychogeography project; Yellow Arrow; Superimposed City Tours; Center for Land Use Interpretation; and Mapping Sex in America. And, many others. Please add any interesting ones that you discover! Foundational text: "Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography" by Guy Debord.

Posted by BKG at 10:13 PM

Leah responds to Lippard

In her introduction to the book On the Beaten track: Tourism, Art and Place, Lucy Lippard comments that “every place is both local and foreign.” (p. 2) This dichotomy, and its tensions, are particularly evident in the phenomenon of domestic travel, the focus of this book. In her final chapter, Lippard notes that “History, created and recreated, is the mother-lode of tourism. (The other extreme – recreation, with its emphasis on immediate gratification – is its greatest, and perhaps generational, rival.) (p. 154) The “history” of a given tourist site and/or the experience it offers serve to attract tourists but also change the locale itself, which is reconfigured around the desire to attract tourists and provide them with the resources that enable such tourism. Much of this activity is economic in nature – local economies shift in order to serve the visitors. But the history presented is also packaged and produced for tourists, leaving locals with a version of their home that is also transformed, perhaps even foreign. Likewise the contemporary experience of a place may be altered. One can imagine the residents of Santa Fe and Maine, noted by Lippard, grumbling to themselves that “It wasn’t always like this.”

Tourism changes both the tourist and the location (p.5), transforming both. Art has the same capacity for transformation, but artistic works, rather than showcasing a commercial representation of a particular place, often seek to interpret or comment on the experience itself, even subverting or upending the conventional understanding of how a particular tourist experience “works.” Artists may be freed from the expectation of providing for tourists and allowed to subvert the “truth” presented. One of the most powerful examples of this upending is the exhibition “Mining the Museum” in which Fred Wilson worked within the tropes of museology to highlight the untold narrative which underscores the conventional history of the objects displayed, in particular as regards the reality of slavery which was a critical element of the American “way of life” on display at the Maryland Historical Society. The work by Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena, “Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West” similarly plays with proscribed notions of exhibition. Tourists, however, may be turned off by encountering unexpectedly such subversive takes, particularly at a site that itself is regarded as “historical” rather than “institutional” in nature. (Lippard herself plays with tropes in a similar way, reading thrift stores and similar settings as “informal museums” that are different in feeling due to being liberated from the formality of the institution.)

To some extent artists provide a critical perspective, one that tourists may not want to engage in or that may be unsettling, even objectionable to local forces that wish to maintain the tourist structures as they are, for economic or other reasons. How and when do the two manage to consonantly co-exist and when they do, what seems to account for it? The example of Jane Greengold’s “Scenic Overlook,” (pp. 140 – 141) which both mock and promote the sites depicted, is notable for peaking (pun intended) the interest of the Prospect Parks Alliance. The criticality that Lippard’s artistic examples manage to inculcate reminds me of the philosophical stance (or educational purpose) often taken by educators who advocate for media education that teaches students to be critical viewers of everyday mass media. In a similar vein, the message here might be “do not simply believe what you see.” This may be easier to accomplish in regards to sites that have already attained a quality of “kitsch,” (relic Hollywood film sets, Disneyworld and Mount Rushmore come to mind) but more difficult with sites such as the ones profiled in the essay “Tragic Tourism.”

The examples given here are generally more sober in their relationship to the events that occurred at the site. I imagine that the form of critique that might be allowed would relate more to the social ills attributed to causes of the tragic events rather than a questioning of the events themselves. To add another layer to this discussion, the “Ground Zero” that is the World Trade Center site would have been an interesting example to include, given the debates that have raged not only over the actual usage of the site but also over what artistic institutions would be considered “good citizen tenants” of the site.

Janet Cardiff’s piece, “Her Long Black Hair,” invites participants on an audio tour of Central Park. While the piece utilizes the park extensively, in many ways it is the experience itself which is sculpted and the site itself which is subsidiary. Cardiff’s recorded narration includes memories, conversations, serendipitous events, instructive “exercises,” historical information, associations and allusions. I began the experience feeling somewhat unsettled that the recording prevented me from attending to the actual sounds in the environment – something that I as a native New Yorker do more vigilantly than I often consciously realize. Instead my walk was shaped by the sounds, authentic to the environment, organized and placed by the artist. I soon realized that I was so attuned to her comments that I had few or no thoughts of my own. As I reflected on this wrinkle in the experience I came to see that that seemed to be precisely the point – to experience a recreation of her experience: to walk in her footsteps, listen to her thoughts, follow her quest, and ultimately breathe her breath. The piece ultimately reflects the internal world of a human being experiencing the physical world at any given moment: with a jumble of thoughts, knowledge, activities and goals; her narration is peppered with “digressions” that are inspired by sights, sounds, interactions and memories.

The seemingly personal nature of the Cardiff is reminiscent of Lippard’s work as well; the sites that Lippard writes about reflect her experiences and predilections both as a local and as a tourist. Some of her passages are associative in a way similar to Cardiff’s work. Both mix personal reflection with artistic construction, individual impressions with serious observation and historical information. And both therefore end up reflecting the potential experience of either the “host” or “guest” in any given tourist interaction. Perhaps the blurring of these roles is part of the possibility of a “progressive tourism” in which the commonality of experience in the moment, rather than the inequality of participants’ varying roles, serves as the basis for more “authentic” exchange. Lippard’s informal tours of Santa Fe might be one example, albeit a relatively “unproduced” one. Programs such as Big Apple Greeters, in which “natives” serve as official but not professional “hosts,” might also point in this direction, especially in unscripted or unexpected moments. I wonder how one can create “tours” that allow for more interaction and exchange along these lines.

Note: I chose the term “participant” because “viewer” and “listener” seemed wholly inadequate, while “visitor” seemed too constructed.

Posted by BKG at 8:10 PM

Transcendental Experiences

Lucy Lippard was not the first person to notice the similarities of tourism and art. In “Surprise Packages,” Lippard writes “[n]othing is more Surrealist than tourism” (34).

James Clifford noted that early French ethnography was equal parts art-collecting and tourism. The aim of the Dakar-Djibouti Mission (1932), the first large-scale French anthropological field expedition, led by Marcel Griaule accompanied by artists and writers, was to collect primitive art the for the Musée de l'Homme. The rituals of modernist travel and modernist art spectatorship both require the viewer to share a conventional bourgeoisie gaze. In both, a disinterested contemplation of the “Other,” to produce a transcendent aesthetic experience meant to access mystical realms of value and a deeper understanding of the hidden nature of the self.

Lippard also compares the disorienting juxtapositions produced by people seeking experiences outside their ordinary life to the practice of Dadaists well as contemporary artists who make interventions into dominant ways of looking through performative art that is intended to criticize and defamiliarize the unfamiliar. Ironically, tourism itself, which is intended to produce a temporary self-critical alienation, is criticized in the praxis of artists whose intention is to do the same. “Seduction and Hyperbole,” for example, focuses on artists who make feminist critiques of tourism. “Exhibitionism” and “Crossroads Everywhere: Cultural Tourism” are articles that deconstruct Museum exhibitions and Cultural tourism that highlight the disparities between the class of people who hold the intended role of viewer, and those who are not welcome on site (in spite of the legitimating ideologies that support these practices –of the democratization of culture and of multi-cultural encounters).

We observe this in both the work of Marcel Proust, as well as the expedition. Janet Cardiff’s tour unites the experience of art, travel, and life using strategies so similar to Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, I can only consider it a homage to the modernist masterpiece. The narrator’s experience, memories, and narratives about another man’s experience explore the dialogue between embodied experiences and those constructed in the intellect, which must be combined in the appreciation of art, travel, and love. In the novel, Marcel notes that as a child he did not properly enjoy trips to distant lands until he learned to cultivate an informed anticipation for the site. His musings on art appreciation and love similarly suggest all aesthetic pleasure requires a cultivation of a dramatic transcendental experience through the embodied experience of something outside the Self.

I the tradition of Minimalist sculpture –I guess --Cardiff’s narrative at times forces us into an acknowledgement of the coevalness of ourselves as spectators with the objecthood of the things in our surroundings. Her directions force us to experience the physicality of the sites in a concentrated and deliberate manner. This experience, however is complicated and confounded by her use of narrative to take us at times far away from the existential relationship with the park, and at times deeper into this experience, but deeper in the sense that we are looking at the sties that have been newly invested with alien meanings.

Cardiff weaves a number of what at times seem banal narratives into the walking experience whose leitmotifs develop similar themes of how we have aesthetic experience. We at times enter the story of an unknown woman, are lead to understand the historical significance of a spot, are forced to subject different areas to an extended meditative gaze (and informed that the park was designed with ideals of modern landscape painting in mind, in case we did not properly enjoy a romantic landscape), even to breath at the appropriately leisurely rate. Like Proust, Cardiff forces us to recognize that memory makes a site significant; often the memory is not one’s own. While aesthetic experiences are experienced individually, they are presumably universal experiences (so long as we belong to the class of people cultivated enough to experience universal experiences). The story of Eurydice invokes the themes of memory and disciplined experience. Enjoying sites properly –whether on tour or in the museum, requires us to stay on the beaten path.

Speaking of other people’s stories and the significance of sites, and the relationship of art and tourism, I’ve posted an image of a painting of the spot Winona Ryder was arrested for shoplifting my art school buddy recently sold to Charles Saatchi (who also bought a painting of the place Hugh Grant was arrested for “lewd conduct” with a prostitute). Would you pay for this photo or to pass by this site on a tour?

Dwayne Moser "Untitled Backdrop" (site of Winona Ryder shoplifting arrest, 12/14/01) 2002
Acrylic on muslin
6' x 11'1"

Posted by Pilar Rau at 7:59 PM | TrackBack

Encounters with Dark Tourism

Having always had an ambivalent and uneasy relationship toward what Lippard calls tragic tourism, I was very interested in her discussion of dark “tourist targets.”(118) Growing up I lived about a three-hour drive from Auschwitz. In a landscape from which the Jewish presence had been almost completely obliterated, there are few markers of a culture that until recently had been an integral part of Poland. I had often wandered around decrepit synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, untouched for years except for the neo-Nazis whose painted swastikas served as raw reminders of anti-Jewish sentiment. These wound-sites, have a strange status, hidden from view yet not completely destroyed. In these forgotten spaces I could wander alone or sit and think in silence, unobstructed. It was in these spaces that I felt rooted, connected to the past that, although talked about in history books and classes, had no material visibility. Auschwitz on the other hand was a different matter. Ethical dilemmas paralyzed my agency to make a decision about whether or not to go. Yet, as it turned out I didn’t have to make a choice.

One night my friend and I were on a train headed for Budapest. As part of our alternative tourism project, one of which axioms was not to spend any money on transportation (this was at once an absolute requirement since we wanted to travel but had no money and a revolt against imposed restrictions on our freedom of movement), we were traveling for free i.e. we hadn’t bought train tickets. Most times we managed to get away with a free train rain, but this night we ran out of luck. The conductor had the train stop and made us get out into a vast and empty countryside in the dead of winter. We wandered around trying to find a road. With no sense of direction we walked, finally coming upon a road which we followed. The road was unlit and unmarked. We were avid hitchhikers but walking for what seemed like hours we did not encounter one car. Finally, we saw a sign ahead of us. Our relief at having found some indication of our whereabouts was dispelled as soon as we were able to make out the words: Oświęcim (Auschwitz).

Years later I did make the conscious choice to visit Auschwitz, but it was much different than this first encounter. That winter night it was so dark we could not make out much of the concentration camp and this made our experience all the more horrific. We did not have the safety of seeing the markers which frame and contain the horror. Also, we did not have the comfort of leaving. We wanted to run but couldn't not knowing if we'd be running to or from. The bitter cold and cloak of darkness, which rendered the place abstract and sinister, forced us to experience and ponder the horror of this site.

One of the things that Lippard touches on which is so crucial but often missing in sites of tragic tourism is a connection to the present. Memorials to the dead, massacre sites are constructed to leave one with a feeling of guilt, powerlessness, and deep pessimism about humanity. Lippard suggests the potential of making connections with current events. Through strategic intervention it is possible to create a connection to the present not only on a local but also global level. People ask about the Holocaust: “How could people let this happen?” Yet there are genocides taking place right now and somehow we still let them happen. Tragic tourism is a site of potential intervention through drawing of lines between historic atrocities and current social and political activism.

Posted by Dominika Bennacer at 4:51 PM

Theme Tours

In On the Beaten Track, Lucy R. Lippard employs a rather post-modernist point of view to read tourism. In “The Tourist at Home,” Lippard remarks that “the local is defined by its unfamiliar counterpart.”(13) Such remark makes us aware of the problematic presumption of the clear distinction between the tourists and the locals, and the separation of them. In fact, the locals, compared with the so-called tourists, are people who are relatively familiar with the area. Therefore, due to their negligence and indifference to the surroundings, the locals, in some cases, might be equally unfamiliar with the area as the tourists. The domestic tourism is a kind of tourism which allows the locals to re-familiarize themselves with the familiar, the things that taken for granted.

In the introductory chapter, Lippard suggests that tourism is ever-changing and can never be settled. By citing David Harvey, she claims that “tourism is about becoming rather than being.” The locals change over time as they interact with the environment as well as with tourists (14).

In her book, Lippard also draws readers’ attention to the impact of tourism, which she describes as a “mixed blessing” (22). Though “economically positive,” the drawbacks of the cultural and economic aspects could be depleting and devastating to the locale. As Lippard contends, tourism could result in “internal colonialism.”

In the chapter on cultural tourism (or “arts and heritage tourism”), Lippard remarks that cultural tourism operates on three fronts, namely, arts tourism, history tourism, and ethnotourism (72). I am interested in what she defines as “special interest” tourism, which is a genre of tourism that directs to the interest of certain group of people. She cites the “theme tours of America” designed by Japanese as an example. These theme tours are “based on their favorite books, such as Anne of Green Gables and Gone with the Wind,” and especially designed for book fans.

I personally read such tours as parallels of Korean Soap Opera Tours for their direct references to fictions. I think these tours demonstrate the constructiveness of tourism and how the consumers indirectly make the travel agencies to offer tours whose itineraries mainly based on the narrative line of the stories and fictional characters. There is (or maybe was) a kind of tours whose theme revolve around a Chinese classic novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber, and its author, Tsao Xue-Chin. Similar to the soap opera tours, the itinerary of The Dream of the Red Chamber tours are designed to cover the “authentic” sites, on which the significant scenes in the novel took place. However, unlike Korean soap opera, The Dream of the Red Chamber tours put great emphasis on the biographical facts of the author and include important locales of the author’s background and/or of the author’s writing this novel. In this sense, the novel tours have a strong historical and cultural background, of which the soap opera tours are void.

There are definitely other differences between Chinese classical novel tours and Korean soap opera tours. Nevertheless, in this moment I wish to focus on their commonalities. By citing this theme tour that take/took place in China, I want to raise the question of the construction of itineraries. I wonder whether the designs of the tours are meant to stir tourists’ emotions and/or to fulfill tourists’ expectations. Is tourism an art of the manipulation of minds?

Posted by Stella Yu-Wen Wang at 4:26 PM

In Paris

I am in Paris and the blog format of our responses compels me to write this as a diary like entry that relates my travel observations to readings past and present. I am here for only two days and I came predominantly to visit a friend, not to see any sites. However, since I don't live in Paris nor have I spent any significant time in Paris, I currently qualify as a tourist.

I spent last night with an American friend who lives in Paris. I arrived serendipitously on a special evening called Nuit Blanche, when the entire city stays open all night so residents can travel in groups from location to location to observe special arts and music installations. The streets were packed. I was in a group that included a mix of Parisian residents: ex pats, Italians and French. “Museum going is for most a “foreign” experience, so the consumer tends to be a tourist whether or not s/he lives elsewhere” (Lippard, 90). Applying this to a sort of outdoor museum, Parisian residents transformed into tourists making pilgrimage throughout the city and just as they turned into tourists, my tourist status was rendered anonymous.

The installations were not phenomenal. One, for example, involved entering a crowded room that turned out to be a religious sanctuary with pews. Viewers sat in these pews in the dark with organ music playing. The point of visual interest was a small crucifix figurine modeled by neon lights and shadows where one would normally find a religious leader. According to Lippard, “even art museums are de-spiritualized when they become tourist destinations rather than inner sanctums of high culture” (Lippard, 64). As a constructed religious space, the tourists in this instance brought the spirituality to the room by performing as participants in a religious setting. Without the tourist viewers, the spiritual space would’ve remained empty and devoid of spiritual energy.

Another installation involved the transformation of a Hotel Particuliers (old homes of aristocrats) into a bonfire space. Organized as a circle with viewers surrounding the site, gigantic bread loaves lit from the inside were suspended over a bonfire of disco balls and charcoal sticks. Interest came more from what was happening around the installation than the installation itself. Some viewers made funny faces, some shared sarcastic comments with me in English, and some started to embrace in dramatic positions while their friends photographed them in front of the disco balls. Lippard writes, “when an emotionally riveting site is visited with a crowd, the surrounding company can be a turn-off or a turn-on” (Lippard, 122). As a group, reactions are contagious. In this instance there appeared to be a viewer consensus that the site was lighthearted and comical. Considering the activities that usually take place around a bonfire, I believe this is consistent with the artist’s goals as well as consistent with the community building process at work within Nuit Blanche at large.

Despite the limitations of the art and despite the fact the artwork was not specifically related to tourism, the space between art and tourism, resident and tourist all converged to reveal interesting correlations between viewer (looking at art), participant (migrating en masse in the dark streets of Paris), and tourist (viewing the participants). What took place last night was a community event, something that brought the city out of their homes and onto the streets participating as a group in the physical act of touring and the visual act of witnessing. Why were tourist practices of migration, view, and documentation (via photography) employed for the purpose of community building for those in the know, when typically this process is reserved for strangers in an unknown environment? Was the tour really about the art or did it take a secondary role to the tourism involved?

When I checked out of my hotel, the desk man offered me an International Tribune put out by the New York Times. While I waited for the train I glanced at the front page and couldn’t help but notice that it was riddled with stories relevant to the issues we grapple with. Next to a small bit about Austrian apprehension towards allowing Turkey into the EU for fear of the already present tourism escalating to mass migration, there was an article about the tourist targeted bombing in Indonesia. Published in 1999, Lippard’s statements on the “dangers of ordinary tourism escalating” (Lippard, 134) seem ominously forecasting of an increasingly violent trend that further elucidates the complex dynamics involved in tourist relationships as well as the power struggles.

Power was a central theme in Lippard’s book. Many of the artist examples given looked at some form of power play taking place whether it related to institutional power, national power, or individual power attempts. Artists highlight power systems and often point out where masses of man have erred. When something becomes as pervasive as tourism there is bound to be some errors and several power systems for artists to articulate. Power, desire, beauty……the recurring use of these words is something I would like to look at further. For my personal focus, I am particularly interested in what Lippard wrote about artists’ use of photography and postcards to comment on the power relationships involved. I would like to incorporate a visual element to my final project and will develop a postcard series based on how Sepharad ’92 would be represented if documented as a postcard.

Posted by Erin Madorsky at 2:51 PM

The art of construction and deconstruction

Lucy R. Lippard introduces tourism as “an emptying out, a void of daily experience and responsibility” (8), which sometimes transforms into a “critical”, thought-provoking experience. It is this transformation that inspires Lippard; she incorporates two new aspects into the analysis of tourism, ‘time’ and ‘art’ in order to explore how certain tourist productions “shakes up our belief and value systems and opens us up” (4).

The author points out that “by definition, tourism is about going “away”; time is as good a destination as space” (159). Indeed, Lippard’s tourists often time travel, revisiting the past they are all part of in one way or another. The main focus of “On the Beaten Track” is domestic tourism (2); and she analyzes tourism “from the perspective of places ‘visited’” (22), places that were established to exhibit and preserve the past, such as museums, antique shops and memorial sites. At the same time, Lippard, as an artist, is interested in finding (and defining) the artist in tourist productions, exploring “the role progressive artists might play in facilitating, even creating a responsible, critical, perhaps even satirical tourist industry” (11). As a result, after studying different sides and topics of tourism, Lippard concludes each chapter by examining artists’ responses and comments on the analyzed tourist phenomenon.

‘Past’ and ‘art’ are the most effective forces in identity-formation; therefore the ultimate subject of Lippard’s analysis is identity-formation by/in tourist productions. The author’s investigation touches upon the general subject of “the quality of life”, “social change” (34) and “identity formation” (128) and how “regional local identity is falsified or diluted” (83). However, Lippard fails to present how artists’ work in the tourist industry can shape contemporary society.

The artists and art works Lippard uses as examples mostly criticize the weaknesses and ignorance of tourist industry. Their primary aim is to ‘deconstruct’. Although Lippard points out that “construction will involve some deconstruction” (32), she rarely incorporates construction into her analysis. Therefore, I was challenged to find art works, in which artistic and social construction was the primal aim instead of commenting on the prevalent tourist industry.
The best example I found was ‘The Gates’ by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, which took place this winter in Central Park. Although the construction of ‘The Gates’ involved the concrete deconstructive and constructive features Lippard depicts in the case study on the creation of a tourist site in Maine, this is not what I would like to focus on. My aim is to point out the social significance a tourist attraction may acquire. Under ‘The Gates’ social/racial/political and geographical differences were suspended; we all stood there mesmerized, tourists and locals, black and white, classy businessmen in suit and tie, and the workers of the streets and the subway in their own class-marking uniforms. One could see uptown school classes as well as groups of children from the kindergartens of Harlem all around drawing; attempting to conceive the inconceivable.

Examining memorial sites, Lippard touches upon sites, which remind nations of crimes they committed in the past. The primary focus of her analysis is to reveal local people’s reaction to these “memories of shameful events” (128). I would like to expand Lippard’s idea and point out the artists’ responsibility in the formation of the historical past and national identity.
The glory of the past is often the basis of national identity in Eastern European countries. Those small nations cannot “afford” to have any stigmas, stains or dirt in their idealized idea of the nation – anything that could ruin the perfect ‘picture’. Therefore, it is only the artist who has the power and the tools (often within the realm of tourism) to modify these distorted self-images. The state have to acknowledge the crimes of the past on a political level, but the artists can help the people through their work to ‘digest’ such responsibilities, ensuring that the ‘national identity’ is reconstructed instead of deconstructed.

Lucy R. Lippard touches upon several different themes and tourist/social phenomena; however, she rarely explores them in their full complexity. The rest relies on us. “Every tourist is an involuntary artist (…) and every artist is an involuntary tourist.” (137) Lippard’s implication is that every one of us shares the responsibilities that she contributes to the artists; the facilitation, even creation of “a responsible, critical, perhaps even satirical tourist industry” (11).

Posted by Aniko Szucs at 2:45 PM

Alma Guzman responds

Not afraid to bad-mouth the tourist while still acknowledging her role as a tourist, Lucy Lippard presents the artist to the tourist spectrum. She explores tourist places as art spaces while dissecting what residents might call home and strangers a “cultural paradise”. In the process, she refers to an enticing vision--“progressive tourism,” an industry in which perhaps the “conscious” and “responsible” tourist could exist in pleasurable and unfamiliar travel. Is it possible? A progressive tourism—it incites hope, but does not sound realistic when Lippard states it is a process that “progressive people” are “struggling to imagine” (11).

In that group of “progressive people” exists the “progressive artist” trying to find a role in this vision. Lippard mentions artists like Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena who took up roles as Two Undiscovered Amerindians and were exhibited to wide-eyed and gullible
visitors in museums across the world. She mentions James Luna who challenged people to take a picture with a real Indian—in street clothes. Lippard refers to artists who dedicate their projects solely for the sake tourism. There’s Kathy Vargas who addresses tourism in her hometown from a Chicana/Mestiza point-of-view. There’s Delilah Montoya who designed postcards that critique tourist activities which undermine her cultural heritage. These artists had similar goals— their performances were efforts to reclaim identity and put the ignorant person/tourist on the spot. A little Tourism 101 for the absent minded—I like that.

Yes, tourists are so absent-minded that “they cannot possibly comprehend what it is to live in a place perceived as existing solely for scrutiny” Lippard adds. This is an extremely bold statement coming from an individual who labels herself as a rubbernecking tourist. This frightens me and adds to my already dubious views with regard to progressive tourism. She mentions pueblos in New Mexico in which tourists feel free to invade without permission. A drawing by a 12 year-old boy shows how tourism has permanently moved into the neighborhood. So how to make tourists comprehend? Whose job is it when the tourist wants to see, the local wants them to leave, and the artist wants respect?

What does Lippard have to say in regard to my pessimistic reaction to progressive tourism? “Utopia too is a necessary and authentic goal, the object of a longing that may never be fulfilled but functions positively and authentically for just that reason” (164). Maybe this utopia will exist when enough people start to envision possibility (which many already have) and begin to put greed on the backburner.

Posted by BKG at 1:58 PM

Touring America With Lucy Lippard

In On the Beaten Track, Lucy Lippard takes readers on a fascinating tour of predominantly U.S. tourist sites, taking time out to examine not only the sites themselves, but also how they’re constructed, perpetuated and subverted. Further, she investigates the changing relationships between sites and their residents, as well as between the sites and the tourists that visit them. During this process, Lippard raises a number of fascinating questions with regard to the construction of history, nostalgia, and community, the tourist’s desire for experience, and the shaping of tourists’ perceptions of tourist sites as well as the institutions that maintain the sites.

On page two, Lippard discusses “rubbernecking” and the implication of a willingness to “stretch, literally, past her own experience, to lean forward in anticipation, engagement, amazement, or horror.” However, at numerous other points in her text she cites the growing number of “armchair,” “national geographic “and” virtual” tourists who prefer the comfort of their own homes to venturing outside. In addition, she mentions how often tourists and/or curators will implement their previously held visions (particularly colonial) upon a tourist site. Add to this Ed Bruner's notion of the “pre-tour narrative,” and one wonders whether tourists really wish to stretch their boundaries and conceptions, or only reinforce their previously held convictions. Where does the line lie? Are their particular groups of tourists or particular circumstances in which tourists are more likely to challenge their preconceptions? If so, what are these?

On 87, Lippard relates the story of a young American tourist to Jamaica who “resigned himself to random acts of tourism…[while] Fate’s travel agents had delivered an expectedly pleasant…. and ethnically authentic…. vacation.” Add to this anecdote Lippard’s “head tourist” (114) who travels in her mind or imagination, and her discussion of how those in the group around a tourist will drastically alter her interaction with a site for better or for worse (122). The conflation of these three excerpts from Lippard’s text lead me to seriously question the extent to which authenticity and the exotic exist solely in the mind of the tourist and have little or nothing to do with physically traveling to a new area, or the site itself.

Finally, how do we situate Janet Cardiff’s “Her Long Black Hair” amongst works like Fred Wilson’s “Mining the Museum,” Robbins and Becher’s “Dachau,” and Kathy Vargas’ “My Alamo?” (Note: I’m sure there are numerous other works contained in the Lippard’s book that would contribute to this question, but these are the first that leap out at me.) It appears to me that although their media are quite different, each of these projects is addressing a similar issue, that of uncovering alternate interpretations of environments. Though Cardiff’s project is decidedly less political than the others are, it is no less powerful in revealing the extent to which preconceptions and the force of habit dictate our interactions with our environments.

Posted by Tyler Sinclair at 1:04 PM

Layering

Lucy Lippard’s thesis is not clearly compartmentalized in the way that say, Dean MacCannell’s is. Her analyses are not conclusive; rather her sites seem to peel open like an onion, leaving room for other layers of history and experience that have and have not been yet. Tourist sites like her summer home in Maine or the city of Santa Fe host a complex of co-exisiting and sometimes competing narratives - although, unlike Bruner, she does not exactly articulate it that way. Rather, the places, objects and people themselves stand in tension with each other - the land on which the trailer park will be built, the beach, the locals, and the semi-or demi- locals (“summer people”) , and the tourists and campers who are just passing through. A tourist-hostile sign on the highway in Maine (“Next time just send the money”) is as worthy of attention as any number of “tourist friendly” attractions.

This is not the story of the master narrative usurping the ‘minor’ ones - though that is bound to happen, Lippard seems drawn to sites whose social and historical (and artistic) intentions and tensions have not completely overwritten each other, and to art work which teases out these existing tensions. If all tourists have are surfaces, the progressive tourist does not look for an authentic reality beyond the surface itself but attends to the complexity of the surface, the elements that make it up, how it becomes itself. The artist can help to bring things into view. I do not think, however, that Lippard intends to privilege the artist as the only one who is capable of this. The tourist herself, and the producers and performers of of tourist events and sites can blur the boundary between artist, tourist, producer/performer. It is not necessarily a didactic relationship (the artists teaching the tourists how to see tourism).

Janet Cardiff’s audio walking piece, “Her Long Black Hair” is concerned with many of the same questions of layering, history and experience of places as Lippard. She succeeds, I think, in changing our perception of place. While in other thinking and writing on Cardiff I thought of the piece as ‘teaching’ us to see the park, I would say now that looking back on it, it is certainly not a didactic relationship of artist teaching tourist. The soundtrack we hear, while it contains some information, is carefully put together so as to almost unobtrusively sit on top of our experience, and to create an experience where the ‘real world’ is indistinguishable from the piece. The simulaneity of this piece, its full orchestration of experience, is a feat. We are highly controlled, yet I feel only lightly controlled, and not at all constricted. I want to keep up, to follow her footsteps. Ironically, it is through giving up my physical autonomy to the piece am I made aware of myself as a part of this place, Central Park. The subject is the layeredness of experience, memory, and place, the media are place, sound, and me. I feel hermetically sealed off from the rest of the park, yet at the same time I am made aware of how each person is also unwittingly a medium in this piece. Not forgetting that Central Park was constructed by Olmsted as a series of three dimensional picturesque views, a large scale landscape sculpture, “Her Long Black Hair” is in symbiosis with this large scale public art piece. I think Lippard would admire the ingenuity of this symbiosis: it enhances perception without necessarily bringing a heavy critique or assuming to reveal the sordid truth of a place (but it does not close the door to criticism) . It reveals the layering of human experience of place of which we are a part - and it does so with us, not to us.

It is interesting that most of the work that Lippard examines is visual art. I wonder if this belies a bias toward the model of the tourist as a visual being (the “tourist gaze” of Urry we have heard so much about), or if this is simply her art history background, or the weakness of the book format to represent work that is not visual. Considering the multimedia Cardiff piece alongside some of the works in the Lippard book makes me wonder if other media (sound, movement, taste) aren’t equally suited to the exploration of tourism in art, as these are part of the tourist experience as much as the visual and often as highly controlled or more. I found the “direct input” of sound to be evocative in a way that pictures aren’t, and especially appropriate for this kind of “gentle” intervention in perception of place.

Posted by Sarah Klein at 12:46 PM

Yuichiro on Defamiliarization

I wonder what a "progressive tourism" might look like--tourism that is "responsible, critical, perhaps even satirical," a kind of tourism which BKG suggests us to consider in her reading guidelines for this week, and what might the role of artists be in bringing it about?

DEFAMILIARIZATION
Lippard affirms the connection between contemporary critical tourist art and Dada (34). As in Duchampian readymades, both take up a familiar object and place it in an unexpected context. Critical tourist art places the viewers in an unfamiliar position where they are obliged to muse reflexively on familiar, and often exploitative tourist practices. For example, Tseng Kwong Chi’s “East Meet West” project (35-6), which displays self-portraits of the artist in Mao-suit standing in front of great “American” monuments, where such a figure is least expected, displacing tourists’ prior expectations.

I would like to bring your attention to a number of other works that Lippard does not include in her book. One is Duane Hanson’s life-size, and so LIFE=LIKE dummies of “Tourists,” replete with transplanted real human hair, inevitably making the viewers uncomfortable as they look upon their mirror-images. Others include Fiona Templeton’s You the City (documented in TDR about 10 years ago), and Terayama Shuji’s Knock, both of which succeeded in defamilializing the environments in which you lived. In their audience-participatory theatre pieces, audience members were given a direction to visit specific urban locations where they would be a part of the “play.” But as the boundary between fiction and reality became blurred, spectators were no longer sure whether the landscapes and actions they were looking at were real, made up by the artists, or mirages they created themselves in their own imaginary. Sometimes they were not sure whether they were seeing actors enacting scripts or passers-by doing their daily routines. In such pieces, the audience must weave narratives together from the encounters they have with found-objects and real environments. Their audience may be compared to the tourist who, “herself creates an “off the beaten track” to reassert her own autonomy and independence (Lippard, 10)” on the beaten track.

Jenny Holzer is another artist who employs defamilialization, who, according to NYU Events Calendar, will be projecting her “truisms” on Bobst Library, as well as on the city’s other iconic sites such as Rockefeller Center between Monday and Wednesday this week.

Common among the artists mentioned above (and of course we must not forget Christo among them) is that they do not necessarily work with privileged spaces such as museums or monuments that tourist pay visits to. Their work suggests that the city is no longer the locus of the boredom of mundane, everyday life from which tourists wish to escape, but is a wonder-generating apparatus suffused, not only with aesthetic, but even with TOURISTIC discoveries. We live a touristic life even when we are at home.

Perhaps one of the reasons why I was not so impressed by Janet Cardiff’s Her Long Black Hair as others seem to have been, is because her work was so finely and closely knit, to the extent that it reminded me of T.S. Eliot and his “mythical method” in The Waste Land, as the layers of narratives from the Greek mythology (Orpheus), history (a fleeing slave), personal narrative (the anecdote of the vibrating bed), surreal imagination (scavenging pigs being shot in the park) and others cohered to generate an well-ordered experience in me. I felt that the text woven out of the interaction between the soundscape created by the artist and the real landscape of the park was hers and not mine. I wished I had more time and place that I could play with.

ARTISTS LOOK BACK
Lippard argues, by citing Jamaica Kinkaid’s A Small Place, now a canonical tract in post-colonial studies, and much discussed performance piece Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit. . .by Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena (sorry I could not put accent marks) among others, that “much of the significant art about travel and tourism is by members of those cultural groups that are stereotypically stared at (38).” The issue of who has the right to look (or the right to take pictures), that has been brought up a number of times during the class, it seems to me, should be given a chance for a fuller, more extended discussion.

However, as I am running out of time on this, another beautiful Sunday morning, please allow me to finish my response with just another example.

Manila’s garbage dumps (called smoky mountains because smoke of burning tyres never ceases to arise out of ground), where the Philippines’ poorest live by scavenging food, clothes and any recyclable, sellable items, has been a destination of environmental tourism for more than a decade. I have heard that local NGOs who are arranging visits are now getting weary of the influx of ever-increasing number of group tours organized by the NGOs from the First World. Participants, I am sure, are well-meaning people with an agenda to end the Third World poverty. Yet they must GO, SEE, and TAKE PICTURES of the smoky-mountain inhabitants before they can start their action plans. Call it curiosity, paternalism, or voyeurism. They should know better that the knowledge of the place, and not an actual visit will suffice to initiate an action. We have enough to see already to believe.

Posted by Yuichiro Takahashi at 12:39 PM

Shifting the Gaze

Lippard in On the Beaten Track highlights how the tourists experience is itself a type of artwork, a kind of framing. Art about tourism has the potential to either strengthen existing metanarratives or to challenge our ways of seeing. Lippard writes: “Tourism is the apotheosis of looking around, which is the root of regional arts as well as how we know where we are” and “The tourist experience is a kind of art form if it is, as Alexander Wilson says, its own way of organizing the landscape and our sense of it.” (13)

Indeed, the self-consciousness of the tourist experience is what links tourism to art. (36) Just as the artist is always questioning ways of seeing, the tourist is trying to make sense of the unfamiliar she is experiencing. The tourist experience is surreal and therefore art about tourism must reflect that disjuncture: “Art about tourism must of necessity be based on the modern and postmodern montage of fragmentation, disjunction and alienation.” (37)

While tourists and artists are linked in sharing a self-consciousness that is born out of “making sense” of the unfamiliar, most tourist productions are not interested in creating new ways of seeing. Producers are interested in guiding tourists to “see” in ways congruent with pre-set narratives. Traditional tourism is built on maintaining the status quo, or locking down on interpretation to allow the tourist to feel that she is getting an authentic experience. The artist’s prerogative is the inverse; she questions these normalized interpretation of place and history and suggests other ways of seeing.

Both tourism and art deal with issues of the gaze and representation. Who has the power to look at another? In addition, who decides how that other is represented? Both tourists and artists gaze, but what they gaze at or choose to represent differs greatly. By redirecting one’s gaze, artists have a unique role in reframing what is gazed upon in the tourist experience. Zig Jackson’s Indian Photographing Tourist Photographing Indian (41), is an example of this redirected gaze. Not only is the gaze redirected, but it is returned to those who are traditionally stared at.

A “progressive tourism” recognizes the many levels of the touristic experience; it is highly reflexive. One acknowledges one’s own motivations for going to a particular place¾ the baggage one is taking along¾ so that one experiences the place for what it is and not what one wants it to be. As Lippard writes, her progressive tourist is one who will “be able to challenge her own pleasures and discomforts, to create a responsible tourist as well as a responsible inhabitant of unfamiliar places . . . I prefer David Harvey’s contention that tourism is about becoming rather than being.” (11) By emphasizing being, there is an acknowledgement that as a tourist, I do not go to a place as “me” and interact with “them,” but rather there is a constant negotiation with changing and overlapping identities.

David Avalos, Louis Hock, and Elizabeth Sisco’s “Welcome to America’s Finest Tourist Plantation.” (48), is an example of art bringing about this progressive tourism. Posters where put on buses highlighting the illegal immigrant labor vital to tourism in San Diego. By viewing these posters, tourists become more responsible and critical, because they are more aware of what is going on where they are visiting. The barrier between controlled tourist discourse and the large factors at play is broken down. Tourists have more of an understanding of the struggles the population they are visiting and consequently less of a feeling that they can go to a place with no regard for their effect on it. With this acknowledgement of current contemporary struggles, it is harder to regard culture in a timeless sense.

In general, tourists must acknowledge their needs and desires and examine how those desires might contribute to seeing “the other,” in a particular and not necessarily accurate light. In progressive tourism, tourists are no longer trying to stranglehold “natives” into timeless culture so that tourists can feel they have had an authentic experience.

Kathy Vargas’s “My Alamo” (1995), (16), is an example of using art as “a mode of inquiry” or “research method” to look at personal relationship to place and how that relationship relates to dominant narratives. This piece highlights individual responses to place; places are not composed of one metanarrative but rather many, and in many cases very different, individual narratives. This art piece is a different research method for gaining information about personal narratives that a more traditional ethnographic interview. It provides a more multifaceted response than a simply verbal narrative. Zig Jackson’s work with the redirected gaze in Indian Photographing Tourist Photographing Indian (41), is an example of performed theory. The notion of the gaze as a key feature of the touristic experience and the gazes’ relationship to power, is animated through his highly reflexive photograph.

The emphasis on the individual experience of a place and of examining ways of seeing could be very helpful in my work. I would like to explore shifting the gaze in a way to empower those who are often gazed at. Perhaps I will go to neighborhood of Mexican immigrants and have a resident guide me through her neighborhood. Perhaps I could take a series of photographs of Mexican workers outside of the restaurants in which they work ¾ as if they are the owners ¾ questioning power relationships and visibility. I could even have fake “Zagat” reviews that highlight Mexican labor or describe how wonderful the restaurant was by how well run the kitchen is. More simply, I could have a Mexican restaurant worker narrate his day working in the restaurant, serving as a visible catalog of what is not cataloged, an examination of the front and back stage.

Cardiff’s walk of Central Park emphasized the personal. It was an exercise in different ways of seeing– looking, sensing, hearing etc . . . We were asked to follow her directions, in order to free up space for us to have an embodied experience. There was a real egalitarian aspect to the tour – it was free, it was low tech. Moreover, it was self-propelled in that the mode of transportation was walking; Cardiff was leading me, but I was walking on my own two feet.

The gaze was radically shifted. On the one hand, Cardiff was directing my gaze to things that I might not look at – a particular tree, a lamppost. On the other hand, she was very honest that the gaze is not simply what one sees looking at in one’s surroundings, but what one is searching for internally, an internal gaze. There were many different levels of gazing and looking; it was a multi-sensorial searching.

The Cardiff walk was for me about performed theory. It was an exercise in ways of experiencing place, of allowing the place to speak to you, of having a dialogue with the place. Throughout the narration, Cardiff was constantly asking questions, questions that were not necessarily answered, however she was opening up different areas of inquiry. The experiments allowed a sensorial awareness. For example, putting the saliva on my cheek made in aware of its wetness and the air on my face – in general, the multifaceted nature of my relationship with the environment.

Change and staying the same were key themes. When Cardiff said “See the Asian couple getting married,” and I saw the Asian couple, I realized how the park is used in a similar way each day. However, looking at the picture of the pond in winter, I realized how the park is also constantly changing. The park, like me, is in a living and breathing dialogue with time.

Posted by Sarah Zoogman at 12:21 PM

The Artistic Lens . . . No, Wait, The Touristic Lens . . . Er, the Artouristc Lens?

To begin this response, I want to cheat a little bit – I have already read the post entitled “Art and Tourism, Tourism and Art,” and Scott’s post (which found a central thesis lacking in Lippard’s book) and I would like to quickly respond to them. Although I agree that Lippard’s rhetorical style involves quite a bit of jumping around, form personal history, to theoretical analysis, to art criticism, and even to ethnographic interviewing, I fervently believe that this was highly intentional on Lippard’s part.

As a “writer, activist, and curator,” according to the short bio on the back of the book, she is no stranger to the world of art and artists (which the text itself clearly proves), and, I believe, has something of the artist’s soul in herself. Like many artists, she knows that she cannot possibly escape her individual experience, her own personal lens on the world, and so instead of allowing that to be a weakness in the exploration of the universal, she utilizes this “limitation” to her advantage, creating a long response to tourism and art that reflect her own unique perspective and nobody else’s, using that “local” in the hopes of expanding to a “universal” (in the same way that the famous envelope address in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town goes from the extremely specific to the extremely expansive and general – “Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God” – to symbolize how Grover’s Corners itself is meant to be a stand-in for “the Mind of God”).

Indeed, Lippard is highly aware of the individualization of the essays that are in On the Beaten Track, for on the very first page she explains:

These essays began with a chapter that fell out of my last book, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, and, as such, they remain primarily focused on the United States. [ . . . ] I also remain more or less within my own experience, so extreme adventure and hedonistic temptations are omitted. (My own touristic preferences run to history, ruins, conversation, funky culture, and heading out into new landscapes by car or on foot)” (2).

Thus, I responded to On the Beaten Track as something of a personalized, artistic piece, rather than a well-laid-out critical thesis, in the way that MacCannell and Bruner structured their books, and as such received an immense amount of pleasure and intellectual stimulation from it.

Now then, with that lengthy preamble out of the way, while reading On the Beaten Track I could get out of my head a long quote from in Anne Bogart’s A Director Prepares, which I want to reproduce here:

To be awake on the stage, to distort something – a movement, a gesuture, a word, a sentence – requires an act of necessary violence: the violence of undefining. Undefining means removing the comfortable assumptions about an object, a person, words, sentences, or narrative by putting it all back in question. What is instantly definable is often instantly forgettable.

Victor Schklovsky, the Russian Formalist who undoubtedly influenced Bertolt Brecht with his Four Essays on Formalism written in the 1920s, developed significant theories on the function of art. Everything around us, he wrote, is asleep. The function of art is to awaken what is asleep. How do you awaken what is asleep? According to Shklovsky, you turn it slightly until it awakens. [ . . . ]

An example of this Schklovsky-ian notion of distortion or ‘turning’ can be found in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Suspicion. In one sequence, a husband (Cary Grant) climbs a staircase carrying a glass of milk on a tray to his wife (Ingrid Bergman) who lies ill in bed in a room at the top of the stairs. At this particular moment, the suspense lies in wondering whether or not the husband has poisoned the milk. Is he a loving husband or a villain and an assassin? What is not obvious but certainly affects the way we experience the scene, is the quality of the milk. Hitchcock placed a tiny light bulb, invisible to the audience, into the glass of milk so that it would glow just a little. Although the audience is not sure why, the milk seems somehow alive, awake, undismissable and in a state of dangerous potential (54).

What Bogart/Schklovsky/Brecht/Hitchcock are all hitting upon, of course, is a basic artistic tenet – through art, taking something that the viewer/audience/reader thought he or she understood and “turning it,” making it different, presenting it through a lens so that it must be reexamined and each individual must renegotiate his/her relation to it. The central motif of On the Beaten Track, it seems to me, is that this “turning” is something which tourism and art share on a deep level, creating the link between the tourist experience and the many artistic works enumerated here by Lippard: “John Urry suggests that the ‘tourist gaze’ uses ‘difference to interrogate the normal,’ whatever that is. This is of course what artists do as a matter of course. Artists have always traveled and provided a lens through which the rest of us look around” (4). To return to where I began, then, I feel like Lippard herself is “providing a lens,” but one with which to look at tourism and at the tourist experience.

The major divergence between a touristic lens and an artistic lens, though, according to Lippard, is that the artistic lens is, in her opinion, presented as unflinchingly positive (or, at least, she never presents any artistic pieces that she is critical of) whereas the touristic lens is one that must constantly be analyzed and examined for its motivations, impact, social factors, etc. She rises to the defense of Zig Jackson, who took a picture of a “white ‘trader’” who did not wish his photograph taken (and who is cast by Jackson and Lippard as a one-dimensional, unrepentant villain, more Iago or Snidely Whiplash than complex human being) as a part of Jackson’s project Indian Photographing Tourist Photographinc Indian (it is perhaps important to point out that the “trader” was taking a picture of a “stuffed buffalo head,” not of another human being, of an “Indian”), but she doesn’t stop to consider that an observer of Fusco/Gomez-Pena’s Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West might be viscerally disturbed by such an image, creating a deep, traumatic psychological impact/upset that goes beyond being a mere “guillible onlooker.” To Lippard, it would seem, art can only provide a positively fresh view of the world, and not have any sort of negative, harmful impact in the way that tourism can (this is, as I’m sure is obvious from the preceding examples, not a belief that I personally share).

Now, of course, with this concept of a “negotiated view” in mind, it is impossible not to think of Janet Cardiff’s Central Park walk, which was based entirely on the notion of utilizing the embodied experience of a walk, complete with ongoing audio and periodic visual elements, to renegotiate the way in which its participants view this Park which is, presumably, so much a part of the heart of every New Yorker’s experience of the city. Here is where, to my mind, Cardiff fails (I provide the caveat that I absolutely LOVED Her Long Black Hair and found it to be one of the most powerful artistic experiences that I have had the pleasure to participate in – but it would be too easy and long-winded for me to go on and on about what is great about the piece, and much more of an interesting challenge to throw a bit of criticism at it): the walk assumes a prior relationship to Central Park for a great deal of its artistic strength. In the constant references to past experiences, of both Cardiff (or the unnamed narrator, whomever she may be) and of the woman in the mysterious photographs, the participant seems meant to reflect upon his or her own past encounters with Central Park, particularly in the long moments of narrative silence filled with either music, simple footsteps and breathing, or pre-recording binaural audio meant to contrast and be juxtaposed with the “real-life” binaural being experienced at the precise moment of the individual’s walk. However, what this does is to create a piece that speaks more to New Yorkers than it does to tourists.

Although I can’t argue that Cardiff does create a lens through which to view Central Park, I feel like it is an artistic lens meant for a particular, local audience, rather than a touristic lens meant for any out-of-town participant who has no emotional attachment to the Park. I am, of course, drawing a line here that I am not quite yet able to theoretically back up, but the best I can do is compare Her Long Back Hair to Christo’s The Gates from last year, which, to me at least, did a slightly better job of recreating a lens with which to view the park, bringing together everybody, foreign, native, and/or local, who joined together for a stroll underneath the bright neon gates, joining in a shared artistic experience that truly engendered a sense of community. In that Christo thus brought a disparate group of individuals together into a community, for both local and tourist, using both an artistic and touristic lens, whereas Cardiff’s walk is very importantly experienced alone, I have to admit that I ultimately found Christo’s piece a bit more powerful, in that I didn’t have the same notice of the line between artistic and touristic that I noticed with Cardiff.

Posted by Andrew Friedenthal at 12:21 PM

Familiarity/Unfamiliarity

Lucy Lippard’s On the Beaten Track is concerned primarily with domestic tourism, with Lippard’s interest in rubbernecking (“looking like a tourist wherever I go, even at home, because I’m always rubbernecking.” (7)). Lippard, with a long history of investigation into contemporary art, makes several linkages between tourism and art. She suggests that Urry’s “tourist gaze” is a bit like what artists do all the time (4), she quotes Albert Camus (5) and Alexander Wilson (13), both of who’s comments could apply to either tourism or art: travel is “a grander and deeper process of learning which leads us back finally to ourselves,” and “we tour the disparate surfaces of everyday life as a way of reintegrating a fragmented world,” respectively. She asserts that the very self-consciousness of being a tourist, allies it to art. (36)

Lippard is advocating a sort of progressive tourism (“responsible, critical, perhaps even satirical” (11)) and importantly, she often returns to the idea of tourism, specifically domestic tourism, being a metaphor for multicenterdness (2). She asks on page 11, “will the consciously multicentered person-artist eventually be able to challenge her own pleasures and discomforts, to create a responsible tourist as well as a responsible inhabitant of unfamiliar places?” and on page 37, “Art about tourism must of necessity be based on the modern and postmodern montage of fragmentation, disjunction, and alienation.” She examines art that provides a political commentary on tourism (ch.3), cultural tourism in its art, history, and ethno sub-divisions (“must cultural tourism be a downer?” (87)), and the role of tourism in looking at the political culture surrounding arts funding (75) and land management (76), among others.

Most interesting to me, is Lippard’s chapter on the popular museum, where re/dis/organisation of objects, the experience more of a junk shop, replaces the clinical museum. Here is where the participation of the body, embodied memory, personal navigation, and associations that make the experience more potent come into play. I am thinking of the infamous Gould’s Bookshop on King’s Road near the University of Sydney – infamous because it is a second-hand bookstore with absolutely no cataloguing system, books are just stacked, sometimes several layers deep, on shelves in a large cavern, making finding a specific tome impossible but aimless browsing and the juxtaposition of titles incredibly interesting.

“Familiarity and unfamiliarity are at play, in comfortable proximity.” (110)

“…a sense of relaxation into delight, a disorientation opening up into discovery.” (115)

Lippard points out that “every place is both local and foreign” (2): she says this in relationship to domestic tourism, that while the place of tourism is inhabited by both (Bruner’s “borderzone”) mostly the view of the visitor, not the visited, is recorded (a notable exception from international tourism being Balinese paintings incorporating tourists in sunglasses, as cited by Bruner). The interest in this comment for me, however, lies in the potential for a place to feel both familiar and foreign; for us to feel like tourists in a place where we are also locals.

This is something that struck me as extremely clever in Janet Cardiff’s Her Long Black Hair – her ability to disconcert and to transport, through time and history, excavating personal memories and associations and allying them with other, foreign stories. Making me see the paths I often walk along, the memories I have, differently. Making me a tourist in my own backyard. I have been on Cardiff’s Central Park audio tour twice; the first time I came home and wrote:

With Cardiff’s calm, seductive voice in my ear and her feet stepping along with my feet, I am invited to see and experience the city of New York, specifically, its Central Park, differently.

There is a sense of secret or guilty delight – I am doing things outside of expected normal urban behaviour. I lick my finger and touch it to my cheek; I stop in the middle of this busy footpath, turn, and begin to walk backwards; I walk with eyes closed (something I would not normally do alone in the city but which seems ok since Janet is with me). There is a sense of heightened existence even. Either I look odd, or perhaps I am invisible. I vacillate between the two.

I wonder whether I can put this together with experiences like, say, evening walks in my neighbourhood where a large part of the exercise is to stare into other people’s windows and lives, putting pressure on theories of home/away and front/back. There is something about the curatorial style of Lippard’s popular museum, the work of someone like Cardiff, and my evening walks that seems to come together in the familiar/unfamiliar, in the specificity of body in place, and in the agency of personal associations that arise.

Posted by Justine Shih Pearson at 12:02 PM

Lisa Reinke responds (fairy tale included)

Lucy R. Lippard points out that “women in ads are often seen not only on islands but also as islands—lonely, alluring curvilinear skylines waiting for invasion” (54). The feminization of landscape goes far beyond the island, however. In numerous religions, the deity representing the earth and/or harvest is a woman (Maori: Raumoko, Papa; Greek: Gaia, Demeter; Aztec: Coatlicue; Incan: Pachamama). Also, consider the feminization of nations by such phrases as the motherland, or Lady Liberty. As Lippard discusses, colonization continued the feminization of landscape. Property was described as having virgin soil, which could be explored and conquered. This motif of representation, of course, continues in tourism, nursed along with other fantasies of colonization.

    Lippard recounts, from the poet Eliot Weinberger, that, “Iceland has few notable buildings, museums or monuments. What it has are hills and rivers and rocks, and each has a story the book recalls” (19). One may attribute the same to Northern Scotland. At the western end of Glen Shiel lie five linked hills, known as the Five Sisters of Kintail. Legend has it that, at one time, there were seven daughters of a local chief, two of whom were taken as brides by two Irish brothers. On departing Kintail, they promised to return with the other five brothers of the Irishmen. These brothers would then marry the remaining sisters. The years passed with no sign of the Irishmen returning, so, to preserve their beauty while they waited, the witch from Kintail turned the sisters into the hills seen today.

    This tale provides a very direct link to the representation of mountains as women. Several websites refer to these hills as “graceful” and “shapely.” Conversely, women are often presented as mountains, particularly in breast metaphors. Also, in the adventurous spirit, one must always mount a mountain. Like colonialism, this story not only represents the conquest of the foreign Other, as two Irishmen seduce and take away two Scottish women; it also represents subsequent betrayal, as the promise to come back is never kept. Granted, most colonizers do not run away, per se, but the discourse contains a false promise of a better life for the colonized people. While colonizers do not run away, tourists regularly do so. Tourists are expected to spend their money and get out. What a poignant metaphor the legend becomes, once the Irish tourists come to Glen Shiel. They have a good time and take their souvenirs away with them. The Scottish women, with the promise of more tourism in sight, go to irreversible extremes to ensure the place has what the tourists want. The tourists do not come, or perhaps they peter out, leaving the Scottish in a worse position than they were in when they started. Suddenly the fairy tale becomes much more believable, especially in consideration of Lippard’s warning. She writes, “Those of us at home in towns, counties, and states soon to be converted for display value are unprepared for these changes. We wake up only when it’s too late to channel or control them” (23). Maybe old cautionary fairy tales really do give the best advice for those who are facing tourism, such as the people of Georgetown, Maine. Yet, not even mountains can stop the forces of globalization. One day, will these ghosts of tourism past consume and loom over the landscape, as mountains eat into glens? Or will tourism begin to recycle itself, as tours of failed tourism spring up?

Posted by Lisa Reinke at 11:59 AM

Memory on Feet

Is Lucy Lippard really addressing the relationship between art and tourism? Her book wants to address so many issues, from eco-tourism to performance art to personal experience to patronizing comments about tourism, to tragic sites, that we quickly lose track of her thinking thread (if there ever was any). Her strong opinions are not developed, her sources scarce and she touches on too many ideas without offering a solid argument for each theme. If I just take her “tragic tourism” section, since I am most familiar with it, I was quite disappointed to see that she doesn’t try to answer the questions she raises (why are people visiting sites of murder? How is memory influencing tourism and vice-versa? Why is James Young her only scholarly source? Her choice in favor of “as-is” sites rather “manicured lawns with monuments” deserves deeper development, as well as the tension between “Holocaust memory fatigue” and mass tourism around Holocaust-related sites. I guess this book remains to be written.

Lippard offers some interesting thoughts on the relationship between visitors and visited, especially the “gaze returned”. The symbol of the mirror is worth keeping in mind, along with the gaze into the mirror as a second layer. After our discussion with Ed Bruner last week, I found fascinating the idea faux-indigenous art created in order “hijack” the tourist gaze and redirect to the tourists themselves. Rather than offering a representation of the “other”, such artistic practices provoke a self-reflection, a distorted representation blending the foreign (Indonesian art) and the familiar (Western porn). The problem raised by self-reflection has then to do with reception: how many tourists are actually aware of the mirror presented to themselves, how many tourists will engage in self-reflection and change some habits in order to experience a more authentic or responsible experience? I think that Lippard offers provocative examples of performance art addressing issues of tourism (colonial discourse, racism, sexism, etc.) but that the discussion remains confined within elite circles such as academia and contemporary art. It loses touch with the reality it claims to denounce and is often uprooted from tourist sites in order to be shown in galleries. In order words, the critique never meets the object of critique, they move on parallel tracks, one eyeing on the other, but never intersect.

As an example of an interesting combination of art and memory, here is an image of the Parque de la Memoria Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is a area along the coast, which has been designated as a memorial to the Disappeared victims of the military dictatorship. The park will include a wall with names, along with about 18 sculptures selected after an international competition. Three of them are already up, with more to come:

The image shows Dennis Oppenheim's Monumento al Escape.

What I find very interesting is the fact that the official brochure published by the Government of the City of Buenos Aires about the park, says that “the project … will make possible the use, by the inhabitants of the city and by its visitors, of a public area with testimonial, artistic, cultural and touristic value” (p. 61). It is the first time I see no shame in mentioning tourist activity on a memorial site, and the combination of the artistic, the touristic, the memorial and the political is an intricate relationship worth exploring.

Another question Lippard raises has to do with the transformation of an ordinary place into a tourism destination (and, one should add, the potential return to an ordinary place deserted by tourists). This is the moment to ask what elements contribute to the making of a tourist destination: it is not the site itself, but the context of the site: what happened then and what happens now, its accessibility, and the audience potentially interested in visiting the place.

This is what Janet Cardiff does with her Soundwalk of Central Park: making the unseen visible, guiding the audio-tourist to details that are overlooked, offering angles off the beaten track, and making us act differently in a place that is usually packed with tourists, marked with repeated behavior (sit by the fountain, look at the seal) and stops at expected places. For the first time in years, I noticed that the angel sculpture didn’t smile, that the polar bear could be seen from afar, among other things. I also appreciated the embodied experience (blurred sounds, imposed walking pace, breathing), though I thought that it could be better exploited and include other senses, such as smell, temperature, touch, color). But the paths explored by Cardiff and the physical impressions that her audiotour left with me are inspiring for my research on embodied memory.

Posted by Brigitte Sion at 11:19 AM

Leah responds to MacCannell

In her book Young Geographers (1934) Lucy Sprague Mitchell, the founder of Bank Street College of Education, outlines her model for the study of geography as a basis for “exploring” and “mapping” the world. She defines a geographer as an “investigator” who “does more than collect factual data. He thinks in geographical relationships. He sees the bearing of one fact upon another fact and thereby produces something different from and added to the two separated facts – a relationship” (p. 4) She contends that “even young children can and do think in geographic terms” (p. 3) In the education of younger students such explorations center around the various locales and activities present in the children’s most immediate environment; in older grades geographic studies take on more abstract and technical elements, as evident in the study of topography and the making of various kinds of maps.

Mitchell’s students are not “tourists” but rather “investigators” of a geography that is theirs to explore. The purpose of their school-mediated explorations is to help them develop the capacities needed to explore the world in this way. Mitchell’s pedagogical model (which was one of the bases for my professional training in museum education at Bank Street College) came very much to mind as a contrast to the idea of “the tourist” in these readings and in thinking about the content of the course overall.

In part this connection came to mind because of an explicit connection that Dean MacCannell made to such school-sponsored explorations. In The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class he notes that “School children’s tours of firehouses, banks, newspapers and dairies are called “educational” because the inner operations of these important places are shown and explained in the course of the tour.” (p. 98) MacCannell’s use of this example made me more aware of my own tendency to think of locations in terms of their potential for experiences that could be described as “educational.”

MacCannell’s analysis of tourist experiences provides a helpful way to begin to move beyond this perspective, by offering a typology that focuses on structural elements, reminiscent of some models of curriculum development. MacCannell’s description of a tourist attraction as “an empirical relationship between a tourist, a sight and a marker (a piece of information about a sight.)” is reminiscent of educational theories that name the various elements of an education experience. For example, it could be compared to the four “commonplaces” of education suggested by Joseph Schwab: teacher, student, subject matter and milieu. While these typologies are helpful in terms of schematizing the elements of a phenomenon and can aid in creating a format for identifying and analyzing these elements, the danger in using them is that they might become “static,” serving more as “markers” then “touchstones” in studying a phenomenon. Hence, while MacCannell defines a tourist attraction as a “relationship” other methodologies need to be employed to understand the nature of the relationship – or perhaps, better, the set of relationships – that constitute the phenomenon itself. If one considers the example of an educational experience (and I would argue that tourist experiences could be considered a form of educational experience) then it should be clear that identifying the commonplaces or describing them is not sufficient to fully capture the nature of the phenomenon or “what is really happening.” (This term that may simply be a fancy way of saying “the truth.”) Such an exercise will not answer such questions as “What are the students really learning?” or “What does the teacher mean to be communicating about this subject?” What is required is a theory and/or methodology which attempts to capture and understand the dynamic that is the interplay of the relationships of all of the commonplaces in an actual enactment of this phenomenon.

The metaphor of performance seems to offer an answer to this conundrum. (Perhaps this could be as true for education as it is for tourist studies.) Tim Edensor’s description of this in his article “Performing Tourism, Staging Tourism” points in this direction: “Tourism is a process which involves the ongoing (re)construction of praxis and space in shared contexts. But this (re) production is never assured, for despite the prevalence of codes and norms, tourist conventions can be destabilized by rebellious performances or by multiple, simultaneous enactions on the same stage.” (p. 60) [This last sentence would be a useful one for all education policy makers to read.] By introducing the notion of reflexivity as well, Edensor offers researchers a way to consider both a study of the phenomenon in action and reflect on both its “norms” and subversions of it. Edensor concludes by noting that “there is an unceasing proliferation of tourist spaces and practices which open up the world,” and expand the possibilities of where and how such performances occur.

Adrian Franklin and Mike Crang, in their article “The Trouble with Tourism and Travel Theory?” extend this idea to say “Tourism is at least part of the way we now perceive the world around us, wherever we are and whatever we do. It is a way of seeing and sensing the world with its own tool kit of technologies, techniques and aesthetic sensibilities and pre-dispositions.” (p. 8) This expansion of the realm of tourism takes me back to Lucy Sprague Mitchell, because it suggests that “tourism” serves as a trope for understanding how human beings interact with their universe in a way strikingly similar to her depiction of her students as “geographers” who explore the world around them and can use the tools of her geography to understand its complexities, and their locations and roles within it, in a reflexive way.

Posted by BKG at 11:12 AM

Scott's Response

In On The Beaten Track, Lippard takes a decidedly post-colonial, cultural critical approach towards tourism, emphasizing not only issues of power and social, economic, and environmental impact but also the power of the tourism to strengthen racist views and deteriorate the integrity and autonomy of ethnic communities. In comparison to those authors we have previously read, she appears to mostly side with MacCallen, claiming “all voluntary travel is characterized by longing for some elusive element that lies out of reach in daily life.” (5) She also states that tourism is driven by the desire for authenticity. Finally, she subscribes to the idea that there is, indeed, an authentic backstage of culture for which tourists strive.

I appreciated Lippard’s case studies regarding various facets of tourism. Something new that Lippard introduces to our reading list to date is the artistic response of individuals in conceptualizing and commenting on tourist productions. I particularly enjoyed her discussion of the “tourist gaze returned” by various performance artists, as this moves into a postmodern understanding of tourist sites also discussed by Bruner. I also found relevant her critical approach to various negative consequences of tourism.

However, I was hoping for the author to present a central thesis, and I found this lacking in the text. The collection of essays were overall less theoretical and more simply reflective with various general statements that occasionally were not supported in theory nor examples. This was most salient in her essay on ethnic tourism. For example, she states “ethnic tourism…usually turn out to be another facet of the racism it claims to overturn by paying homage to or idealizing a group of people.” (84) I have difficulty finding this to be categorically true. Is paying homage to someone inherently racist? She also contradicts herself at times. In one instant, Lippard claims “when the tourists arrive at the roots, at the more or less original context, the uprooted nation itself becomes a museum. The detrimental effects of tourism on internal community engender competition and fragmentation of place.”(86) In the next moment she indicates that such authenticity is possible to experience in a beneficial, reciprocal manner, pointing to the accidental Jamaican tourism experience by the 20 year old white musician who “gave up” on planning his tour and paid a young Jamaican man for the opportunity to simply “hang out with him in his life.” She reports that the tourist “lived poor”, ate “good home-cooked food, swam under a beautiful waterfall and smoked a lot of dope.”

Lippard embraces this tourist experience as “ethnically authentic,” as if these activities best represent true Jamaican culture and living. In doing so, Lippard reveals her own stereotype-based fantasy of the epitome of Jamaican culture: relaxed, task-free living (hanging out, smoking marijuana, living poor but experiencing what really matters in life: family and healthy home-cooked food), and swimming under beautiful waterfalls in paradise while taking time to help harvest the “good herb” that romantically epitomizes the easy-going, “no worries” Jamaican. Perhaps she is not aware that the majority of Jamaicans do not smoke ganja (nor that it is, in fact, illegal), that the few swimmable waterfalls on the island are not readily accessible to the vast majority of 2.5 million Jamaicans, more than half of whom live in concrete, tree-less cities or polluted environments without access to rivers or clean water at all, that people generally work very hard for long hours and do not live a relaxed lifestyle where hanging out and eating good home-cooked food with the family is the average daily experience, or where “living poor” is a positive aspect of life to be relished. She is also apparently unaware that there is a strong informal tourist economy in Jamaica where locals provide tourists with personally accompanied vacation experiences (often including sexual services and/or drugs) where the tourist receives the same tourist package as all-inclusive hotel vacationers, only at a different socio-economic level. In embracing the musician’s experience as more “authentic” Lippard seems to endorse the idea that the young Jamaican man is not an tour guide, nor lodging operator, but simply opening his family’s door and life to the tourist for social reasons--simply because the “friendly, care-free native” welcomes the foreigner into his life in paradise. In reality, the youth who “befriended” the tourist is certainly regarded by his neighbors as an informal tourist operator whose business is picking up tourists and socializing with them for money. Such activity by a local school teacher, construction worker, store clerk, factory worker, or business woman would seem as out of place as the average American picking up a German tourist, bringing him home, and guiding him around the city for a week. Perhaps, Lippard was fooled into thinking that the musician tourist experienced something more “authentic” than other tourists because there were no official tourist markers in his experience (aside from the exchange of money.)

In such a manner, Lippard highlights the pitfalls of attempting to work within a structured model of “authenticity” regarding tourist productions. She is quick to value authenticity in the exotic “Other” and decries exploitation by those who cannibalistically destroy such culture, but she unable to offer an alternative solution or even scenario. Furthermore, by framing “the Other” as a fragile, tourist stage to be destroyed by the tourist gaze, she perpetuates a colonial and paternalistic view of that culture, a view that is steeped in her own First World fantasies of the “primitive” to be cherished and yearned for, but who’s identity is unable to withstand the touristic embrace.

The rest of the essays presented various examples of types of tourism with appropriate examples. I found her overall tone somewhat pessimistic without being constructively so, leaving me with a sense of unsupported snobbery or intellectual superiority. Perhaps I found this markedly so in contrast to last week’s Bruner who humbly qualified his view through his personal experience. Lippard seems to place herself firmly in the camp of traveler as opposed to tourist without clearly defining the practical difference.

It is interesting for me to think upon Cardiff’s piece through a “tourist studies” lens, for I did not do so the two times I experienced the walk (first on my own, and then the second time for a “Performance in New York”class.) I had experienced walking in Central Park before, but having recently moved to NYC, it was the first true walking tour through part of the park. Since there is no clear economic transaction involved, the Walk seems to be partly removed from the normal tourist experience. Secondly, there are no tourist markers involved in the production. I did not feel I was labeling myself as a “tourist” by taking the Walk. True, I was wearing headphones attached to a shoulder bag. Perhaps I felt I was more of an art consumer. There was, however, definitely a sense of the tourist gaze in that as I walked along I was instructed to view the sunbathers, the “typical” food cart vendors, the Manhattan Zoo. I was also instructed to perform the role of someone who is walking through the park, copying the narrative of another past walker (Cardiff.)

What is interesting is how the Walk truly resides in Bruner’s “Border Zone” in that is a New York experience constructed specifically for the tourist (although the tourist can easily be a native New Yorker.) One may apply the concept of Front Stage and Back Stage regarding “authenticity” to the piece. We are led to believe that we are re-experiencing an authentic walk by Cardiff in space and time in the park as if she just serendipitously had a tape recorder with her on one single walk, when in reality we are experiencing an artistic construction of a fictional walk with sound edited in from different time periods, scripted conversation performed solely for recording, and photographs of dubious authenticity (e.g. are they really “old” photographs? If so, how come all of the copies are made to look equally “old”? Are we made to believe that we are holding the actual old photographs found in the flea market? Werer the original photographs even found in a flea market? Cardiff also imposes an imagined narrative on the photographs. If they were found, how do we know that a lover took them?) We are led through a choreographed score that allows us to be totally in the moment, which affords a pleasurable sense of immediacy. There is also room for improvisation and chance reality by the environment within the framework. These facets lead to experience an aura of authenticity, for in one sense each performance is unique and personal. However, the entire experience is sculpted and very different than if the tourist were to take his or her own walk through the park.

On a personal note, the first time I took the walk, I happily suspended disbelief and thoroughly enjoyed jumping back and forth through time past and present, allowing myself to slow down and gaze upon things that I normally would have passed by. I experienced the walk as a four dimensional sculpture piece with a guided tour in the most intimate manner, much like guided imagery meditation, only up on my feet and moving. In this sense, it felt like environmental theater where the audience got to perform most of the acting of a script co-written by all involved.

Posted by Scott Wallin at 10:50 AM

Leah responds to Bruner

Edward Bruner’s ethnographic work on tourism, as represented by these two readings, focuses on the role of stories or narratives in the tourist experience.

I wonder about how a narrative, or projected narrative, can be understood as being in some way “mapped onto” a place and how that relates to conceptions of “narrative” and “performance.” This question came to mind because of my interest in educational institutions and settings and the relationships that alumni of these institutions have with the sites of their educational experiences. In much of my thinking about alumni relationships I have focused on the importance of the educational experience in terms of content, sequence and purposes. The study of tourism has pushed me to think more about how alumni relate to the sites of their educational experiences, especially since they are often invited to revisit those sites (concurrently with their cohort members) for reunions. When alumni do attend reunions they do not simply visit the site of their previous experiences; they also in some way revisit the experiences themselves and their memories. The location can serve as a “landscape of memory” that brings to mind stories from their prior sojourning there. In two of the cases in Bruner’s book he makes reference to other books that deal with the concept of alumni status and its relationship to setting. These two examples, and the sense of narrative that is implied in each, are striking to me in different ways.

In the first example, Bruner studies the reconstructed town of New Salem, Illinois, home to the young Abraham Lincoln in the 1830s. In each of the two chapters about this site (“4: Lincoln’s New Salem as a Contested Site” and “5: Abraham Lincoln as Authentic Reproduction: A Critique of Postmodernism”) Bruner cites the description of New Salem given by Carl Sandburg in his 1954 biography, entitled Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years. According to Bruner, Sandburg calls New Salem both Lincoln’s “Alma Mater” and “nourishing mother.” The two terms are the same; “Alma Mater” is a traditional appellation for a school or educational institution that one has graduated from.

In Chapter Four Bruner quotes one of Sandburg’s passages: “The hilltop village, now fading to become a ghost town, had been to him a nourishing mother… a friendly place with a peculiar equality between man and man… Here newspapers, books, mathematics, law, the ways of people and life, had taken on new and subtle meanings for him.” (p. 131) As Bruner continues in his own voice, “New Salem is presented as the site where it all happened, the scene of a rural Midwest version of the familiar American rags-to-riches success story, a master narrative in American culture.” (ibid.) I hear something else is Sandburg’s description: he seems to say that New Salem was a place where Lincoln’s education was finessed, where he learned new ways of understanding the concepts that he had previously learned. Bruner seems to reject this notion, commenting later on the same page that Lincoln “had spent his truly formative adolescent years elsewhere.”
In his mention Sandburg’s use of this term in Chapter Five Bruner reports that “Implicit in Sandburg’s story is the frontier hypothesis of Frederick Jackson Turner: he suggests that just as the United States was formed by its overcoming of the obstacles of the wilderness, so too Lincoln was formed by his overcoming of the hardships of frontier life.” (p. 147) He states further “New Salem, then, is a national shrine of America’s civil religion because it is the locality of the transformation that gave birth to the adult Lincoln. Lincoln’s story is the story of America, the rags-to-riches, log cabin-to-White House American narrative.” (ibid.)

Without worrying about answering Bruner’s question “Is it “true”?” (p. 131) I am interested in thinking further about the implied message: that Lincoln’s experiences in New Salem were edifying in a way that helped to shape the beliefs or values that he became associated with in later years. Presenting a reconstructed New Salem might then suggest that a tourist visiting the site will somehow experience or come to understand some of what inspired Lincoln himself. As an educator I wonder about how this message might be presented or communicated. As a researcher I wonder about how this understanding of educational experience shapes tourists’ experience of this site and its narrative as “authentic” or “true.” It relates as well to how they might connect the “story” of New Salem to their pre-existing understandings of American history and of Abraham Lincoln.

The second case where the concept of alumni surfaces is in Chapter Nine, “Reincorporations,” in which Bruner reflects on his return to Sumatra, the site of fieldwork that he engaged in at the start of his career. He explains that his focus is not on the changes in the villagers or himself but rather in the field of anthropology and the ways in which he thinks about ethnographic work in a “transnational global world.” One of the concepts that he references in order to do is the idea of “postcommunity,” a term from anthropologist Sherry Ortner’s study of her own high school graduating class (1958) in Newark, New Jersey. Bruner notes that “she writes about doing fieldwork in the postcommunity, her term for a one-time local community that has been radically delocalized.” (p. 231) Towards the end of the chapter Bruner returns to this example, noting that the “high school class was together in one locality, engaged in face-to-face relation, only during the school years, for after graduation the members of the class dispersed. There was 100 percent geographic mobility, and class members and their spouses came together most prominently in reunions.” (p. 251) He then notes that a number of residents of the Batak village that was the site of his fieldwork have migrated “while maintaing an identification with their place of origin.” (ibid.) Bruner describes the Batak as a “postlocal community, one that is radically delocalized, but the culture of the Toba Batak continues to emerge in many diverse transnational spaces and there is continuous interaction among geographically dispersed ethnic and kin group members” (p. 252) This description is useful, but I wonder how to further describe the interplay between the locality and the collective experiences shared there. Further I wonder how to describe the new ways that “postlocal” communities can remain connected given the existence of new modes of communication.
In “The Role of Narrative in Tourism” Bruner describes the stages of the “life cycle of the touristic engagement” (p.1) and the role of stories in the pre-tour, on-tour, and post-tour stages. It seems to me that this typology remains useful but is made more complicated by the examples discussed above, where personal stories are about sites are blended with other stories that relate to one’s own individual or national history. I wonder how the typology can be extended to consider previous visits, related history, and the communal relationships that connect and might yet reconnect to particular localities.

Posted by BKG at 10:42 AM

Tourism and Artists

Lippard identified On the Beaten Track as a book mainly based on domestic travel. As a student traveled afar from the other country, I have the problem of setting my personal points on seeing these analysis as domestic travel, however, this problem also led me to think about the definition of locality. How to define the borderline of being local and being non-local?

As Lippard quoted Jamaica Kinkaid, that natives always envy the tourists and their ability to turn the banality of the natives into the source of pleasure (22). Exoticism certainly played the part in tourism production and served as a highlight in all kinds of marketing strategy when it comes down to sell the travel product. But what is exoticism when you can easily tell the difference of each area on Manhattan and feel like a tourist in a few blocks away from the place you are familiar with. You can go to a remodeled bar which you have visited thousand times before its remodeling and feel like a totally new world. Or, maybe I should ask, what is banality?

It was a beautiful experience to join Janet Cardiff’s walking tour in the central park and dig into my own memory. There is no memory about Central Park in my memory, yet the journey in Central Park perfectly matched the image of Central Park in an artistic way. Or say, I do have memory about Central Park in the big illusionary image of New York City that created by superpower media in United States. Therefore, while I was creating my own memory with Cardiff’s voice in Central Park, I was also examining my imaginary memory of Central Park. Cardiff introduced us Central Park by asking us to follow the trace of the lady with long black hair in her red coat, with her enchanting narration, and the empowerment of the audio set, the audience can be more sensitive about all the sounds and scenes in routine life. By setting the path in Central Park, which is one of the symbolic icons of New York City yet follow the trace of an insignificant lady, Cardiff’s walking tour coincidentally echoed with Lippard’s book and questioned about banality and tourism.

In Lippard’s book, she mentioned Tseng Kwong Chi’s artistic project, which used photographs as media to discuss about tourism. Since this book is published in 1999, the time before the digital camera substitute the traditional camera and become the major product of producing pictures. The new gizmo changed the way people making image records of their daily life and their travel life as well. I believe the travel pictures reflect a certain sense about the way people see tourism. It is fascinating for me to see the mis-en-scene is actually going to the opposite way as Tseng’s picture.

For my project, I am planning to finish an idea, which inspired by Janet Cardiff’s tour. Personally, I felt like that I was walking in a space that contains different layers of time at the same time, I can almost see the lady with red coat walking a few steps ahead, the man with cell phone who was not there, yet so vividly exist in my imagination. I cannot help myself of not thinking the piece as a poetic ghost story. Therefore, I am very interested about make a tourist list about the best places in New York to find the ghosts. By doing the list, I think it can be very exciting to peek into the change of narration in these urban legends, re-interpret several iconic landscape and also some insignificant locations.

Posted by Yo-Chi Li at 9:58 AM

Sandra responds: Art and Tourism, Tourism and Art

Lucy Lippard presents a multilayered understanding of the relationship between art and tourism. In On the Beaten Track, she weaves so many different threads together that it is difficult to compartmentalize her analysis. She combines elements of her own experience (memories, experiences, stories) with art criticism in order to comment on tourism as an art form in itself, the arts that have emerged from/for the tourism industry, how different artists have worked with the subject of tourism, how art has influenced tourism and the way place is experienced, as well as how talking about the relationship between art and tourism provides a locus where alterative forms of “progressive” travel can be found.

Art and tourism seem first and foremost to be intertwined because they share a common nature capable of shifting, fragmenting, juxtaposing and superimposing elements from reality and fiction. In Lippard’s understanding, both art and tourism share a surreal power of curating/editing the world in particular ways and shaping experience, culture, landscape (13). The idea of power is certainly highlighted by Lippard. Art, like tourism, does, it creates, produces, transforms (5). Art and tourism are very much “about becoming rather than being” (11).

Both are often motivated by the desire to change, to improve, to learn or to see the world in a different light. The parallels between tourism and a performance piece provide an interesting way of understanding this relationship: when one travels, one can reinvent oneself, act out a part that shapes our interaction with people in a different way than when one is at home (5); when one travels, places are transformed into stage sets, citizens become actors, guides take on the role of directors, and the tourist production begins (34).

For Lippard, art is also tied to tourism, or anti-tourism rather, as it provides a means of empowerment for the “toured” to speak up against the adverse effects of tourism (cultural, economic, ecological) in their communities. Indeed, many of the artists that have taken tourism seriously as a subject in their work are members of the cultural groups that are objects of tourism (38). Their work has been instrumental in debunking the stereotypes created by the tourist industry (Zig Jackson’s work), working as a powerful tool of self-representation (James Luna). Art has also provided a means for political activism, often denouncing the “dark side” of tourism while using the importance of tourism as an income generating industry as a way to exercise pressure on government, corporations, etc. The Welcome to America’s Finest Tourist Plantation campaign by Avalos, Hock and Sisco is a great example of this, especially since the artists used a form created for the tourism industry, the advertisement of place, to turn tourism on its head and expose its hypocritical use of migrant labor in the face of anti-immigrant policies (48). On yet another level, tourism and art seem to coproduce each other, namely through the use of photography and video. The importance of the camera in tourism has made everybody into a potential artist , as well as transformed artists into potential tourists (137).

For Lippard, tourism and art are also related as spaces of memory-work. Her discussion on monuments is especially illustrative of how art an travel have been linked in how memory, as well as forgetting, is made concrete through an object or a landscape. Here, tourism and art collaborate in inducing memory-work since tourism is the “visiting mechanism” through which monuments function (129). A monument needs a visitor in order to work. Museums are also identified by Lippard as places where art and tourism collaborate. Museums are tourist sites as they provide the same sense of self-improvement as travel (90), but they are also works of art in themselves that emerge from tourism (the Biblao Guggenheim is a perfect example of this) (92). Museums are also interesting as examples of the way tourism has influenced art. Certainly Fred Wilson, Guillermo Gomez Pena and Coco Fusco, Mark Dion, Thomas Struth, David Wilson et al. have used art as a way to “mine” the museum and expose its constructed and political nature as a type of tourist production. Lippard provides an interesting framework to look at the different ways artists have dislocated the museum from the tourism/cultural industry and transformed it into a subject of art: the museums within the museums approach (or minimuseums) such as that of Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol, the anti catalog (Carol Duncan et al.), the mirror box (Thomas Struth), the exhibition as artwork (Group Material), and reflexive and critical exhibits (Fred Wilson). Perhaps the ultimate example of the way tourism (museums) has influenced art is the museum as a work of art and the work of art as a museum embodied by David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology (105). All of these artists have echoed (and sometimes pioneered) much of the critiques that academia has formulated in the new museum studies since the late 80s in a non-verbal and thought-provoking way.

But how effective is art in providing theoretical frameworks to understand/study tourism? Guillermo Gomez Pena and Coco Fusco’s Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (39) might be the best example of the unpredictable ways in which critical art can function. As Lippard (and the artists themselves) have recognized, the artists did not anticipate the audience’s taking the piece seriously, rather than perceiving its irony. Lippard critiques the fact that often the “surprise box” approach creates more of a sense of bafflement than a real transformation in the audience. Certainly, art does not have to be democratic, but often, people get frustrated that they don’t “get it” and are either dismissive of the piece, or feel exposed by it, rather than thinking about what the piece is focusing on, they focus on their own misunderstanding of it.

Certainly, this is not always the case. Janet Cardiff’s walking tour of Central Park is also a “surprise box” that uses parody to reflect on tourism and place. However, her work is not using irony in the same way. She parodies the tour guide/book’s role as she instructs/guides the participant in the park, but she does not use the form to critique its origin. Rather, she provides a creative approach to touring. She uses the audience’s prior exposure to having been on tour to create a relationship of trust between the participant and herself. We follow her instructions, turn left, look right, sit down, think about x, partially because we have been exposed to the format beforehand. Cardiff takes the format a step further, guiding the participant almost into her own body, looking to her gaze, stepping to her steps, breathing to her breath. Rather than making the piece critical of the guided tour per se, Cardiff uses the genre to explore it, to re-invent it and make us think about the experience of touring in an embodied way. The piece is not shocking, it does not bank on our stereotypes or ignorance. It very intricately makes us think about how we experience place, a place we walk in and visit in the quotidian, a place we tour. It uses history and memory, personal narratives and a reconstructed story based on photographs (this is where I think the weakness of the piece lies), to sculpt the landscape, to refashion place with her voice, with sounds, with music. Thus, for example, the participant listens to Cardiff’s tales of Central Park’s as the undercity of the 1930s, as a dark place of crime, vagrancy, poverty, but also refuge, while walking in one of the most picturesque wooded areas of the park (and classic background for photography), watching people sunbathe and play. Cardiff’s work is often even eerie because she uses both the constructed prerecorded audio tour, and the park as it is the very second you walk by, to shape experience. While taking the tour, one feels transported to a magical place where one no longer knows what is inside and what is outside the recording. A whining saxophone surprises us as we see it played by a man dancing to his own music on a pathway, and rumbling horse hoofs take us aback when we turn around and cannot find their owner. Cardiff turns the entire park into a theatrical extravaganza, forcing us not only to experience it, but to think about what we are experiencing on tour, as well as in our daily routines. This seems like a more nuanced and multilayered way of “mining” tourism through art that does much more than merely point fingers.

Going back to Lippard, it seems that she uses the relationship between tourism and art as a way of exploring new ways of touring, of being a “progressive tourist” that travels and consumes elements of place without consuming the place itself (11). She proposes several examples, some accidental and some more self-conscious, in which tourism can become responsible as well as critical. The model of tourism as a form of exchange seems to be inevitably accidental. For Lippard, this often happens when the tourist experience goes wrong, when the tourist slips through the cracks and falls into the loopholes. But, it can happen (87). However, there seem to be more “active” or organized ways in which Lippard believes one can be a progressive tourist. Her own writing on her summer home in Maine and the debates around its being a tourist site, a summer home and a home home for different people; as well as on her home in Santa Fe, is proposed as a means of action. Finding one’s own sites based on personal experience and memory, or “invisible monuments” is another. Artists and activists have also taken this into their hands by organizing tours that are centered around political activism (133), as well as environmental activism such as CLUI’s tours (149). However, the book seems open-ended. Lippard does not provide a model, merely sketching options, ways of using the gaps in productive and responsible ways. But I am not sure her project was to create a manual for the progressive tourist, merely to suggest that there are ways in which one can take it upon one’s self to be one.

I want to end this response with some thoughts on the book. I was incredibly frustrated by the book, by Lippard’s way of constantly shifting back and forth between art criticism, tourism insights and her own experience. The book is full of assumptions about audience reactions, artists’ intentions, and tourists’ experiences. However, she does not explain where she gets these assumptions from, what her sources and evidence are, and presents her own voice/opinion as truth. I hate to be an anthropologist about this, but her return every few chapters, and most notably, in the conclusion, to herself and her experience as the only subject she truly knows anything about, makes many of her other insights seem more like personal opinion than scholarship. Surely, different audiences and individuals react differently to tourism, to art, to museums. I just did not find that she took this very much into consideration.

Posted by at 9:29 AM

Keeping it real.

The way I think of art is as something that is powerfully expressive, uplifting, revealing and inspiring. And Lippard’s book examined the way art could and is a way out of the seemingly slow and steady process of a sanitizing and embalming process of a culture and a people, as a way of re-thinking tourism and urging it to be more responsible and thoughtful, a way of stimulating some sensation to a numbing body as it were. So is tourism indeed a process of slow and steady ‘destruction’ of a place and a people? Because the past two weeks I have been trying to focus on the ‘creative’ role of tourism in its potential to create new social relations, transnational communities and indeed new forms of art. The question that now comes to mind is how powerful and expressive are the new forms of art and culture simulated by tourism? How nourishing, enduring and thought-provoked is it? Aren’t all these new forms “contextualized and created by a quintessentially capitalist and colonialist value system”?

I think Lippard did a wonderful job of examining these questions and more – particularly to look at the power in play in tourism, representation, and an examination of how meaningful and deep/cheap tourism is/‘nt. The work of the socially conscious artists that she focussed on is thought-provoking to say the least, her book is also very important in bringing attention to the crucial role of artists in the survival and life of a culture, something that is being lost sight of as we are “all complicit in what our culture has become” (77). I felt wanting to read more on that.

There were important questions that came up – for my own research I raise the question of authenticity and legitimacy. Its really misleading to think that authenticity is about the past. It’s about how the present sees and constructs the past and what past it wants. Authenticity itself is never an objective quality inherent in things, but simply a shared set of beliefs about the nature of things we value in the world. These beliefs are subsequently reinforced by the conscious efforts of cultural producers and consumers alike, and is “visibly insistent” in the tourist art, (or audibly insistent in the tourist music). Lippard sums it up for me - “We need to know what art looks like when it no longer represents only the taste of the ruling class” (117).

“Is anyone himself when a tourist”? (37) or to rephrase that – is anyone him/herself before a tourist? Apparently not. How feasible is it to separate tourist culture from ‘real’ embodied culture for the ‘native’ community? The idea to “harness tourism for community needs….to create a separate space, both psychologically and physically, where local communities can nourish their own myths and social lives”(61) sounds ideal, but what will sustain that ideal world when tourism backed by money is constantly pushing the edges for more spaces to control? And just how real can that protected space be – that is indeed museumization – where and how will it find ways to renew, replenish and move forward? It was the artists in Lippard’s book that were trying to bring about a balance and sense of reality in the tourist world, their ‘real’ world. What is ‘real’ as I understand is something that is not illusory but something embodied and grounded in experience. What I’ve been struggling with I think is when the illusory starts becoming the reality - to what magnitudes of detriment? Particularly for the music that becomes a mere exercise – how enduring can that be? Can I really call that the ‘creation’ of a new genre?

Lippard touched on so many interesting issues – nostalgia, sacred and profane, primary and secondary memories and celebrities, feminist perspectives among others – her work represents the immense montage of tourism, tourism not just as a frame or a lens but as an embodied covert art form.

Posted by Senti Toy at 9:29 AM

October 1, 2005

"How can I know what I have seen?"

“How can I know what I have seen?” asks the voice on Cardiff’s recording after describing the aftermath of violence in a room. There are signs everywhere, described by the narrator (blood on the drapes, etc.), yet everything is up for interpretation. How are we know what has actually happened in this room, in this park, in this country we are touring? This question – how can I know what I have seen? – resonates throughout Lippard’s On the Beaten Track. A tourist knows what she has seen because she has been guided – the signs are everywhere, the meaning is made clear. The Ground Zero memorial, for example, will tell a certain story and build a national narrative, but what will remain hidden from view? What violence will remain shielded and what voices repressed? Both Lippard and Cardiff are interested in toying with the boundaries of tourism and sightseeing, revealing suppressed narratives, and creating new, more conscious (and, thereby, more responsible) ways of seeing/knowing the world around us.

“Teaching people how to see,” writes Lippard, “is the artist’s business” (4). Though this statement is certainly arguable, it draws an affinity, a relationship between the artist who expresses a certain worldview through her art and the industry of tourism itself (an industry that is conspicuously in the business of casing landscapes, explaining monuments, and guiding people through new scenery. Both artist and industry frame the world (here, I am thinking of Bruner’s own metaphor of “framing” and MacCannell’s “staging”) and both construct a particular experience for a viewing public.

So, why isn’t there more art about tourism, asks Lippard. Or, if not specifically about tourism, why isn’t there more creative production around and about this social group of mobile, sight-searching, circulating individuals? Here is a class of persons poised to see the world anew, fueled by a “desire to become intimate with the unfamiliar” (51), so why not harness this energy and create what Lippard calls an “alter-industry” to conventional tourism? Tourists are perfectly positioned to collectively experience something new – and collective experience is the base of political mobilization and heightened awareness. The idea here seems to be that tourism is an economically entrenched and growing enterprise that is “here to stay” so we artists, critics, and scholars better start working creatively within this paradigm. Lippard alludes to a variety of public, collective art projects that are doing just this: the Ohio Site-Seeing project which hijacked the form of the tourist brochure (49), and Dean MacCannell’s own “unconventional sites” tour of San Francisco, just to mention a few.

But Lippard also has in mind a particular tourist-as-artist paradigm: “the tourist experience is a kind of art form if it is… its own way of organizing the landscape and our sense of it.” And it is best practiced locally (13). The Cardiff walk is a perfect example of this. Cardiff herself (or the performing voice on the recording) is acting as a guide, leading the walker through a landscape that has popularized itself in the local, national, and global imaginary: Central Park. While traveling back through the park after finishing the walk, I saw a tour group standing on the promenade leading up to the Bethesda fountain. They were clustered around a guide who was pointing out where a scene of “Kramer vs. Kramer” had been filmed. She is a guide, and Cardiff is a guide: both are engaged in (art)ifice, both are guiding a group of people through a popular public space, pointing to certain things, telling stories, directing the gaze. So, who is the artist? And who are the “real” tourists?

“Her Long Black Hair” (like all good theory) begs these important, binary-busting questions. It is an art form that provides a new experience, one that, in turn, leads to new thoughts about a landscape. It asks us to move differently, to see differently, to become differently. “Put your body here, walk this way, breathe and think,” demands the art. Then it asks of us (as all “good” art asks of us): Now, who do you know yourself to be in the world? It provides a space for a different kind of knowledge acquisition, one that does not separate thinking from feeling, minds from bodies, or observing from participating. Sightseeing becomes place-sensing, and intimacy ensues. Cardiff’s understanding of art is undisciplined, unbounded. There is simply sound, scene, and sensation: the Nick Cave melody, the sunlight through the trees, the sensing of slave music in a dark, hollowed tunnel, the stories of visits to New York. So simple. And yet, we are in awe and completely confounded by how easy it is to know the world around us. It is an exercise in letting the body theorize rather than the mind and though the experience is structured, the outcome is spontaneous; the space between the viewer and the viewed is a borderzone of creativity that hinges on what we bring to it.

I appreciated the opportunity to take part in a mode of inquiry that builds on and fleshes out Lippard’s own desire to merge tourism with art.

Posted by Brynn Noelle Saito at 11:17 PM

Contradictions

Download file. I really appreciate how much On the Beaten Track compares tourism to theater. I along with Lucy Lippard look at tourism as a kind of performance piece. For my research project I want to look at the “toured” as a performance piece. Specifically, how people put on a certain production as it pertains to their culture, whether it is true or false, for tourists. However, I find it interesting that Lippard said specifically that traveling could be a performance piece and not tourism. I think she is making a distinction between the two, which is not something I have discovered in the other readings.

Though her distinction is different than mine, I believe the two have some common ground. I believe that sometimes people can travel without the intent of being tourists. As she stated many times in the reading, sometimes people go on vacation simply for leisure. To get away from their everyday reality and transform themselves into an unknown world of relaxation and play. Now maybe this world clashes with that of tourism, but I do not believe it always begins with that intent. Like Lippard, I believe that traveling offers more freedom than tourism. This is something I wish Lippard explored more in depth.

I love how she incorporates class and gender into the equation, though I do not feel like she explored the gender aspect as in depth as she did class. It is true that the amount of money one makes determines their length of stay or if they can travel at all. This can sometimes cause envy, anger, or jealousy among those who cannot travel. For example, while in Ghana I was sitting in the lounge area of a hotel with a couple of my classmates. We were approached by one of the employees of the hotel and were engaged in a lengthy conversation about Western travel. The conversation became heated when this young man expressed his disdain for the fact that we (the American students) could travel to another country to do research for our schools when he could not even afford to go to school. At first I was offended. I am cognizant of my blessings as an American student, but money does not come easy for my family either and going to school has been a constant struggle. Of course, he replied by saying that we still had the opportunity to fly to another country, stay for a week in the nicest hotels, and study a culture while this opportunity would never be available to him. I saw his point and was immediately silenced. I think class is a very important factor in determining the financial abilities of many tourists.

Lastly, I saw a major contradiction in her writing. She begins in the introduction by saying that in this book she tries to go against the grain of the usual melancholic texts concerning tourism to show its more positive sides. However, in the very next chapters, particularly one and two, she explores much of the negative. First, she discusses the need for tourists to “look around,” but then she sardonically follows that statement by saying we would know so much more about our own neighborhoods if we spent the same amount of time looking around as tourists do. Maybe she did not mean that in a sarcastic way, but that is the way it sounded to me. Next, she talks about the unbalance in tourism, sometimes being the only option for economic survival, which leads to a labor force becoming a nation of service workers pretending to look tantamount to our ancestors. Then, Georgetown’s economy is mentioned as being “pitifully dependent” on tourism. I am not saying that she does not actually look at tourism in a lighter light as she promised. I was simply looking for that light much sooner, and after her initial statement in the introduction and then reading the next few chapters, her initial statement seemed to be a contradiction.

Posted by Siobhan Robinson at 10:27 PM