Syllabus

Neighborhood Narratives
Fall 2008, Rutgers University
Hickman Hall, Room 126
Wednesdays, 12:35 – 3:35 p.m.
Instructor: Hana Iverson
Email: hanaiver@gmail.com; h.iverson@mac.com
Office Hours: Wednesdays after class, by appointment.

In Neighborhood Narratives, the urban landscape is a canvas where analogue and digital media, text, sound, and image are applied to real places in order to document the definable aspects of place that simultaneously reveal and construct their essence and trigger authentic engagement. The goal is to create a set of site specific annotations; such as sound maps, community histories augmented by websites, audio interviews authored and distributed over the cell phone, site specific installations that integrate radio and other communications technology, scavenger hunts along with many other types of combinations that when connected would produce a neighborhood narrative. This process encourages participants to combine the skills of the storyteller (the grounded expert with detailed everyday knowledge) with the flaneur (the mobile observer of the city with a broad overview).

Neighborhood Narratives uses alternative technologies, basic mobile recording devices, on-line open-source tools such as blogging, and Google Maps along with analog resources such as sketch maps to produce context rich stories that portray the world, city, or neighborhood. In Neighborhood Narratives we explore the real and metaphorical potentialities of mapping, walking, and wayfinding as methods of developing attachments, connecting, and constructing narratives in a virtual and spatial locality (neighborhood).

The final assignments are presented on location in the city. No prior technological expertise is required.

The course is divided into three themes:

Theme one: Place and Space. The course begins with a close examination of the concept of place. We explore questions such as: What is place? What is the difference between place and space? How are places mapped? What is the relationship of place to location?

Theme two: Embodied Practice. We investigate how a constantly changing environment affects the ways in which we physically stabilize our sense of orientation. We consider ways to ask strategic questions about encounter, gathering, and location; exploring our sensory alignment of the world, and how it is synthesized by the social mix of influences that affect both physical and virtual environments.

Theme three: Merger of Mixed reality and Mobility. Mobile media are tools that connect the physical to the virtual, by handheld connectivity to networks and webs. New public sites are emerging as a result of this mix - situated storysites, community mapping, environmental installations that incorporate technology, to name a few - that create a new form of experience and authorship.

Schedule of Classes and Assignments

Sept. 3

Introduction: What is Neighborhood Narratives?
The history of the class, case studies. Where am I? Rutgers campus, New Brunswick. What I carry with me. The bag exercise. The archeology of everyday life. Create your blog. Daniel Spoerri – An Anecdoted Topography of Chance.
Assigned Reading: Of Other Spaces, Foucault.
http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html
Assignment: Map your week on a T-shirt.

Sept. 10

Introduction to place and space.
Review Foucault.
Discussion of Foucault’s ideas about hetertopias; the archeology of place and space.
George Legrady’s “Annotated Archive of the Cold War” + other projects by Legrady.
Assigned reading: From Yi-Fu Tuan.
Assignment: Take photos of reflections and/or places that are “time out of time” and “place out of place” and post to blog.

Sept. 17

Place and Space.
Presentation of Cross/Walks: Weaving Fabric Row; Murmur Toronto; One Block Radius (GlowLab)
Psychogeography, ethnography.
Artist: Richard Long, Walking the Line
Assigned Reading: The Garden of Forking Paths, Jorge Luis Borges
Assignment: Drift, Tag/Annotate the walk, Document

Sept. 24

Embodiment. Walking.
Historic Walk of New Brunswick. Push/Pull.

Oct. 1

Embodiment.
Review Yi Fu Tuan, Garden of Forking Paths.
Push/Pull and stabilzation: Akitsugu Mayebashi, Sonic Interface.
Historic view vs. psychogeography: One Block Radius.
Assigned Reading: The Situationists
Assignment: Rearrange something/where in your life and document as two versions of a self-portrait.

Oct. 8

Design, politics and economics: Urban Planning and Mapping.
Review Situationists + assignments
How-to GPS.
The geoweb. Google earth. New neighborhoods without proximity
Assigned Reading: Mapping the Homonculus
Assignment: Emotional Maps

Oct. 15

Public Art. Kystof Wodizcko and “Public Address”. Public memorials, counter-memorials.
Assigned Reading: Critical Vehicles
Mid-term Assignment: Put something here

Oct. 22

Mixed Reality and Locative Media.
Review: Put Something Here.
A variety of Locative Arts projects will be presented including MilkProject.
Assigned Reading: Locative-Media Artists in the Contested Aware City; Views from Above: Locative Narrative and the Landscape
Mid-term Review

Oct. 23
Extra Credit Event

Rob Kitchin, Professor of Geography, National University of Ireland, Maynooth; Director: National Institute of Regional and Spatial Analysis
1.10 pm, Special Events Forum, Civic Square
“Soft Cities: Software and the remaking of the American City”

Oct. 29

Public/Private
Janet Cardiff, Sophie Calle
Assigned Reading: Locative Arts
Assignment: Following

Nov. 5

Public/Private II
Review Following.
Outline requirements for final projects. Discuss locations.
Assignment: On-line following and the idea of driving a project on the street from the web.

Nov. 12

Games.
Blast Theory – Uncle Roy All Around You.
Class Map as interface for final projects.
Begin discussion of final projects.

Nov. 19

Project Development
More Locative examples.

Nov. 26

No class. Thanksgiving break.

Dec. 3

Final projects due. On-site presentations.

Dec. 10

Class critique and wrap up.