Observers who grow up in the suburbs are used to seeing green lots as the emblem of a city working towards public health. It takes more than a few bicycle trips past the empty lots in south-side Chicago for the newcomer to realize that the fie

Rust Belt Tour '09: Looking at Landscapes

Sep 15th, 2009

In Rust Belt Tour '09, scholar Jo Guldi and activist Simon Strikeback traveled the landscape between Flint, Michigan and Holyoke, Massachusetts, documenting the foreclosures, arsons, vacant lots, anarchist squats, community gardens, and revital

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

Sep 8th, 2009

In 2009, the wasting steel town of Braddock, Pennsylvania hit international newspapers as an example of how post-industrial ruins could be transformed into utopian spaces after the mayors' plea for dedicated urban homesteaders to relocate to Br

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

Sep 2nd, 2009

At the close of the Civil War, the industrial hub of Elmira, NY began to pioneer a new model of economic development: they opened a reformatory. The model served them well. In the twentieth century, nineteenth-century industry collapsed around

Rust Belt Tour '09: Traces of Industrial History in America: First Generation and Second Generation Rust Belt

Aug 22nd, 2009

The first, nineteenth-century industrial revolution began with mill-building along the rivers of New England in the eighteenth century. It grew to encompass a wide network of canals and rivers. The decline of early industrial towns today leav

Rick Prelinger on the lost landscapes of San Francisco

Aug 15th, 2009

Footage collector Rick Prelinger takes us on a tour of the forces that built the vernacular sinews of twentieth-century experience in San Francisco: ethnic migration, infrastructure on the an enormous scale, mass transport, and consumer videogr

Robert Todd: Thunder

Aug 8th, 2009

Robert Todd feels things through landscape. In the first film of his I saw, fields bristled in sunlight, the hirsute stems of Queen Anne's lace lit by the rising sun. Like the psychoanalyst Gaston Bachelard, Todd thinks that all materiality c

Max Cafard: The Surre(gion)alist Manifesto

Aug 3rd, 2009

Max Cafard's Surre(gion)alist Manifest first appeared in Exquisite Corpse in 1990 and was afterwards republished with a preface by New Orleans poet Andrei Codrescu. Arguing for the eminence of the local as a point of view, the manifesto urged

Simon Strikeback: Visit to Memphis

Jul 23rd, 2009

U Chicago grad student Simon Strikeback takes us on a hypnotizing visual tour of the textures and geometry of infrastructure around Memphis. Travel shots capture trucker zones at winter sunset and other thresholds. Landscape is abstracted to

Broadcasting from Tokyo

Jul 21st, 2009

How do you channel experimental mastermind Chris Marker and higher-level mathematics at once? Transplanted from Chicago to Tokyo, astrophysicist Simon DeDeo started looking around him in the cafes of Tokyo, watching eye-contact and subtle vari

Sam Amidon: "Saro"

Jul 25th, 2008

This episode comes courtesy of Jeremy Blatter, a member of the Landscape Posse, former intern at the Prelinger Archive, and graduate student in the History of Science department at Harvard. Landsploitation is proud to present "Saro," a vernacul

Landsploitation: Cosmology

Apr 27th, 2008

"It has come time to talk about the very small and the very large; streetscape, townscape, highways, continents and oceans. It is time to talk about vision." "Cosmology" explores the relationships between the traveler and social gravitation, ha

Future home of the landsploitation podcast

Apr 25th, 2008

check back for landscape awesomeness, unfettered from the constraints of scholarly academia, roaming freely through the creative universe of the landscape junkie's mind

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