David Gordon is visiting our class March 16

Choreographer David Gordon is coming to our class on March 16 and on March 30. In anticipation of his engagement with our practice, he and I have been exchanging emails, discussing what locative media is and how it relates to his work with movement and dance. I told him that my work developed on the Lower East Side of New York through my project View from the Balcony. In his latest email he wrote:

I was born on the lower east side, lived on Eldridge St, moved to Ludlow St where I grew up. Physical mobility (includes behavior) in a big city small ghetto neighborhood - with a public school, Jr. High School and High School all within walking distance from a walk up tenement (where you see into other people's windows) and public transportation (subway/bus systems) produces a kind of urban malazyness in which you don't see or imagine any other existence (I never learned to drive) until your life changes radically by partnering w/someone from an entirely other physical realm and by having a pram full of baby that you have to make room for in city streets and by career traveling, so when you revisit your old neighborhood you see it suddenly in comparison to other worlds and you recognize an aspect of physical mobility and behavior that includes where you once felt safe and you realize how much you've changed.

"Neighborhood Narratives is a locative media course that introduces students to the concept of situated storytelling, mobile navigation, investigations of place in a technologically mediated world"

Story telling in a "technologically mediated world" is, I assume, vastly different than being rocked to sleep on your grandma's lap while she tells you the terrifying tales of being a child in Polish Russia or Russian Poland.

We're off to the races!

Hello everyone,

Now that we have discussed George Orwell, Paul Virillio and terrorism, you are probably wondering what this has to do with the price of cheese. Well, you are now going to find out...

Here's to a semester of happy blogging!