Wireless networks, electronic markets, Real-Time, worldwide webs, telepresence, Second Life, Wii, Farmville, Foursquare, SCVNGR, geo-filtered Twitter, 27/7 surveillance, cryptography GPS, Google Earth. What is the fate of place in the virtual spaces of global connectivity? Is place disappearing or is it being recongifured? Does the global absorb or revive the local? What are the politics of place? What is the impact of migration (internal and external)? What is the relation between virtualization and delocalization? Where is place in MySpace? Will there ever be a Cyberplace? Is place the repressed other of hypermodernity?
Throughout history, religious thought and practice have been intimately bound to particular places that often are deemed sacred or holy. In this seminar, we will rethink the meaning and significance of place. What defines place? How is place experienced? How do space and place differ? What constitutes a place sacred or holy? How do sacred and profane places differ? How are place and time related?
Readings include: Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto, Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Bill Bishop, The Big Short: Why the clustering of like-minded America is tearing us apart, Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Ed Casey, Getting Back Into Place and The Fate of Place, Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization and The Domain of the Dead, Francois Berthier, Reading Zen in the Rocks: The Japanese Dry Landscape Garden.
Students will have the opportunity to write a term paper or create a project in any appropriate medium. Open to all graduate and upper level undergraduate students.
