Revise and Extend

Race, Place, and New Orleans in Film and Television

In this post, Helen Morgan Parmett takes stock of some of the ways in which media culture and practice, and particularly film and television, has helped to shape discourses of New Orleans historically and the ways in which more recent shifts in the city’s post-Katrina cultural economy have implicated the industrial conditions of media in the city as well as its global representation.

Empathy for Place

Over the River allows the user to experience the recently vanished landscape of Hunter's Point South, across from the Manhattan skyline. VR is employed to invoke empathy for a place, which takes on a political importance.

Spaces of Spectatorship: Architectures of the Projected Image

Moving-image installations and media architecture have recently given renewed currency to established notions of dispositif, apparatus, and spectatorship. These concepts have allowed for new inquiries into the relationships among screens, viewers, and space in the urban context. In this Polished Panel, the participants use close analyses of peripheral practices of projection to illuminate the centrality of architecture to spectatorial experience.

Methodologies of Race and Space

Mediated cityscapes often reinforce the stigma associated with devalued areas and the underprivileged, yet can also undermine dominant perceptions and counter misrepresentations of place. In this Polished Panel, the participants map that tension that emerges between real and represented places, using a spatial approach to race to trace formal and industrial practices that create meaningful linkages among spaces, places, and bodies.

Mapping Urban Horror

Of all popular film genres, horror perhaps makes the most consistent and flexible use of space. This use maps out landscapes of power, repression, and displacement. In this Polished Panel, the participants propose to use horror as a map of gentrification and its spectre of racialized violence.

The Moving Image of Coney Island

The traveling exhibition Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008 has been featured in several American museums over the past year, and is currently on display at the Brooklyn Museum. Josh Glick, a key participant in the construction and the curation of the exhibit, reflects on his experiences, especially on his work to integrate film into the museum experience.