The urban spectator
Subtitle: American concept cities from Kodak to Google
By: Eric Gordon
Edition: 1st ed.
Series: Interfaces, studies in visual culture; Interfaces, studies in visual culture
Publisher: Dartmouth College Press; University Press of New England
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Hanover, NH
Language: eng
Number of pages: 228
ISBN-13: 9781584658030
Other titles: American concept cities from Kodak to Google
Description: "The Urban Spectator is a lively and utterly fascinating exploration of the ways in which technologies have influenced our collective conception of the American city, as well as our relationship with urban space and architecture. Eric Gordon argues that the city, developing late and in conjunction with a range of modern media, produced a particular way of seeing - what he labels "possessive spectatorship."" "Lacking the historical rootedness of European cities, the American city was open to individual interpretation, definition, and ownership. Beginning with the White City of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the efforts to commodify the concept-city through photography, Gordon shows how the American city has always been a product of the collision between the dominant conceptualization, shaped by contemporary media, and the spectator. From the viewfinder of the Kodak camera, to the public display of early cinema, to the speculative desire of network radio, all the way to machine-age utopianism, nostalgia, and America's "rerun" culture, the city is an amalgam of practice and concept. All of this comes to a head in the "database city," where urban spectatorship takes on the characteristics of a Google search. In new urban developments, the spectator searches, retrieves, and combines urban references to construct each experience of the city."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: More than the sum of its parts : the white city and amateur photography; title: Picture thinking : Kodaking and the art of nature; title: City in motion : early cinema and Times Square; title: Scaling up : the "speculative architecture" of 1930s New York; title: The operative city : the machine intelligence of urban renewal; title: Rerun city : nostalgia and urban narrative; title: The database city : the digital possessive and Hollywood Boulevard.