Periplurban

Brian House and Jesse Shapins 2008

Poetic Urbanisms, Arts @ 29 Garden
Harvard University, 2011 Februrary

"Archaeology of Modernity and Visual Culture"
Harvard University, 2010 Spring

"Approaches to Modernity: Metropolis"
Harvard University, 2008 Fall

"Critical Urban Media Arts"
Columbia University, 2008 Summer

"Periplum" is a word coined by Ezra Pound in his Cantos to describe a form of mapmaking and history concerned not with the conventional bird's-eye view of the cartographer or historian, but rather the point-of-view of the poet who is a voyager personally navigating space and time. Periplurban is a translation of Pound's poetic concept of cartography and history to the urban environment in the form of an experiential dictionary. This dictionary serves as a source for new modes of site-specific storytelling, read and written with mobile phones and the internet.

As a tool for workshops engaging critical discourse about the built environment and media arts, periplurban.org allows students to conduct urban research by defining new words through text, photography, video and maps. The platform was initially developed in the context of a Visual Studies workshop sponsored by the Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University.

Each student chooses a specific site within the city to declare as his or her territory. Through seven exercises ranging from ethnographic interviews to Fluxus-inspired non-theatrical performances to short city-symphony films, each student defines terms specific to their space by uploading text, photography, and video to the Periplurban website. The larger goal of these collective investigations is to begin re-defining what is a city, and in this process, a new urban language is created.

The final student project draws upon the rich database of knowledge and media collected online to create a series of design interventions in physical and virtual space. Writing in this new language, the core component of the students' final project is an SMS-based walking tour of their territory that poetically connects the words in the new vocabulary they have defined. The walk provides an experiential tour of the multiple layers of physical, social, historical and fictional qualities that have been identified through their research.

Periplurban: A New Language of Poetic Estrangement, printed in 2011, is a casting of the Periplurban relational database into codex form. Tabbed navigation allows the reader to follow nonlinear paths by skipping pages. Using on demand publishing, new editions of the dictionary can be printed as the database is updated.