KICKSTARTER PROJECT PAGE: http://kck.st/oNQOcH

I’ve always had a strong affinity for Japan, and will be experiencing it for the first time this Fall. I plan to travel all over the country by train for five weeks: from Tokyo to Sapporo, to Kyoto, then Nagasaki and then back to Tokyo. Come with me! through your suggestions on what is Japan’s ‘sense of place’.

PUBLIC INTERACTIVE PROJECT
This project is an interactive public project; I will be using the platform of Kickstarter to create art based on public interaction. This project will document my experience of Japan for the first time via your suggestions of ‘sense of place’ moments. Every Kickstarter supporter contributes to the planning of my five week itinerary in Japan: places to go, food to eat, people to meet, art and architecture to see etc. Please contribute something specific that you feel resonates as ‘Japan’ that I can experience and document when I’m there. The photographs, collages and other works produced from this project will become a publication on return to the U.S.

My project is titled “Honoring Japan’s ‘sense of place’”, and it focuses on artistic research into Japan’s ‘sense of place’, as well as an investigation into how the ‘sense of place’ of Japan has changed due the Tsunami: what is lost and what remains.

REWARDS
Rewards include the book, the postcards series, prints, collages, handmade postcards and found objects from Japan, as well as acknowledgement in all materials about the project.

Thank you for your financial support and creative involvement. I look forward to creating this project with you.

A question inspired by a discussion in the NY Times. [ Link to NY Times article]
As we scan the photos in fashion magazines and click on to blogs that chronicle the latest trends, we can’t help but wonder: How has globalization affected street style? Essays by: Will Welch, senior editor, GQ; Kim Hastreiter, PAPER Magazine; Valerie Steele, Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology; Tommy Ton, photographer; Adriano Sack, publisher, I Like My Style Quarterly

A house is a place where people and ideas gather and find shelter, a place where sociability is rehearsed and produced. Social housing, housing built on a multiple scale, is the replication of this model in towns and cities on political grounds: a spatial commitment on the part of governments to building on the basis of broad social needs and ideals. Social Housing–Housing the Social brings together contemporary artists, architects and designers working on new ideas and models for urban living with politicians, planners, activists, urban theorists and city development agencies, to investigate and challenge the ways in which housing is imagined, commissioned and implemented.

Article from NYT by Patricia Cohen
Link to article

Advanced technology similar to Google Earth, MapQuest and the GPS systems used in millions of cars has made it possible to recreate a vanished landscape. This new generation of digital maps has given rise to an academic field known as spatial humanities. Historians, literary theorists, archaeologists and others are using Geographic Information Systems — software that displays and analyzes information related to a physical location — to re-examine real and fictional places like the villages around Salem, Mass., at the time of the witch trials; the Dust Bowl region devastated during the Great Depression; and the Eastcheap taverns where Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Prince Hal caroused.

Like the crew on the starship Enterprise, humanists are exploring a new frontier of the scholarly universe: space.

“Mapping spatial information reveals part of human history that otherwise we couldn’t possibly know,” said Anne Kelly Knowles, a geographer at Middlebury College in Vermont. “It enables you to see patterns and information that are literally invisible.” It adds layers of information to a map that can be added or taken off at will in various combinations; the same location can also be viewed back and forth over time at the click of a mouse.

Photo by Roberto Burle Marx

Link to article

By Peter Kageyama, the author of “For the Love of Cities: The Love Affair Between People and Their Places.”

We think of city infrastructure in a particular way – sort of like bones and connective tissue in a body; the major structural components that support our existence. Beyond the bones, we need to include key pieces that nourish our higher selves- our minds and spirits. If cities are merely paved surfaces and police and fire service, there is nothing that distinguishes one place from another. But this isn’t the case: The Gallup Soul of the Community survey from 2008 to 2010 found strong correlations between peoples’ emotional attachment to the communities they lived in, and higher levels of local GDP. They also found a link between passion for and loyalty to places, and the health of the local economy.