Ethics of Space - Schedule

Wednesday, March 3, 7:00pm, Miller Forum, Moyer Hall
A public lecture by Mary Seton Corboy on Urban Gardening

Mary Seton Corboy from Greensgrow Farm in Philadelphia, PA serves as the Chief Farm Hand at the farm and was co-founder of the organization. She is a native of Washington, D.C. and has her B.A. in Political Science & English Literature from Wilson College and a MA in Political Science from Villanova. Mary was named on Organic Style magazine's top 50 "Environmental Power List" in 2004 and Greensgrow Farm has been recognized as the premier urban agriculture project in the country (PBS Edens Lost and Found, Real Momentum, Organic Style Magazine, Growing for Market). How do you transform a brownfield into a vibrant active center of a community? How do you involve community in urban gardening? Mary will answer these questions and more through an interactive gardening demonstration and evening discussion.

Tuesday, March 16, 7:00pm, Miller Forum, Moyer Hall
A public lecture by Keith Hampton, "The Power of Space and Place: New Technologies and the Public Sphere"

Wednesday, March 17 th, 7:30pm, Martin Art Gallery
Exploring Sound Art with Steve Roden

Co-Sponsored by the Department of Art

Steve Roden is a visual and sound artist from Los Angeles. His work includes painting, drawing, sculpture, film/video, sound installation, and performance. Roden's working process uses various forms of specific notation (words, musical scores, maps, etc.) and translates them through self invented systems into scores; which then influence the process of painting, drawing, sculpture, and sound composition. These scores, rigid in terms of their parameters and rules, are also full of holes for intuitive decisions and left turns. The inspirational source material becomes a kind of formal skeleton that the abstract finished works are built upon. 
 In the visual works, translations of information such as text and maps, become rules and systems for generating visual actions such as color choices, number of elements, and image building. In the sound works, singular source materials such as objects, architectural spaces, and field recordings, are abstracted through humble electronic processes to create new audio spaces, or 'possible landscapes'. The sound works present themselves with an aesthetic Roden describes as "lower case'' - sound concerned with subtlety and the quiet activity of listening. rodent has been exhibiting his visual and sound works since the mid 1980's, and has had numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally. He has also released over 20 CDs of audio works on labels worldwide. 

 Roden received an MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA in 1989, and a BFA from Otis Parsons in Los Angeles in 1986.

Tuesday, March 23, 4:30pm, Location TBA
A soundwalk with Edmond Mooney and Jonny Farrow, co-presidents of the New York Society for Acoustics Ecology (NYSAE)

Co-sponsored by the Department of Art

Please note: Advanced Sign up Required; contact Beth Buechler at [email protected] , or 484-664-3243.

The purpose of these soundwalks will be to gain an understanding of the psychogeographical and architectural interferences we experience as sound when exploring the topography of the Muhlenberg campus. We will notice the transitions in the soundscape when we interact with and pass through these various zones of sonic interest.. Walkers may also become aware of the demarcations of public space and private space through sound. The walks begin with what composer and acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer calls, “ear cleaning” exercises. These exercises consist of simple relaxation techniques focusing breathing and then focusing the ears on the basic sonic layers of the soundscape. These exercises help the listener to untangle layers of sounds—soft and loud, periodic and random, high and low—one can encounter at any given time (or simultaneously) in any soundscape. These exercises help to better engage the ear with the mind and aim to transform the soundscape into a living organism for the sound-walker through active listening. NYSAE is a membership organization that advocates listening and promotes public dialog about the urban sound environment. NYSAE creates and encourages new ways of encountering sound and provides resources and information on acoustic ecology.

Jonathan “Jonny” Farrow is a Brooklyn, NY-based interdisciplinary sound artist/composer/performer working with field recordings, found sounds, and the sounds of small objects. He holds a master’s degree in musicology from The City College of New York, is the co-chair of the New York Society for Acoustic Ecology, and is the recipient of a performance grant from Meet the Composer for his collaborative work Musique d’ombre. Recent projects/performances include Soundbox 1&2, Musique d’ombre. He has lead soundwalks most recently for The Canary Project’s 40/73 soundwalk series, Issue Project Room's Sound-Walk-A-Thon, The Guggenheim Museum's gallery guide training program soundwalking initiative, and The Art in Odd Places Festival "Listening to 14th Street" soundwalk series. He also frequently curates/hosts the web radio program Giant Ear)))—a show dedicated to the art of field recording—and he teaches music at three different CUNY schools.

Edmund Mooney is a composer, sound designer and sound artist. His work has been presented at Lincoln Center, The Metropolitan Museum, DTW and PS 122, among others. Recent works include “Body Maps” with Vision into Art at the Whitney Museum, “Sound Box 1” with Andrea Williams and Jonny Farrow at Free 103’s Wave Farm and “Eros Thanatos” with installation artist Erika Harrsch at Fotofest in Houston, TX and at Galleria Leme in Sao Paolo, Brazil. He is a founding member of the New York Society for Acoustic Ecology. His work explores, among other things, the ecstatic soundscape through temporal displacement and re-contextualization of naturally occurring sonic events in combination with digitally altered or created instruments.

Saturday, April 17 (raindate Sunday, April 18), Time & Location TBA
“A Walk in the Park: Park Sustainability and Public Use,” led by Dr. Kimberly Heiman, Lecturer, Department of Biology

How are public spaces designed to meet the needs of many different groups of people while restoring degraded natural beauty? How do you involve community in park design? This walking tour of Cedar Creek Parkway’s ongoing restoration and revitalization efforts is designed to explore the sometimes controversial decisions about how to revitalize public parks with both use and sustainability in mind.

TBA

Numbers Runners and New Negroes: Harlem in Sound-Era Race Film
A public lecture with Paula Massood on Images of Harlem in African American films of the 1930s

Co-Sponsored by the Department of Film Studies

From the teens through the late-forties, a number of independent film companies produced "race films," or films intended for African American audiences, many of whom could only attend segregated screenings. While the majority of the films, especially those produced during the silent period, were uplift melodramas focused on African American progress in the new century, sound-era race films began to compete with Hollywood offerings by shifting into the production of popular genres, including comedies, sports films, the western, and gangster films. “Numbers Runners and New Negroes” will offer an introduction to the black gangster genre, particularly those films set in Harlem, New York, a neighborhood which by the thirties, was recognized at the “Mecca of the New Negro.”

Paula Massood, Professor of Film Studies at Brooklyn College and in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at The Graduate Center, will present her research on images of Harlem in African American films from the 1930s. Morality tales of gangsters and innocents reveal African American perspectives on Harlem as simultaneously a place of opportunity, a community, and a dangerous temptation. Massood will screen clips from a selection of rare independently made African American films known as "race movies" that offer a window into a New York not seen in Hollywood. Massood is the author of Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film and is currently working on a photographic and cinematic history of Harlem.

TBA

A public lecture by Li Zhang, “Contesting Private/Public Boundaries in China's New Housing Regime”

Co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology & Anthropology and by the Lectures & Forums series, “The Legacy of 1989: Twenty Years in the Post Communist World”

A new revolution in homeownership and living is sweeping the booming Chinese metropolises. Spurred on by the real estate boom, the quest for good life and social distinction by the new middle-classes is profoundly transforming the physical and social landscapes of Chinese cities. This public talk examines how the private/public spatial boundaries in new private residential compounds become blurred and contested by different social groups in the city of Kunming. It draws from three ethnographic cases that represent different circumstances under which the use of privatized communal space was conceived and negotiated by those living inside and outside the gated communities while different notions of rights were invoked. The implications of this shifting spatial order for rethinking class entitlement and citizen rights in post-socialist and neoliberal times will also be considered.

Li Zhang is Professor of Anthropology and former Director of East Asian Studies Program at the University of California at Davis, and also a Guggenheim Fellow. She is the author of Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China’s Floating Population (Stanford), and co-editor of Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar (Cornell). Her forthcoming book, In Search of Paradise: Middle Class Living and Activism in a Chinese Metropolis, will be published by Cornell University Press.