Detroit Ahoy!

we're going to detroit today because I've been hearing some strange and interesting things about it. I read an article in Harper's Magazine that was talking about how this city is becoming the first "post-american" city and how it's getting turned inside out with people developing their own sorts of farms within city limits, while the suburbs continue to incorporate into each other and distance themselves from the center city. Apparently some places in the city are nice set up in the fancy downtown way that has become so popular lately, but so much of the rest of the city will have brand new condos, which might be next to a completely abandoned block, or a block with a couple houses and rows of organic staple crops. Strange.

Cleveland and Ann Arbor: The Book Killed the Building

Right now we're staying with Lauren and Matt in Ann Arbor, MI, and they've been taking good care of us; they made us naan and some Indian food last night and then took us out and about Ann Arbor and Kerrytown.

On our way out of Cleveland we stopped at the MOCA in Ohio City. Olga Ziemska's work relating nature to human biological construction was on display. Recent bio art initiatives, Steve Kurtz, and the Critical Art Ensemble seemed to be in each of Ziemska's plaster fingernails.

Last night a woman exclaimed, "TAKE that jacket off it looks so Summer '99!"


Back to MOCA, they also had a large exhibit from OPEN, a variegated groups of architects, artists, advertising firms, indoor lighting consultants, and mad scientists designing new forms of public space around the globe. Challenges to reinvigorate dying "downtowns" are addressed in many of these OPEN exhibits, and concurrently we have been discussing these situations of drying up urban centers in Albany, Buffalo, Syracuse, and Cleveland with the people we've been staying with. Has the information superhighway killed your street yet? Anri Sala had these great plans to turn Cleveland into a rainforest.

Stop fighting in Little Italy!

Sitting in an Ann Arbor living room...

city #2 of our trip. Last night we explored the city and saw parks and bars and restaurants and people and streets and the farmer's market where people were just getting set up at 3am. We noticed some strange contrasts similar to some that we see in Albany, with the interactions between the various groups of people that compose a university community though are into verry different things and have verry different backgrounds.