>> a mere delivery system for melancholy, nostalgia, or DIY gestalt, these images project complex and contradictory meanings that precede any tangible experience of the city itself. And yet Detroiters often do not get to see them or comment. So there’s the rub. To proceed with an analysis of Detroit’s mediatized image without local input would serve to reinscribe the rift between the framer and the framed, the subject and its constructed significations. Instead, we would aim to collapse these binaries and to enable feedback from multiple contingencies. This would require a common ground. A meeting place. An inclusive cultural infrastructure. And to that end, we set out to facilitate an event as anthology and public agora. For its purposes, we would collect of all of the documentary and photographic media produced on
the subject of Detroit over the past ten years. Then we would access its symbolic, semantic, and projective meanings collectively. Imaging Detroit was, therefore, as much an event as a research strategy that aimed to minimize subjective distanciation, to create a space of dissensus where the staged disjunction between representation, discourse and experience could be exposed. And I think we may have achieved this. Bringing together hundreds of representations of Detroit with national and international speakers from a myriad of disciplinary perspectives, inviting neighborhood participation, engaging Detroit’s government and cultural agencies – we produced interactions, however uncomfortable, between radically different contingencies. The dialogue that emerged was amazing.
Producing Imaging Detroit required countless decisions. And in conjunction with media analysis, the evolving mechanics of the project formed the very basis of our research. The texts in this book assemble some of the people, processes, connections, mishaps and evaluations that we have reflected upon since Imaging Detroit was staged. The collection is invariable partial. And we believe that our ongoing research and engagement with help fill in the blanks.
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