Short Abstract:

Our workshop examines picture postcards as un/written canvases of a cityscape. Participants explore Aberdeen on foot, following postcard motifs. Without using smartphones, we will rely only on the city’s social surroundings and touristic hunches for orientation.

Long Abstract:

Picture postcards as touristic souvenirs and small courtesies from traveling friends show and tell mediated imaginaries of landscapes, cities, or events. In a way, they are the perfect illusion of a place’s character and atmosphere. Postcards often omit elements of daily life or transform the mundane into something sublime, serving as tokens of an "authentic experience" (Stewart, 2012). Simultaneously, the written notes on postcards are hardly extraordinary. Senders write about food, weather, and activities, concluding with hopes for an early reunion.

In a palimpsest-like excursion, our workshop questions the touristic gaze of picture postcards as a biased imaginary of cityscapes and as an idealized construction of urban life. The workshop engages with the historic postcards of the city of Aberdeen to re/un/write touristic practices and affects. In small groups, workshop participants follow the streets of Aberdeen in search of the postcards’ motifs. This involves re-experiencing the spaces around these sites and retracing the paths leading to them. Participants are encouraged to focus on their affective experience of unfamiliar surroundings. This approach seeks to create a fuller sensory awareness (Stoller, 1997) of the spatial reality conveyed by the postcards.

Drawing inspiration from Georges Perec's experiments with “un/writing” in his collection of combinatorial postcards (Bonch-Osmolovskaya, 2018), we will ultimately experiment with “field-prompts” for generating AI picture postcards.

The first “Let’s Get Lost!” edition took place in 2023 in Brno at the 16th SIEF congress, receiving widespread support to be repeated in other locations.

Two 105-minute sessions over two days.

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