Dean Emeritus, College for Creative Studies

Fuel for Thought: Climate Change as Class War

The climate crisis has its material foundations in the capitalist system of production; Syracuse University geographer Matthew Huber proposes that tackling the problem requires changing how production is organized

June 7, 2022 • by Vince Carducci

Huber is essentially correct that the climate crisis is for all intents and purposes a class war, that of the transnational national capitalist class against the rest of us...

Fuel for Thought: Climate Change as Class War

Democracy

Detroit’s Project Green Light and the “New Jim Code”

Why video surveillance and digital technology intensify racism

October 1, 2020 • by Vince Carducci

————— Over the last three and a half years, the City of Detroit has greatly expanded Project Green Light, an initiative of the Detroit Police Department (DPD), along with local businesses and other organizations, to use video surveillance and digital technology to fight crime. Since the first cameras went live in ...

Detroit’s Project Green Light and the “New Jim Code”

Feature

For and Against the Anthropocene

A review of ‘Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today’

September 15, 2017 • by Vince Carducci

Since the turn of the 21st century, many scientists have been arguing for the designation of a new epoch in Earth's geological history, which they term the Anthropocene in acknowledgment of the impact of humans on the planet's evolution. While not yet officially approved by the International Union of Geological ...

Feature

The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization

Poetry, Art, and the New Spirit of Capitalism

July 16, 2017 • by Vince Carducci

Updating Walter Benjamin -- whose famous essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' on which the title of his book riffs -- poet and critic Jasper Bernes seeks nothing less than a complete reconsideration of poetry and art over the past 50 years, coinciding with the ...

The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization

Feature

Practice Makes Practicable

From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art

July 11, 2017 • by Vince Carducci

Clocking in at nearly 900 pages of dense text plus index, Practicable: From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art, edited by artist and researcher Samuel Bianchini and curator and critic Erik Verhagen, is a door-stopper of a book. Its ambition is equal to its mass -- it proposes to rewrite postwar Western ...

Literature

A Pure Solar World

Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism by Paul Youngquist

December 21, 2016 • by Vince Carducci

One of my favorite moments of personal cognitive dissonance goes back to my time at Michigan State in the mid-1970s when at brunch at IHOP one Sunday morning I looked over to see John Gilmore, June Tyson, and Marshall Allen seated a couple of tables over from me. They were ...

Feature

Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-1971, by Jonas Mekas

December 6, 2016 • by Vince Carducci

Back in the day when I was an aspiring young artist, one of my bibles was a well-worn copy (gotten at the late-great independent bookstore Paperbacks Unlimited) of Movie Journal, a collection of columns by filmmaker/impresario Jonas Mekas that had originally appeared in the Village Voice from 1959 to 1971, trumpeting the ...

Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-1971, by Jonas Mekas

Feature

Remaking the Rust Belt

The Postindustrial Transformation of North America

November 20, 2016 • by Vince Carducci

The decline of American manufacturing and what to do about it has been a key topic in the current election cycle. The demise of the nation's industrial plant, and its implications for manufacturing cities such as Detroit, Akron, and Pittsburgh, has often been seen as inevitable, a result of blind ...

Feature

Bob Dylan: Nobel Laureate?

October 14, 2016 • by Vince Carducci

I can’t say that I am a huge Bob Dylan fan. I may have been born just a little too late to have been caught up in the folk craze, though I do remember singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” along with “This Land is Your Land” and “Where Have All ...

Feature

The Smartest Places on Earth

Why Rustbelts Are the Emerging Hotspots of Global Innovation

October 10, 2016 • by Vince Carducci

For nearly four decades, the manufacturing centers of the industrialized world have been in decline, their once mighty engines of mass productivity decommissioned and rendered into silent, rusting hulks. Waves of capital and (mostly white) people have streamed out of the central cities, leaving ruined landscapes in their wake. Recently ...

Feature

Sharing Cities: A Case for Truly Smart and Sustainable Cities

May 18, 2016 • by Vince Carducci

According to the 2014 United Nations World Urbanization Prospects report, some two-thirds of the world's population is expected to reside in cities by 2050, more than double the percentage of urban dwellers that existed across the globe in 1950. To manage this growth, policymakers have embraced the notion that cities need ...

Sharing Cities: A Case for Truly Smart and Sustainable Cities

Feature

A View of Detroit’s “Beautiful Terrible Ruins”

From ruin porn to a call to action

January 20, 2016 • by Vince Carducci

Wayne State University art historian Dora Apel’s new book, Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline (Rutgers University Press, 2015) is the last word (at least, I hope it is) on the disreputable photographic genre known as “ruin porn.” Bringing her usual due diligence to bear, Apel ...