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Off the Road: The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility

Descripción del proyecto

Los primeros coches pueden ayudar a moldear nuestra actual comprensión del medio ambiente

Los primeros automóviles no tenían techo y circulaban por carreteras con barro, arena y agua. Por esta razón, los conductores estaban continuamente expuestos a los elementos y tenían que estar pendientes de las condiciones ambientales. Por tanto, la automoción era una experiencia centrada en el entorno. Esta percepción de la naturaleza y el medio ambiente a través de los automóviles apenas se ha investigado. Para subsanar esta carencia, el equipo del proyecto financiado con fondos europeos OffRoad creará una base de datos interactiva y en línea que permitirá acceder a una amplia variedad de literatura vial estadounidense de entre 1890 y 1929, período en el que se concibió el concepto de automóvil como medio de transporte.

Objetivo

In times of climate crisis, there is wide agreement that we need a more environmental approach to automobility. “Off the Road” addresses this challenge by highlighting a largely forgotten fact: that automobility was a thoroughly environmental experience before the current system of closed cars on concrete roads emerged. This environmental automobility was particularly widespread in the United States, where much driving occurred in off-road conditions well into the 1920s. Motorists navigated through mud, sand, and water, constantly exposed to the elements and acutely aware of their surroundings. Early automobility thus engendered unprecedented modes of relating to the environment—modes that have never been systematically researched.

“Off the Road” recovers this environmental automobility by conceiving it as an aesthetic experience: one that created new sensual perceptions, new strategies of representation, and new formations of environmental knowledge. These aesthetic patterns found their most complex manifestation in road literature. The project assembles researchers from literary studies, environmental history, and the history of knowledge to recover the aesthetics of environmental automobility in three steps. (1) It builds an interactive digital corpus of American road literature from 1890 to 1929 to identify the full range of aesthetic strategies employed to render the experience of environmental automobility. (2) It positions these strategies within the modernist aesthetic innovations of the period, thus bringing into view a previously marginalized modernism inspired by slow driving in rural environments. (3) It examines how the aesthetics of automobility generated a new kind of mobile environmental knowledge that shaped environmental activism and the emergent science of ecology. In sum, the project reveals how early automobility created distinct modes of environmental awareness that can help us reconceive mobility today.

Ámbito científico (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS clasifica los proyectos con EuroSciVoc, una taxonomía plurilingüe de ámbitos científicos, mediante un proceso semiautomático basado en técnicas de procesamiento del lenguaje natural.

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Régimen de financiación

HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

Institución de acogida

UNIVERSITAT KONSTANZ
Aportación neta de la UEn
€ 1 978 350,00
Dirección
UNIVERSITATSSTRASSE 10
78464 Konstanz
Alemania

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Región
Baden-Württemberg Freiburg Konstanz
Tipo de actividad
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Enlaces
Coste total
€ 1 978 350,00

Beneficiarios (1)