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Off the Road: The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility

Descrizione del progetto

Le prime automobili possono contribuire a plasmare la nostra attuale comprensione dell’ambiente

Le prime automobili non avevano il tetto e viaggiavano su strade con fango, sabbia e acqua. Per questo motivo, i conducenti erano continuamente esposti agli elementi e dovevano essere consapevoli delle condizioni ambientali. Spostarsi con l’automobile era quindi un’esperienza incentrata sull’ambiente. Questa percezione della natura e dell’ambiente attraverso le automobili è stata scarsamente studiata. Per colmare questa lacuna, il progetto OffRoad, finanziato dall’UE, creerà una banca dati interattiva online per rendere accessibile un’ampia varietà di letteratura stradale americana dal 1890 al 1929, periodo in cui è stato concepito il concetto di automobile come mezzo di trasporto.

Obiettivo

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.

Campo scientifico (EuroSciVoc)

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Argomento(i)

Meccanismo di finanziamento

HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

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(si apre in una nuova finestra) ERC-2021-COG

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Istituzione ospitante

UNIVERSITAET REGENSBURG
Contributo netto dell'UE
€ 570 353,74
Indirizzo
UNIVERSITATSSTRASSE 31
93053 Regensburg
Germania
Regione
Bayern Oberpfalz Regensburg, Kreisfreie Stadt
Tipo di attività
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Collegamenti
Costo totale
€ 570 353,74

Beneficiari (2)