The organizing principle: Scavenger hunts
The method: Meet at a point in Shanghai. Form pairs. Receive scavenge instructions. Set out to find designated locations. Explore. Write. Describe. Narrate. Talk to somebody. Write. Answer a question. Write a new question for the next pair to come. Follow instructions. Write. You may be asked to take a photo or shoot some video. You may be asked not to take any photos or to shoot video. You may be asked to try a particular type of food. You are being asked to write. You may be asked to toss coins at Buddha and burn incense in the Jing’an Temple courtyard. There may be no instructions other than to go on your nerve. Write as freely and creatively as you can (and quickly—we can cut, alter and otherwise edit later). Then share, edit and compile results with other hunter-scavengers. We post it to the Web. We repeat three times throughout the semester in three different neighborhoods.
The results: A one-of-a-kind travel guide to Shanghai. An anti-travel guide, even, featuringirreproducible subjective experiences of the city rather than the “objective” descriptive and narrative framework familiar to anyone who has picked up a Lonely Planet or Rough Guide. In other words: What you say, not what you're told.
Rather than set expectations and walk people through reproducible experiences (“yeah, we checked out that place because Conde Nast Traveler recommended it, too..."), Scavenge will feature:
Stories of chance encounters; breathless descriptions of people and spaces in states of high-speed flux; slow and in-depth descriptions of single objects or textures or rhythms; overheard conversations; photos; sounds; the moment of writing and the moment of seeing, touching, hearing. This will be a constellation of unique moments, composed in situ and edited in collaboration by students.
We may print something, too.
