Scene 1
Ron is a poet. He finds his music in the mundane. Unfortunately he's also a full-time bartender and he can't get out to find his everyday muse in his banal surrounds. Confined to the internet he stumbles upon the Strip Mall Ethnography. He muses on the significance of having two Ethiopian restaurants, a Mexican grocery and a Dollar Store in one place. He sees the negative capability inherent in the shopping center experience. He decides to write his suburban-inspired epic and return to school to get his MFA.
Scene 2
Shannon works for the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. She's been looking for ways to express the vibrant, cosmopolitan nature of certain areas around Atlanta to young, well-educated, affluent profesionals looking to move to Atlanta, but Google Maps shows her city as a mass of push-pins and strip malls. To make matters worse, Everyblock has started showing tons of crime data around fledgling areas of commerce.
Shannon wants people to understand that there's more to Atlanta than crime data and push-pins, that strip malls are not commodified culture, but sites of culture and diversity in earnest. She's suggested that Strip Mall Ethnography be added to the CoC's web-site to give a more accurate portrayal of what Atlanta's shopping landscape has to offer.
Scene 3
Tom is a worker's rights activist. He wants to find an ideal setting for staging a statement of resistance in a public setting. By engaging the Strip Mall Ethnography he discovers that day laborers congregate at a strip mall a mere three miles from one of the poshest strip malls in Atlanta. Through some organizing and coaxing, he manages to convince two dozen workers to congregate at the posh shopping center for a week. By Friday he has generated media coverage and brought attention to the unfair working conditions many day laborers are subjected to in one of Atlanta's most affluent neighborhoods.
Scene 4
Alastair is a cultural critic and PhD candidate in England. He's convinced, thanks to reading too much Baudrillard, that America is series of cookie-cutter culture blocks, conveniently situated along endless miles of black-top. He sees the seemingly endless, homogenous listings for Targets and Wal-Marts as prime evidence to support his thesis: American culture is dead.
Alastair's rival, Frank, contends that American culture is still a vital and influential force in the world. That strip malls may seem like vapid, mass produced outlets of goods and ideas, but they are in fact complex parts of a larger system that inform potent individual landscapes.
The two create a lively discourse over Strip Mall Ethnography. Frank posits that the trends that come to the fore within the documentation show strip malls to be robust and culturally diverse sites. Alastair counters that these "sites" are ultimately subject to the politics of ownership and can therefore be considered only as points of sale for the commodified culture defined by corporate information brokers. Frank then rebuts, with the help of Strip Mall Ethnography, that while buying and selling may be the exigence for the a strip mall's existence, more than commerce takes place at a strip mall. They are, indeed sites of possible resistence and difference.
Scene 5
Carol is a high school teacher. She's been excited to work with the Center for Urban Pedagogy, but she wants her students to make something other than a video documentary or print campaign. She's been checking out the Strip Mall Ethnography and wants her students to take the Bronx Bodega Project a step further, turning the data used in the documentary into a web-based digital expression, using maps to geographically situate the data and realizing the physical context the bodega infrastructure occupies.
