NOMADelphia

Group Project

Read the excerpts from Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, in which imaginary cities and their inhabitants are created in short vignettes. As a group, you will now create the inhabitants of a city, and the city itself, in a bulletin board discussion on Blackboard.

You are each an inhabitant of NOMADelphia, a place that exists in the past, present or future, or all times at once.

You will each contribute to an open diary of the inhabitants of NOMADelphia. Each writer is anonymous—choose a NAME. Each writer can talk about who and where s/he is, why and how s/he got there, where and when s/he is going.

Each post MUST contain a key word from one of the most recent posts before it. You can also post images as attachments.

This is an opportunity to imagine or find the VOICE you speak with; a chance to document, discover or imagine the PLACE you inhabit.

You are creating the VOICE of an inhabitant of NOMADelphia. You will create an NAME for yourself. You will introduce yourself to the NOMADelphia Discussion Board, giving your NAME and the details you see fit. You may not yet know "who" you are, and you may not yet know where, how or why you live in NOMADelphia. Or you may simply report the details of your daily life. You do not yet know who else lives there, or what kind of a place NOMADelphia is. You will find all of this out by presenting yourself, meeting the other inhabitants, asking and answering questions. You can maintain anonymity among the group by being SURE to check the "Post Message As Anonymous" checkbox BEFORE YOU SEND EACH MESSAGE.

REMEMBER: All of you already live in NOMADelphia. It exists already, and so does everyone in it. Your job is to find out as much information about this place as you can, including information about your own life experience there. You also want to find out geographical, architectural, physical, metaphysical, biological, philosophical, linguistic, material, etc. information about the place, the inhabitants and their relationships to each other.

Each member MUST post at least 1 message per day, starting on Friday, October 8 and ending on Thursday October 15. Each member must read all messages posted. Your post can be a new message or a response to another post.

Again, BE SURE to check the "Post Message As Anonymous" checkbox BEFORE YOU SEND EACH MESSAGE.

Each of you has the power to create or destroy NOMADelphia. Please be constructive and respectful with your messages. Please avoid abusive language or intentions. Respecting basic conventions of appropriate behavior, feel free to push the boundaries of communication, imagination, realism as far as you can go.