this week: WCIARTS - Macomb; a strip and a video short
the short:
“The Walk” installations are a McLuhanish update on Patrick Geddes’s "map and biopsy city protocol". They frame my praxis, and demonstrate two "recursive urbanism" protocols. The protocols are oppositional. One protocol uses the street as an evolving search engine, a tableau you drift through, synthesizing as you move. The other protocol uses the street as a beautiful girl or guy uses a conversation; they keep turning the conversation back on themselves.
the goings on:
Installation Macomb: West Central Illinois Arts Center - 4pm to 7 pm on Fridays and 10am to 4pm on Saturdays throughNovember 19th . A Guzzardo lecture “A Walk on the Digital Sublime – Meets Occupy” is set for Thursday, November 17th at 7pm at the West Central Illinois Arts Center at 25 East Side Square, Macomb Il.
S, M, Lgraphic tryptic downloads, "a civics lesson, a recursive installation" (codling/guzzardo_ graphic) codling is a maker, and the video that follows_ follows on that.
"A Walk on the Digital 'Sublime" bores into a St. Louis Missouri urban design praxis. The praxis recursive urbanism uses the street as: 1) an evolving search engine, a tableau you drift through, synthesizing as you move, 2) a platform to assemble networks to critique the network, and 3) a probe into how digital kit edits-us. Videos and accompanying graphics frame a struggle of getting onto the street, and manning way-stations to navigate through a digital fog. This streetscape praxis is now snared in litigation in St. Louis. St. Louis is where Marshal McLuhan did foundational media work. McLuhan anguished that the "privileged diet for the elite" would thwart art as radar. "A Walk on the Digital Sublime"tracks how a bogus idea of community provoked a lawsuit, and why a St. Louis elite decided to forfeit and obliterate McLuhan's St. Louis legacy. And do it in time to celebrate his 2011 Centennial.
Lectures:
Links to Digital Sublime Lectures, NORTHERN IRELAND
The 2 Image Boards are from “The Cartographer’s Guide to Bad Code" lecture series. Venues were Illinois, New York, Buenos Aires, England, Scotand and The North of Ireland. The eight lectures were from November 2010 to July 2011 .
Here are details on some upcoming talks. There are other lectures set in March, April and May but the dates are not firmed up. Those lectures are scheduled in Belfast, Edinburgh, Glasgow and London. Details will be posted later. Also here's a link to The Opening Lecture KEYNOTE SEGMENTS
2-24-2011- Western Illinois University Libraries and the Department of English and Journalism host my talk, “How to Scavenge and Survive Inside a Wikileak Dumpster_ and Don’t Even Think About Prospering” . It's set for 6:00p.m. in the Leslie F. Malpass Library, Garden Lounge, Macomb Illinois. Here's a Link and a Poster.
3-3-2011- Pratt Institute's Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development are hosting my lecture “New Ways to Smear the Street with Our Extended Epistemology”. It’s scheduled at the Brooklyn Campus, Higgins Hall Auditorium (61 St. James Place, Brooklyn, New York). Reception 5:30; Lecture 6:00; Q+A 7:00. The lecture is also being co-sponsored by the Buckminster Fuller Institute. Here is a Fuller link to the lecture.
3-16-2011 - “The Cartographer’s Guide to Bad Code _or How to Navigate Through a Digital Minefield” is sponsored by The Association of Dundee Architecture Students ADAS at the University of Dundee, Dundee Scotland.
3-23-2011 - “The Cartographer’s Guide to Bad Code" is also set for a Research and Design Seminar at the University Newcastle School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. It is at 1pm in the Exhibition Area, 4th floor Claremont Tower.
"Displaced" the Llonch / Vidalle publication is now available for order/purchase. I'm one of four authors, including George Ranallie, Michael Sorkin and Mario Correa. My essay is "Tunnel Vision- An Architecture of Reflexivity"
October 23, 2010 "Writing Critique Media Design" with Charles McLead and Dr. David Banish. The panel was part of the Humanities in the Digital Age conference at Western Illinois University.
November 17, 2010 - I have been invited to give the "Geography Awareness Week Presentation". It is sponsored by the Department of Geography Western Illinois University. The title of my talk is "The Cartographer's Guide to Bad Code".
A note about the Cartographer Dilemma Symposium / Charette - The October event was postponed. A late spring 2011 date will be announced shortly. More to follow.
Somewhat Briefly Stated
I'm a media activist, artist - designer and a lawyer. I refer to my praxis as Recursive Urbanism. RU probes the effect of pervasive computing on the design and occupation of public space. I use the recursive _redundant loop-cut-paste_ grammar of digital information systems to activate the public sphere. For the last thirteen years I’ve examined the performative dynamics of new communications technologies; in a nightclub, a media lab, in theatres, documentary films, and in various public installations, projections and publications. The projects mix spectacle and information. I use the street as the platform/medium to investigate how digital information technologies change us. I am particularly interested in how the digital fog of image and sound affects our democratic public sphere and civic identity. More and more I focus on why existing noetic economies (knowledge systems) discourage an emergent political geography, a "Polis" that promotes contest, collaborations and creativity.
I am a fellow at The Geddes Institute for Urban Research. It is an interdisciplinary research institute within the University of Dundee. Also I am currently working with activist attorneys. We’re looking at reified cultural art practices as viral bad-code; code that hollows out the public sphere _ and what to do about it. Or in legal parlance "what's the remedy".
My projects can be seen at various web sites and are also described in publications. Web sites and links to publications are included throughout this post. But for brevity (and I hope clarity) here is a quick 1 2 3. (Note some of the content that follows is Buenos Aires derivative and bilingual.)
The Praxis: Article and Videos
An abstract from my article “The Cartographer’s Dilemma” follows. It was published this spring in the UK in Urbanism in Scotland by Urban Design UK. The article was co- written with Lorens Holm, the Director of the Geddes Institute for Urban Research. The article is structured as a "Holm - Guzzardo conversation". An expanded version was presented at SAUD 2010 in Amman Jordan. The conference theme was "Sustainable Architecture and Urban Development”. It explores architecture and urban development within the context of sustainability.
Abstract: The Cartographer’s Dilemma
The city is quickening. We hover between built space and media places. Place making that takes no heed of the knowledge environment is no longer sustainable. In the era of pervasive computing we need better maps to manage the built environment. The Cartographer’s Dilemma proposes a new place making action plan for a withering public sphere. We need to develop new epistemic assemblages - street probes - for navigating a landscape of space and information. The city as site and form of knowledge begins with Patrick Geddes, the evolutionist/planner who celebrated the Greek polis, who was a pivotal link in an intellectual lineage that extends from Darwin to contemporary media theorists. With projects like the Outlook Tower and the Cities Exhibition, Geddes left behind a tool kit on synthesis, gear to map sites and record knowledge, and assemble places where mapping persists. He saw the city as an evolving search engine, a tableau you drifted through, synthesizing as you move. For Geddes, you became a citizen when you glimpse the future and humanize it. Mindful of Geddes - and wedged between a data space and a hard place - this paper will explore how place makers can begin to rethink the neighbourhood enclave and reprogram them as precincts for knowledge creation and creative action. This paper uses Geddes' work on the city to rethink the implications of the digital environment for the space we call Civic. It recalls projects in the UK context, that address this space as an archive of knowledge and identity. The Cartographers Dilemma is relevant for the re-cabled megalopolis that will need strategies for capitalising on this status. It will argue for a new definition of the sustainable city, by projecting the urban planning theories of Patrick Geddes onto the evolving 21st century media environment.
Keywords: digital media, urbanism, civics, map, game, Patrick Geddes, sustainable community.
Links to Cartographer Dilemma articles, the short and the long:
The Cartographer's Dilemma documentary is currently in process. The opening chapter offers a quick "praxis summary".
Dystopic Kid Text (dkt) This video has been used in installations and in the documentary buildbetterbarrel. It has been included in talks _ by myself and others _ in South America, EEUU and Europe. Below is a "partial bilingual" dkt version.
The MediaLab - A BUILT PROJECT
A description of myMediaLab (1999-2001) follows. Again the text is from the Guzzardo/Holms article The Cartographer's Dilemma from the current issue "Urbanism in Scotland". A MediaLab image and video short follows:
MediaARTS lab in St. Louis... was blended place, a straddled one. The lab was a roll. It was fun. It was on the street, a sort of polis update: Release 99.The lab wrapped a windowed corner in downtown St. Louis. Artists used digital collage, remix to create new urban narratives, to map and re-mythologize a streetscape. Their work, the evening’s digital amalgam / remix was projected on screens and monitor walls facing the street. The topical subject matter included meditations on film and digital editing; art/science practice; the effect of information technology on social practice; 9/11; the millennium, comic books; and Orwellian media culture. It ran off and on for a couple years. It was street theatre, and maybe more. It was tool looking for a better one to try to advance synthesis and awareness, with the hope that it might lead to collective action.
CONTENT
Secretbaker is an example of a "digitized archive" both as content and as "activist urban design gear". Secretbaker was a 3 year project. It involved a fluid creative atelier; multiple venues and practice grammars. The project series emerged from the FBI files of the American expatriate entertainer Josephine Baker. Two Secretbaker You Tube videos follow.
Obviously my praxis requires collaborations; artists who are agile with multiple creative languages. The video below is from a secretbaker remix concert. It demonstrates a recursive-remix grammar and the studied, collaborative nature of the RU praxis.
A Final Note - and one about Borges
"The Cartographer's Dilemma" was an installation in the EEUU. This is a link to the INSTALLATION Content Ledger. A multimedia study of Jorge Luis Borge's "The Exactitude of Science" was included in the installation. The video follows:
buildbetterbarrel -
nine events in new media is a road movie. it is a chain of short vignettes.
segments map a new media story line. backdrops include cahokia mounds, the
chicago lakefront, the pulitzer foundation for the arts, and a st. louis street
front media lab. in this road movie we meet two suits and a trickster, mounds
and mississippians, catholic boys and a bible press. and we run into an eskimo,
the one who started it rolling, Nanook.
