the codling / guzzardo documentary "posses | protocols | perpwalks" is currently being edited and assembled, “chapter 1” and “ preview” follow.
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Hackerspace for Myth-Making: THE RECAP
On the terms imposed by technocratic society, there is no hope for mankind except by 'going with' its plans for accelerated technological progress, even though man's vital organs will all be cannibalized in order to prolong the mega-machine's meaningless existence. But for those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty ancient hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out.
Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine (Epilogue)
A Hackerspace For Myth-Making workshop was conducted at PLACE, the architecture centre based in in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The workshop ran from March 19-22, 2012. It was produced in partnership with the Ulster Festival of Art and Design 2012, and held in conjunction with my Festival Lecture. The initial brief stated the workshop objective was to: Generate “on the street prototypes” that intersect with web based social media applications. The product will also include design protocols for the prototype operation. Workshop focus turned quickly to FACEBOOK's "frictionless sharing applications". These applications are the backbone/infrastructure of FACEBOOK’S IPO. This Initial Public Offering (now estimated at 100 + Billion US) offered a pressing reason to examine the "apps", and the impact they will have on urban ecology (place and us). As always in my praxis "workshop endgame" was protocol development for on going research. Process and results follows. Content is organized into 7 Hackerspace Modules.
Module 1 : a script
Module 2 : an antecedent
Module 3 : props
Module 4 : another graph
Module 5 : deep cuts
Module 6 : iterations
Module 7 : a bad example
BUT FIRST A VIDEO - The Opening / Closing Installation - Thursday March 22, 2012
THE MODULES
Module 1 ; a script 
Two technology interviews framed the workshop. An interview of Facebook’s Director of Product Development Carl Sjogreen was coupled with one of Vidar Brekke. Brekke is a technology brand strategist. The Sjogreen’s interview _ Deep look at Facebook’s Open Graph _ was conducted by Building 43’s Robert Scoble, and Brekke’s interview _ The Open Graph and What it Means to Brands & Marketers _ was from Scribe Media.Org. Both interviews were on “the open graph”. The open graph is the web architecture for "frictionless sharing". Simply stated, the graph's morphology turns the internet from an index of pages into an index of people. The implications are profound. Here's the quick wiki description.
The Open Graph protocol enables developers to integrate their pages into the social graph. These pages gain the functionality of other graph objects including profile links and stream updates for connected users.The implications that the Open Graph may have on the web as a whole relate significantly to the idea of search engines. While currently Google still attracts more traffic than any other website, Facebook is a close second. Even without a good internal search engine, Facebook already drives more traffic for some searches, specifically social searches, than Google itself. And in attempting to link Facebook with the rest of the web, the Open Graph is creating Facebook’s own extensive and highly interactive version of a search engine.
The workshop remixed the Sjorreen and Brekke interviews in order to jump-start a map of FP’s “frictionless new world”. The two interviews provided workshop players a structure to assemble tools to lay open what's coming. The two files below, 1) the "interview text grab", 2) an "audio remix" were used to claw out an ur-SCRIPT. It's a script we'll likely be working with for awhile.
Interview- Text Grabs (ur script) Interview Audio Remix (acoustic stage)
Module 2; antecedent to what’s coming
This video short is by Ray McNally and Ivor Hession of the University of Ulster School of Art and Design . Done for the workshop, the video logs the "page index". It's a dizzying snapshot, a running log of the pre-open graph world. It marks where we came from. It's a sort of starting point, a place we might soon call "nostalgic".
Module 3 ; the stagecraft; props, pictures, video
The street has always been a stage. Lewis Mumford called it "a platform for heroic reform". And some of us would like to keep it that way. The workshop used the Belfast street to toy with an FB crush of friends. This street theater vignette (props and all) was the work of University of Ulster artist Alice Burns _ and a cast of would be friends and passersby. Ciara O’Malley documented it all.
An FB Buddy Album - A Binder on Bonding
Module 4 : another graph
John D’Arcy and Christian Cherene, post graduate students at The Sonic Arts Research Centre Queen's University Belfast, were the programers, and all around creatives. While code/programing details are not included in this post, note the D'Arcy-Cherene chart below. It's a meta-graph to the open graph. It was used for the closing installation, and was a make-break workshop tool. The PLACE installation is documented in 1) the first video in this post, and 2) the live feed below this chart. Together they suggest (and sketch-out) a background-foreground visualization of "the new index" that's being generated by the open graph. We are the "prop-like" foreground in the visualization. The hovering BACKGROUND is the BRAND. The brand is the standout. This time around it's "Subway", but that will flip. There's a long line, and it's getting longer.
(no audio track)
Module 5 : piranesi's plans, sections, and deep cut
The workshop brief included designing a portable-prototype street stage, a street prototype to mount this "shape shifting liminal script". The stage _an assemblage of tableaus_ would be the interface with the open graph; something akin to a "friend arena". Plans and sections for this proto-stage were to be ripped out of Piranesi’s carceri (prison) drawings. Piranesi’s cuts (the copper plate kind) offer a deep well to plumb the open graph ecology. Unfortunately the workshop was too short to develop that Piranesi Build Module. It’s left to another day.
Currently I’m preparing an article on Piranesi and the open graph. It's with my frequent collaborator Lorens Holm. The working title is A Shadow in the Cloud. Holm is the Director of the Patrick Geddes Institute for Urban Research in Dundee, where I am a Fellow. Patrick Geddes was the mentor of Lewis Mumford. Both men understood the city as stagecraft. And while paring Piranesi with Geddes and Mumford might have seemed odd awhile back, maybe not so now . (And lest we forget, it started with Piranesi sending all those picture post cards from his Roman junket to his Venetian FRIENDS.)
Module 6: the iterations
If there's any criteria out there for evaluating the workshop it's got to be whether it provokes something more. Product needs replication. There's got to be iterations. It works if there's a meme-like sway. So what follows is a post-Hackerspace sway. This includes video two shorts; Index the People by Christian Cherene and John D'Arcy, and Face to Facebook by Alice Burns. These videos are content in a second PLACE Hackerspace installation. It's a budding multiscreen iPOD docudrama.
(no audio track)
Module 7 : a bad example
The Hackerspace for Myth-Making workshop and the University of Dundee Hacker Seminar emerged out of my “Walk on the Digital Sublime” cycle of exhibitions and lectures. The "Walk" series is detailed elsewhere in this blog, and on the web. Both "Hackerspace" and "Walk" are situated on "The Arendtian Stage". Hannah Arendt understood that if you want to show a new example you better be ready to show a bad one. Absent that “your new example” might get stuck in a self indulgent solipsistic loop. “Hackerspace for Myth - Making" hacks out a new example. The Walk” was about a bad example. It was about a bogus idea of community.
The "Walk" traced how that bogus idea _ a privileged diet of the elite _ fouled the legacy of Marshall McLuhan and his St. Louis Mo. Posse. Those guys (that Posse) were McLuhan's first time collaborators. Back in the 1940/50s McLuhan and the Posse were on the trail of an old graph. McLuhan's media legacy caught fire tracking down and mapping that graph. The graph was print technology. It's called the Ramus Method. And it’s the slow moving analogue to what’s now at the door. The hack into the Ramus was done by Walter Ong. He was part of the Posse. In this face-off with Facebook let's close with Ong.
Reflection on the condition of the new media and the changes they are effecting in human life will probably produce no pat formulae either to describe the totality of the present situation or to prescribe highly simplified lines of action. But it should enable us to live.
“The Barbarian Within” Fr. Walter Ong (1962)
CREDITS/Another Posse
In addition to the individuals noted above, the following individuals also assisted in the Belfast Hackerspace workshop and the seminar in Dundee. A thank you to Tim Kerr, Paul Clarke, Alona Martinez, Conor McCafferty, Amberlea Neely, Gary Potter, Ciaran Mackel, Sara Love, Lorens Holm, Cameron McEwan and Jesse Codling
guzzardo workshop: a hackerspace for myth making
guzzardo workshop: a hackerspace for myth making
When and Where
PLACE 40 Fountain Street, Belfast, Monday - Thursday 19-22 March
ULSTER FESTIVAL OF ART AND DESIGN
the workshop goal:
Generate “on the street prototypes” that intersect with web based social media applications. The product will also include design protocols for prototype operation.
some background, and questions:
The ubiquity and torrent of social media applications is apparent; facebook, twitter, tumblr, instagram, pinterest. But there’s not much thought given to what effect this “social media ecology” is having on the city. Are we we going to be stranded in a public sphere smeared with social media detritus, piled high? Can we still come up with some strategies (prototypes and protocols) before a “social media brownfield” clamps down the street?
a workshop map (of sorts):
“a hackerspace for myth-making” is obviously open-ended, and certainly an outlier on the usual place-making check list. But here’s another list that should be helpful in getting started.
- street theater / public arena is a good frame. Interactive staging and performative street installations is central, and is key to my praxis. Links to my work are below. Lewis Mumford’s epilogue in The Myth of the Machine is the quintessential text on the city “as a theater for heroic reform”. His prescience stuns. I’ve uploaded the epilogue as a pdf. Epilogue, Mumford's Myth of Machine.
- in terms of the Applications, all of us have a varying baseline in place. But how theses Apps might be used/ played with/ grafted onto a site specific projects; now that’s more of a creative leap. Photo-sharing Apps like Pinterest or Instagram are a good place to start. We will look at some of the weirdly evocative social media instructional video you-tube links. They offer 1) a “roux/code” to generate designs for street interface into this new blended social space 2) a critique pad into this liminal public-private sphere.
- there's a desperate need to grab onto to a hard site’s embedded histories, traditions, myths. It’s important to use the street’s past to anchor any prototype. We need “palimpsest processors” on the street to stand up to this social media tsunami.
- hardware / widget things; certainly the reason that this workshop is happening is that there’s cheap portable kit out there, and more every day. The web is fount for this gear.
workshop end game, OR what are you going to get out of this:
maybe a new tool set? some things you can use to refit the street as stage for reflectivity, so the city (and you and me) are still players in the face of what’s coming.
Links: Much of my web presence is smeared over a batch of sites. So it is somewhat of a pick and choose.
http://www.secretbaker.com/recursive-urbanism.html
http://www.rudi.net/node/22049
a walk on the digital sublime_ guzzardo
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.
Installations Dundee: The two "Walk on the Digital Sublime" Dundee installations are produced by Paul Guzzardo and The Geddes Institute for Urban Research in the School of the Environment the University of Dundee. They are being hosted in the Dalhousie Building and in the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
Dalhousie- October 7-28 2011
Duncan of Jordanstone Lower Foyer Gallery, October 28 - November 11 2011
Credits + Crew + Collaborators; Jesse Thomas Codling, Lorens Holm, Elizabeth Shearer, Sophia Hao, Richard White, Lyle McCance, Hugh Campbell and Cameron McEwan.
Lobby Gallery Strips 1 + 2
Lobby Gallery Video
Dalhousie Video
Western Illinois University at Macomb Illinois; October 21-22, 2011, EGO - English Graduate Organization Conference : Intersections: Literature, Technology, Science
In Newcastle - Culture Lab, Creative Communities
Newcastle Video Short
Newcastle Photo Strip
THE WALK ON THE DIGITAL SUBLIME_the 123 basics:
the link to the creative communities symposium, Culture Lab Newcastle UK:
the link to the guzzardo installation:
S, M, L graphic tryptic downloads, "a civics lesson, a recursive installation" (codling/guzzardo_ graphic) codling is a maker, and the video that follows_ follows on that.
the content videos:
the media box creative commons interview
and again, the text:
"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
28 Sep 2011, Lunchtime Lecture: Paul Guzzardo , Artillery Chambers, 10-12 Artillery Street, Derry~Londonderry BT48 6RG "A Walk on the Digital Sublime, a lesson in Protocol"
29 Sept 2011 Lecture 11.15am: University of Ulster School of Architecture and Design, Connor Lecture Theatre.
lecture film-strips
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 .
Schedule
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.
Guzzardo: Recursive Urbanism Synopsis
a few updates
"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" Regarding another "Tunel", here's a link to my Rosario Argentina lecture - The Green Flaneur and the Wiki'd Street. 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:
Urban Design UK (short)
SAUD 2010 (long)
Two videos, as a FRAME:
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 my MediaLab (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.
The second video is a "remix" of the 1952 Teatro Colon lectures of J.Baker. Also as background : a link to a 1) PDF of the J. Baker - Teatro Colon FBI Files and 2) An Spanish audio file - of the Baker Colon remix Democracia en Norte América es una farsa.
Secret Baker generated much content and interest. Here are links to two additional secretbaker videos: Truck and Tadao Ando/Pulitzer.
An Atelier
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:
Other Links : WebSites
http://cartographersdilemma.com/
http://buildbetterbarrel.typepad.com
Links to Some Papers, Publications
Is There a Digital Future Landscape Terrain?
Links to Presentations
pdf - List of Guzzardo Lectures – Multimedia Presentation
Guzzardo- you tube video; The Cartographer's Dilemma - WIU Installation Gallery Walk; 1-2010
content
0922-CC01036 paul guzzardo v grand center
links to pleadings:
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.
paul guzzardo
prelude to a barrel youtube QT
jesse codling graphics
