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
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