Paul Guzzardo
A Walk on the Digital Sublime bores into a St. Louis Missouri urban design praxis. The praxis - which anticipates a form of recursive urbanism - uses the street as:
- an evolving search engine, a tableau you drift through, synthesizing as you move,
- a platform to assemble networks to critique the network, and
- 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 the 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. This installation is part of a larger project to create the media conditions for intelligent and transformative political debate in the city.
Dundee Installation credits
A Walk on the Digital Sublime is a joint Paul Guzzardo and The Geddes Institute for Urban Research installation, hosted by the School of the Environment, University of Dundee, in the Dalhousie Building and in the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
Dalhousie - 8-28 October 2011
Duncan of Jordanstone Lower Foyer Gallery - 29 October - 11 November 2011
Credits + Crew + Collaborators = Hugh Campbell, Jesse Thomas Codling, Sophia Hao, Lorens Holm, Lyle McCance, Elizabeth Shearer, and Richard White.
Paul Guzzardo is currently a fellow at the Geddes Institute