The following remarks were selected from a mix of Guzzardo writings.
They offer a sketch of the “digital city agora” and
the DJ/VJ as “agora venued” post text - post canvas
artists.
… if a serious critique of our information age is to take
place, it will take place on the street, the street as a stage,
the street as an animated tableau, a tableau consisting of brick,
bits, bytes, and “Joe and Jane Public”.
… a public stage for the interplay of complex communication
systems where the process of production is showcased on a public
platform.
… an arena for the performative dynamics of new communications
technologies, using mapping tools and stagecraft tools.
… an alternative performance venue, one that stimulates
a self reflectivity among producers and the consumers of media
content.
… . where, and who are the new media literate sentinels
safekeeping the porous boarders of the Digital City?
… the street as a viewing station, an ocular device offering
a line of sight into the Digital City, as an outpost, a way station
for a new generation of digital artists, who are beginning to
master the tangled relationships between information infrastructures
and street corners, beginning see the porosity of a Digital City
street, beginning to recognize the new civic ensemble made up
of bricks, concrete and data packets.
… in an age of nano second change who out there is going
to initiate a public critique on the rise of an information age
plutocracy and the plunder of a digital common. Do we look to
traditional artists, filmmakers, the eleemosynary brethren?
… as digital appliances hasten the descent of three dimensional
culture into two-dimensional apparel, there is a desperate need
to craft an alternative interface in public space to respond to
our new liminal home base.
… platforms to give voice to visual artists as poets and
poets as visual artists.
… street experiments whose mission is to advance our understanding
of the effect digital communication technologies have on us.
… urban tools to examine the fanciest and fastest of all
the tools, the Internet.
… tools shaped by our haptic self, information age tools
responsive to the glance and hostile to the gaze.
… tools that offer an interface with an extended landscape.
… digital urban tableau vivants as stairways to syntheses.
… a new blended social space, social spaces created by bleeding
information networks and their virtual communities into a rich
dimensional public realm.
… technologies that gave us passage through Tolkien’s
Middle Earth are the same technologies that can give us passage
through Midwestern Cities.
… to rethink and remake the city as a stage - the technology
is in place, and that place is the street.
… a public stage for the interplay of complex communication
systems, an arena where essayists, poets and artists engage in
ongoing agonistic encounters with emerging media environments.
… spatially and aurally complex tabla rasas that can be
whispered on and written on, again and again.
… mingling on line operators and communities with a streetscape
audience to create new urban social spaces.
… the development of agile plastic information age urban
structures with the mission to map the spatial dynamics of the
network.
… new interfaces in public space, prototypes that map the
extended site and simultaneously observes the cause and the effect
of digital media on the tool user.
… schooling of information age cartographers, artists who
are responsive to this liminal state, this place between public
space and data space, thinkers who are creatively and politically
disposed to prick and lance at institutions and practices inept
and insensitive to a new topography.
… inject information networks and their virtual communities
into a rich dimensional public realm.
… a theater for multiple voices to ricochet, recoil, boom
and reflect off one another, to generate forms that welcome stickiness,
contingencies and complexities.
… richly designed haptic environments, multi sensorium backdrops
to bridge the gap between information and communication.
… performative structures that embraces happenstance, accident,
and change.
… how technology married with urban architecture and art
might be used to strengthen our sense of moral agency rather than
further dilute it.
… public spaces as media baroque agoras, liminal stages
for tricksters who prick at information plutocracies, tricksters
who invent and spread a new techne, and tricksters who make new
worlds.
… as Lewis Munford understood, the City has the potential
as a theater for heroic reform
