| The Media Box was going to be located in the St. Louis Grand Center arts district, across from two museums - the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts and the Contemporary Art Museum. Next door was Saint Louis University. This is where seventy years earlier Marshall McLuhan and Father Walter Ong began to rethink how we tell, save and send on stories. And where these two men wrote how monikers, tags and brands stand in the way of the stories we need to tell if we want to continue to tell stories. The Media Box grew out of everything that makes up this web site; the Josephine Baker archive cycle - the MediaARTS’s lab - the night club Cabool - a Sam Clemens remix. But it was more. It was not built. Ironically a building about storytelling was a victim of a “bad brand; a casualty of misunderstandings and skewed press regarding public space and private property rights. And it happened very quickly, right before the United States Supreme Court decision on eminent domain - Kelso vs. City of New London Connecticut., 545 U.S. 469. But before it failed much work was done. Below are links; links
to maps, maps that mark where the Media Box was going to be built,
and to a series of video interviews describing where the Media
Box came from, and where it hoped to go. The maps were drawn
in the studio Axiome. They show the Media Box site at the intersection
of the bawdy and the bookish. It’s where a theatrical Great
White Way once intersected with a learned place, Saint Louis
University. The interviews were held with the Australian
Creative Resources Online ARCO) at the University of Queensland.” MAPS |