Paul Guzzardo

Paul Guzzardo is a lawyer, media activist, artist-designer and member of the UNESCO Media Information Literacy Innovation Committee. He is the innovator of a discipline called Recursive Urbanism which examines the intersection of smart machines (code + things) and the City Street. His work explores the relationship between digital technology and urban environments. Through his storyboards, Guzzardo sketches the digitization of the human experience, addressing the dizzying dynamic between machines and us. Guzzardo’s creative praxis includes academic publications, a 1990’s internet nightclub, outdoor projections, a street-front media lab, remix concerts, gallery installations, documentary films, theatrical productions, and litigation. He was a visiting fellow at the Patrick Geddes Institute for Urban Research University of Dundee, Scotland, 2007-2019. Guzzardo was a former legal counsel for the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) and served for a while as the agent-manager of the eminent Hindustani musician Ustad Imrat Khan.

Website
https://paulguzzardo.com/

The Player on the Quantum Stage

“The Player on the Quantum Stage” is traced to “A Septic Turn in a Space of Appearance”. “Septic Turn” showed up in 2015.  The intervening decade is marked by two defining happenings: the velocity of A I technologies, and the growing struggle between democracies and autocracies. While both projects delve into how digital technologies shape our interactions with public spaces – and the stages we play on – “The Player” confronts long-held assumptions involving the essence of player and body.

“Septic Turn ” was a 2015 UK installation-lecture series. “The Player” is an ongoing project. “The Player” is in search of a protocol responsive to the exponential scalability of computational power, alert to changing notions of fixed spaces and static bodies; and desperate for a practice that might inform a more fluid and interconnected understanding of the street and body.

The urban design praxis – Recursive Urbanism – served as the footing for “Septic Turn” and it points the way to “The Player.” Recursive Urbanism aimed to identify epistemic niches—stages where knowledge and creativity converge, nodes as anchors, grounding us amidst rapid technological acceleration. Paul Guzzardo developed Recursive Urbanism in St. Louis Missouri between 1996 – 2016, the same RiverCity stage where Marshall McLuhan, Water Ong, Jack Dorsey, and Sam Altman played.

“The Player ” offers an insider’s look at the stage, that set the stage, for the explosion of social media and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). It explores how elites have controlled public spaces, making it difficult for creative communities to adapt, innovate, and redefine their practices in this worrying Ai – Autocratic landscape. As it critiques the failure of the arts and the privileged ones to prepare for “the dark aspects” of social media and AI, “The Player” scans our evolving body in this digital age.