Smithsonian
New Media/New Century Award
SPRAWL is a documentary and photographic exhibition dealing with the story
of suburban sprawl in my home town of North Canton, Ohio. It uses the
same principles as those used in previous hyperessays like Grasping at
Bits and Metaphor and Terrain, but breaks from their abstraction in using
by using an associative geographic map to guide the reader through the
stories contained within the documentary.
Sprawl was commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution's American Art Museum based on a 1996-8 series of panoramic digital photographs I had created on areas in North Canton that had been or were in the process of becoming developed. Upon reflection, I realized that my original impulse to do this was a simple nostalgia. But upon realizing this, I sought to understand the circumstances and history of my native area and how it reached the stage of development it had at the time of SPrawl's creation. The result was 190 minutes of online video and 32 panoramas plus historical documents that tries to tell a multifacted perspective of the issues relating to sprawl in what is considered by national entities like the New York Times and AOL/TimeWarner as a bellwether part of the nation.
