Current Project

In this new project, we examine the way technology is being represented and read in popular culture. The texts of new media are ahistorical, reference points manifested as a chronology of release dates. Each exposure to experience is informing our understanding and relation to another experience, resulting in an accumulation of general “knowledge”. These sources are impacting our lives, influencing the way we design, organize, and utilize technology. These are the texts that write our future and our past.

Three nines are symbolic of the pentultimate number in a revolution; the last number before 1000. However, three gears interlocked can not turn. The repetitive application of power grinds these gears. The erosion of the machine continues until the machine breaks, and the revolution occurs. In gaming culture, grinding is known as the repetitive behavior of a single task in order to unlock a special feature or customize a character. This is our task. To grind the machine, regardless of success, to customize our public voice - our avatars.

We are the gamers; we are the grinders.

In this season, Fall of 2009, my task is taking a magnifying glass to these representations allowing a pattern to emerge from fragments. We are making meaning; generating an argument of interpretation.

In order to understand where we may be positioned, and where we might go, we engage the electrate; we explore the new literacies of the digital age. We do not engage to explain, we engage to explore.

For the next few months, join me for a journey into popular culture to track our human connection to technology; to pursue a holy grail whose reward is the quest. It is a game, of sorts. It may be a chase, an attempt to capture fireflies. It is a puzzle, a million pieces whose edges are yet to be defined (if they even exist). We are the gamers.

Let us begin.

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