My buddy John Brownlee recommended World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War for my Kindle after I told him about reading Kill the Dead: A Sandman Slim Novel. He told me he was reading WWZ and it was amazing and written by the son of Mel Brooks.

I am maybe halfway through the book but I am already sold. It has captured my mind and my heart and also my dreams. No nightmares yes.

This book isn’t about Zombies at all, actually. Max Brooks is just using Zombies as a framework to hang our humanity out to dry.

This book is about nationalism, jingoism, empotionalism, disinfo, misinfo, inflexible old Generals, arrogant pricks, generous love, denial, fear, extremism, grace, insanity, coping, and about our current 2010 set of priorities.  In this post-apocalyptic world, the people who make your food, grow your food, fix your cars and toilets, build houses and guns, and even replace a lightbulb are inherently more useful than the C-suite of Goldman Sachs global (my only saving grace as a person in this book is that I do PR and dispelling misinfo and disinfo proves to be essential in this post-infection planet earth).

The book is about cracking a lot of eggs in order to make a very small omelet in a future that might never happen. What do people do? There are reflections of Hitler and the Germans and how they behaved against the Jews — under duress and fear, human nature demands a strong leadership you assume knows what it’s doing, right?  And, is that any sort of excuse?

There are expositions on weakness and hubris and pride. The book is both pro and anti individualism as each thing has a time and a place and nothing will survive The Panic if it is marinated in Hubris. What is survival instinct, what is selfishness, what is single-mindedness, what is leadership, and what is defiance?

What an amazing novel.

World War Zis all based on “interviews” with survivors of The Panic — a global infestation of the undead who quickly take over much of the world. Billions of living humans die globally. Sounds to me like only 50,000 folks of every culture seem to make it through, and these are their words. Very well-played and completely convincing, especially if, like me, you’re old enough to have lived through the Cold War and the real thread of nuclear annihilation.

One of my goals in life is to be on Boing Boing, so in many ways my dreams are coming true every day in so many ways in the form of getting a guest blog post on Boing Boing Gadgets about the ultimate gadget, my hand-made, bespoke, Randall Model 1 knife — many thanks to my buddy John Brownlee for inviting me over and for not only considering my knife a gadget but fancying it worthy of bbG:

Knife Porn: Four years waiting and one month with the Randall Model 1 Fighting Knife Posted by John Brownlee

Guest Review by Chris Abraham

After four years, I finally received my bespoke, hand-made, Randall Model 1 “All-Purpose Fighting Knife.” Unstead of tearing right into the box, I paused and filmed a nine-minute unboxing video and took some photos of the knife — knife porn.

There are two iconic fighting knives known the world over for their service in World War II. The British Sykes-Fairbairn dagger and the American style of fighting knife, inspired both by the Bowie and the American hunting knife. There was one knife, above all other, that I coveted… coveted not just because it was considered “the best” by all of the knife magazines I bought but also because it was associated with doing hard service during World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. That knife was the Randall Model #1.

Because I wanted a Randall that was as authentic to the knives that have served our military since WWII, I ordered the Randall with a carbon blade, since it predates stainless steel. There are some challenges associated with owning and using a carbon steel knife, be it in the kitchen or in the field.

First, they can — and do — rust. Since rust is normal with daily use out in the field, don’t freak out if it happens to you. A little sandpaper should do the trick if the rusting isn’t too bad.

Second, even if you spend the time and attention required to make sure your knife remains dry and sealed under a light coating of oil, there is still the issue of discoloration. Unlike stainless, carbon steel reacts with the things it touches. The acids and oils of the leather sheath could discolor the blade. Cutting meat will discolor the blade, too.

The instructions also suggest that cutting meat with the carbon blade results in discoloration, so you’re pretty much screwed unless you don’t use your Randall at all. Luckily, that’s not true. Go ahead and use it, if you’re not a strict collector — it was meant to be man-handled. Like I said above, all of the discoloration can be easily polished out of your knife. Working carbon knives always end up looking a little like they were made of silver because of the way silver tarnishes.

When I received the knife, the blade was coated with a light oil. The instructions recommend keeping the blade dry and lubricated with WD-40. After I posted the unboxing video on YouTube, someone commented that I should be really careful with the carbon steel blade and not store the knife in the leather scabbard but rather keep the blade (but not the handle) wrapped in an oil cloth.

And how does it feel? Perfectly-balanced. It’s right where it’s supposed to be: the shiny brass hilt rests the handle right on your forefinger, as it should.

There is an after-market for Randall knives if you’re unwilling to wait for 4-years for one like I did. I checked out A.G. Russell, a popular knife store, and I found the Randall Model 1 for $600. Instant gratification for Randalls generally starts at $600 for a brand new knife of someone else’s design, usually with a micarta or stag handle, and quickly tops out at thousands for a specialty, rare, or vintage knife. If you want a knife made by Bo Randall himself, it will cost: older Randall knives are worth five to fifteen times their value.

These are collectors knives, that’s for sure. If you explore the catalog, you’ll get a feel how extensively you can pimp your knife. I ordered mine plain vanilla “traditional” with the pressed-leather handle, 7″ blade, and Duralumin butt cap. Some options I could have requested were a longer or shorter blade in stainless steel. There’s an assortment of brass hilt shapes and sizes along with a myriad of handle types, including bone, tusk, horn, micarta (a mixture of layered linen and resin), or just about anything else that could be shoehorned onto the full tang.

I don’t know if I like the big and bulky sharpening stone pocket on the front of the sheath since I don’t plan on being far enough in the wilderness to not be able to come home to sharpen the knife. I did a little research and you can get just about anything you want from Randall, including getting the sheath without the stone pouch, although a replacement sheath from Randall costs almost two-hundred dollars, nearly the cost of the knife itself. If my Google searches are true, you can even get sheaths in other leathers and colors, including ostrich, alligator, and zebra. All I need to know is the length of the blade, which is a very standard and popular 7″ (8″ is also very popular).

The man behind Randall Made Knives, W.D. Bo Randall, started making hand-forged knives as a hobby back in 1937 and started selling them in the years leading up to World War II. A reporter wrote a story about Bo during the early years of the war and there was so much demand for his fighting knife, now known as the Model 1, that Bo became a full-time knife-maker. According the website, Bo Randall hand-crafted each knife no matter how much demand or the temptation to mass-produce. Throughout WWII, the knives became legendary. Ronald Reagan carried a Randall Model 1 knife.

And, if you ever have a chance to buy a used Randall on the cheap, don’t reject a knife just because it’s rusted or the sheath is rotted. Some oil, a fine grit emery cloth or steel wool, a little polish, and you’re good to go. These knives were made for duty so there isn’t a lot you can do to “kill” the knife. And, if the knife looks a little far gone, don’t worry, you can probably find a knife-maker in your area who can fix it up by reshaping the blade and restoring the bits and pieces. If you want to restore your Randall in style, to this day you can buy replacement sheaths from the company, made to order. Additionally, you can send your Randall home to Orlando, Florida, where it was born, they can do a lovely job restoring it.

Why did I buy a knife like this? Well, that’s an odd thing, and the reason dates back over 24 years to when I was a strapping teen. When I was in high school, during the mid- to late-80s, I was a teenage commando. I went to an all-boys Catholic school in Hawaii called Saint Louis School and we had an JROTC program that I joined because it was either that, PE, or band (shudder). After joining JROTC I joined the Ranger club. On the surface the Rangers were a bunch of boys who did calisthenics and ran around campus and were entitled to wear black berets and bloused jump boots on the days every member of JROTC was required to skulk around school in Class-A Army uniforms. Still, that wasn’t all the Rangers did. We also spent weekends playing the part of Opposition Forces (OPFOR) for Hawaii’s National Guard and Army Reserve. As part of all that, we were issued camouflaged fatigues (BDUs), ALICE packs, web gear, and M-16s. Yes, real M-16s with real banana clips and real brass casings filled with real smokeless gunpowder, but without bullets with a blank-firing adaptor.

I was motivated and dedicated. I became obsessed with everything military. I bought copies of SOF and shopped at Army surplus stores. We all prized authentic gear and many of us bought Vietnam-era slash-pocket OD fatigues and Ka-Bar knives. I was obsessed with knives and started a collection.

That was 1984. I didn’t end up ordering my own Randall until twenty-years later while I was supposed to be working for Pete Snyder at New Media Strategies during the Summer of 2004. I put down $50 as a down payment, clicked “order” and then obsessed about it for nearly five years! I paid off the balance of $264.00 about a year ago. It was supposed to be delivered in June but I received a letter letting me know that delivery had been delayed until October.

Why does a knife take four-years? One of the reasons my order, #57224, order date September 2004, took so long is because I ordered my knife in a time of war. Randall Made Knives is a purveyor of hunting knives during peacetime; however, during a time of war, most of their capacity is spent on providing for our troops. According to their FAQ, “spare time and space is devoted to filling military knife orders for our active military customers. I think that’s fair, since the Model 1 was a military knife from the very beginning.

It was finally ready for delivery while I was in Berlin so I had the knife FedExed to my mom’s house in Arlington, Virginia, and counted the days until I returned home for Christmas. I arrived on Christmas eve but kept it in my pants until Christmas day, when I took this unboxing video and these photos.

After four years, the knife more than lives up to my expectations, especially since there were a couple of cool surprises that I didn’t know about, including red, white, and blue patriotic spacers between the hilt and the pressed-leather handle and between the handle and the Duralumin butt cap — I’ll photograph it with my Nokia N95 camera phone. To be frank, I have been waiting for this Randall Model #1 for twenty-four-years, since I fell in love with this perfect thing back when I was a Freshman in high school.

Worth the wait? Yes! Any hype associated with the entire experience? No, I don’t think so at all. It couldn’t be better-crafted or more beautiful. I am no longer a knife collector — or an anything collector — so the only two remaining knives in my collection is a Cold Steel Tanto I got back in 1983 and this Randall Model 1.

Randall Made Knife Unboxing Porn

Randall Knife Unboxing Pics [Flickr]

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When not waiting four years for a knife to be hand crafted for him, drunkenly stumbling away with me from a disreputable Berlin pub, or being one of the sweetest and smartest guys it is my pleasure to know, Chris Abraham runs a crackerjack conversational marketing firm, Abraham Harrison. This technically makes him a scumbag, but I love him anyway.

I was lucky enough to be a part of Jonny’s German Par-Tay. His take on Berlin? “Hey, I enjoyed Berlin too. But it also gave me the willies.” Fair enough. We spent a night carousing in Berlin with John Brownlee at The Bird over many beers. Was a good time had by all. And, as Jonny always says, jonnygoldstein.com!

Image via CrunchBase

John Brownlee of Boing Boing Gadgets cracks me up. He is one the reasons why have so much fun in Berlin. I just got off the phone with him and he dropped that he blogged about my business partner, Mark Harrison.

A private moment with Steve Jobs by John Brownlee

My friend Mark Harrison is an intriguing sort: a globe-trotting alpha male who spends winters rubbing elbows with bikini models down in Mauretius and summers either indulging in sport in Berlin or piloting yachts around Cape Horn. He’s also got some fantastic stories about his run-ins with various eccentric business tycoons. One of those tycoons is Steve Jobs.

According to Mark, the year was 2000, and the company he worked for had set up a meeting with Jobs. Their pitch was simple: while Apple at that time owned the educational market up until the end of grade school, they completely lost all of their users by the time high school started, where computer labs became dominated by PCs. Their proposition was simple: team up with Apple and leverage their presence in thousands of schools to expand Apple’s educational market share.

From the very second he sat down with them, Jobs seemed agitated. The second his ass hit the chair, Jobs began rocking back and forth autistically. But as Mark’s colleagues made blunt and undeniable appraisals of Apple’s presence in high school computer labs, the rocking dramatically increased, then exploded… along with Jobs.

A purpling shade of apoplectic, Jobs launched to his feet, flecking the table with spittle. “You’re shit! Your company’s shit! It’s nothing compared to mine!” he screamed, an outstretched finger jutting accusingly up and down. Eventually, his fury was spent, and the situation was defused by some politically expedient cooing noises.

Still, it’s all just so Jobs, isn’t it? Ever since I heard the anecdote, I can’t help but think of Jobs that way. Turgid with rage and quivering in front of a PC or DAP or mobile phone, spraying its display with spittle: “You’re shit! SHIT! DO YOU HEAR ME? Your operating system’s nothing compared to mine.”

Mark used to be a big cheese for Primedia in New York at the turn of the century but I had never heard this story. Please read and laugh. The funny thing is that back in the day, Mark and I were big proponents of Apple and their Apple for the Teacher and Apple for the School program. We were inspired by the Apple Evangelist, Guy Kawasaki, and both wondered why Apple kept on dropping the ball and ceeding market share to Microsoft. Well, after reading this post you will see that is was probably hubris.

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Thanks to Xeni Jardin and John Brownlee over at Boing Boing and Boing Boing Gadgets for giving a shout out to my client and worthy cause, Fresh Air Fund, as they come into a crunch in their need to place 200 kids who are still lacking host families for August, Give low-income city kids a chance to experience rural reality!

Give low-income city kids a chance to experience rural reality.

Posted by Xeni Jardin, July 16, 2008 11:46 PM | permalink

Our John Brownlee, over at Boing Boing Gadgets, tells the mothership about a project close to his heart:

There’s an organization called the Fresh Air Fund, which has been around since 1877.Their charter is basically to arrange to send low-income New York City kids out of the city for the summer to get a breath of fresh air and experience the country: free summer vacations for kids who might never have left the city in their lives.

There’s a website detailing their organization and what they need from host families here: freshair.smnr.us.

Image: “Fresh Air campers visit the model farm, one of the highlights of Sharpe Reservation in Fishkill, NY where The Fresh Air Fund has five camps.”

posted in: Environment ,  Make a Difference

Via Marketing Conversation and Boing Boing

Last night I joined the party train with the Berlin English-speaking expatriot community at Marietta Bar. Met up with John Brownlee, met some very lovely girls — a German and a Romanian — beauties — who are courting Big Pharma and want to practice their English, and then I had some time to chat with Hasan Elahi, who I had met last Friday at Hairy Mary. Do you know who Hasan Elahi is? Hasan is the artist behind Tracking Transience!

I read WIRED and I listen to NPR every single day — even now in Berlin via podcasts. I think I first heard of Hasan Elahi on Studio 360 — maybe WIRED? However it may well just have been in the mediasphere.

Hasan is cool, hip, playful, fun-loving, and now a major player in the modern art scene. If he didn’t need to be a wanderer before, he needs to wander now. He has galleries around the world and needs to spend time popping around the globe doing seminars, talks, installations, panel discussions, and the like. He is also someone who lives life pretty well — last night, when I remembered I left my jacket liner at the bar and had to go back to look for it (and I got lost and ended up bailing for the night), it was after 3AM and the drunken American mob (well, Hasan and I were quiet but we’re in our 30s, but we were with college-age and early twenties merry pranksters — Europeans actually do open their windows and yell hateful things our of their windows at 3AM on a Thursday night when you’re being loud — it happened) were on our way from the closed Marietta Bar and headed back for more at the “we close whenever” Hairy Mary and Hasan Elahi was right there with him, a half-empty Budweiser Budvar in one hand and his camera phone in his right.

And yes, he does snap a new picture from his camera phone when he arrives in a new place. He tags the photos using names and cities and so forth, but the system is not GPS-based, it is tag-based: folksonomy based on a system he predefines. For example, the G4 server running the site receives his tagged images and parses it using PHP and then ties into the Google Maps API to render a real-time map of where he is.  Elegant, really — and simple, too.  So, let’s say he is going someplace new.  Well, he can put in the street name and number, and that is a good enough tag for Google Maps to find him.  So, for example, his PHP app is smart enough to understand the following:

• Hairy Mary
• Marietta Bar
• Office
• Berlin home
• Lehrter Strasse 5d Berlin

And since Google recognizes places as well, he can take a picture at Berlin Hauptbahnhof and tag the image “Berlin Hauptbahnhof” and it will find him and place him on a map.

So, working with Google Maps is elegant — he could arrive in Northern Virginia and just tag an image with “iota bar virginia” and it should work — and it does! And it really does for many restaurants, bars, stores, airports, and so forth — to it means that Hasan Elahi doesn’t require clunky GPS systems — that Google Earth and Google Maps go all of his heavy-lifting.

Brilliant, really.

The Visible Man: An FBI Target Puts His Whole Life Online on WIRED

Hasan Elahi whips out his Samsung Pocket PC phone and shows me how he’s keeping himself out of Guantanamo. He swivels the camera lens around and snaps a picture of the Manhattan Starbucks where we’re drinking coffee. Then he squints and pecks at the phone’s touchscreen. “OK! It’s uploading now,” says the cheery, 35-year-old artist and Rutgers professor, whose bleached-blond hair complements his fluorescent-green pants. “It’ll go public in a few seconds.” Sure enough, a moment later the shot appears on the front page of his Web site, TrackingTransience.net.

There are already tons of pictures there. Elahi will post about a hundred today — the rooms he sat in, the food he ate, the coffees he ordered. Poke around his site and you’ll find more than 20,000 images stretching back three years. Elahi has documented nearly every waking hour of his life during that time. He posts copies of every debit card transaction, so you can see what he bought, where, and when. A GPS device in his pocket reports his real-time physical location on a map.

Elahi’s site is the perfect alibi. Or an audacious art project. Or both. The Bangladeshi-born American says the US government mistakenly listed him on its terrorist watch list — and once you’re on, it’s hard to get off. To convince the Feds of his innocence, Elahi has made his life an open book. Whenever they want, officials can go to his site and see where he is and what he’s doing. Indeed, his server logs show hits from the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, and the Executive Office of the President, among others.

The globe-hopping prof says his overexposed life began in 2002, when he stepped off a flight from the Netherlands and was detained at the Detroit airport. He says FBI agents later told him they’d been tipped off that he was hoarding explosives in a Florida storage unit; subsequent lie detector tests convinced them he wasn’t their man. But with his frequent travel — Elahi logs more than 70,000 air miles a year exhibiting his art work and attending conferences — he figured it was only a matter of time before he got hauled in again. He might even be shipped off to Gitmo before anyone realized their mistake. The FBI agents had given him their phone number, so he decided to call before each trip; that way, they could alert the field offices. He hasn’t been detained since.

So it dawned on him: If being candid about his flights could clear his name, why not be open about everything? “I’ve discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away,” he says, grinning as he sips his venti Black Eye. Elahi relishes upending the received wisdom about surveillance. The government monitors your movements, but it gets things wrong. You can monitor yourself much more accurately. Plus, no ambitious agent is going to score a big intelligence triumph by snooping into your movements when there’s a Web page broadcasting the Big Mac you ate four minutes ago in Boise, Idaho. “It’s economics,” he says. “I flood the market.”

Elahi says his students get it immediately. They’ve grown up spilling their guts online — posting Flickr photo sets and confessing secrets on MySpace. He figures the day is coming when so many people shove so much personal data online that it will put Big Brother out of business.

For now, though, Big Brother is still on the case. At least according to Elahi’s server logs. “It’s really weird watching the government watch me,” he says. But it sure beats Guantanamo.

Speakers > Speaker Detail

Hasan Elahi
Assistant Professor, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University

Hasan M. Elahi is an interdisciplinary artist with an emphasis on technology and media and their social implications. His research interests include issues of surveillance, simulated time, transport systems, and borders and frontiers. He has had numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally in venues such as PS122 and Exit Art in New York; the Kulturbahnhof in Kassel, Germany; the BBC Big Screen in Manchester, UK; and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. He has also lectured at the American Association of Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University and the Tate Modern in London. His work has been supported with significant grants and numerous sponsorships from the Ford Foundation/Philip Morris, Creative Capital Foundation, DuPont Industries, the West Virginia Cultural Center and the Asociación Artetik Berrikuntzara in Donostia-San Sebastián in the Basque Country/Spain among others. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Elahi’s Pop!Tech Appearances:
Pop!Tech 2006 “Dangerous Ideas”

Hasan Elahi on NPR’s Studio 360

Last weekend, new media artist and Pop!Tech 2006 speaker Hasan Elahi was interviewed on NPR’s Studio 360 hosted by Kurt Andersen about Hasan’s website art project, Tracking Transcience.

The website has tracked Hasan’s life in all its mundane glory, in real time, for more than 5 years now. He began the project in response to his experience in an airport where he was wrongly identified and detained as a terrorist and was constrained to report on all of his whereabouts and movements on the days around 9/11 to the FBI. After he was freed of all charges, he decided to voluntarily track his movements online.

Pop!Tech Host and Curator, Andrew Zolli is also on the program to discuss the impact of Hasan’s work and its context in a world with a changing view of privacy.

Listen to it here on iTunes, or visit the Studio 360 website and listen to the episode online.

AND stay tuned for Hasan’s upcoming Pop!Tech Pop!Cast of his 2006 presentation. Check Pop!Tech Pop!Casts for more information.

Hasan M. Elahi From Wikipedia

Hasan M. Elahi is an interdisciplinary media artist with an emphasis on technology and media and their social implications. His research interests include issues of surveillance, sousveillance, simulated time, transport systems, and borders and frontiers.

His recent work falls in the area of Sousveillance Culture together with artists Amy Alexander and Jill Magid], as recently presented at the Conflux Festival in New York.

Sousveillance

As reported in Wired (May 22, 2007), Elahi has put his entire life online:

Poke around his site and you'll find more than 20,000 images stretching back three years. Elahi has documented nearly every waking hour of his life during that time. He posts copies of every debit card transaction, so you can see what he bought, where, and when. A GPS device in his pocket reports his real-time physical location on a map.

Elahi's site is the perfect alibi. Or an audacious art project. Or both. The Bangladeshi-born American says the US government mistakenly listed him on its terrorist watch list — and once you're on, it's hard to get off. To convince the Feds of his innocence, Elahi has made his life an open book. Whenever they want, officials can go to his site and see where he is and what he's doing. Indeed, his server logs show hits from the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, and the Executive Office of the President, among others.

The globe-hopping prof says his overexposed life began in 2002, when he stepped off a flight from the Netherlands and was detained at the Detroit airport. He says FBI agents later told him they'd been tipped off that he was hoarding explosives in a Florida storage unit; subsequent lie detector tests convinced them he wasn't their man. But with his frequent travel — Elahi logs more than 70,000 air miles a year exhibiting his art work and attending conferences — he figured it was only a matter of time before he got hauled in again. He might even be shipped off to Gitmo before anyone realized their mistake. The FBI agents had given him their phone number, so he decided to call before each trip; that way, they could alert the field offices. He hasn't been detained since.

Exhibitions

He has had numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally in venues such as PS122, Exit Art, and Pace Digital Gallery in New York, the Kulturbahnhof in Kassel, Germany, the BBC Big Screen in Manchester, UK and The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. His work has been supported with significant grants and numerous sponsorships from The Ford Foundation/Philip Morris, Creative Capital Foundation, DuPont Industries, the West Virginia Cultural Center and the Asociación Artetik Berrikuntzara in Donostia-San Sebastián in the Basque Country/Spain among others.

Faculty positions

Prior to joining the faculty at Rutgers, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. He has also taught at West Virginia University; Wanganui School of Design, in Wanganui, New Zealand; and also in Houston, Texas.

See also

• Steve Mann (live 24/7 wireless video webcast starting 1994)
• Joi Ito (transmission of pictures from cameraphones)
• Justine Ezarik
• Justin Kan
• JenniCam
• Sophie Calle (surveillance artist)
• Julia Scher (surveillance and sousveillance artist)
• Sousveillance

External links

• • Tracking Transience
  • Hasan Elahi siteWired (May 22, 2007)
  • CBS Evening News (June 18, 2007)
  • Sousveillance culture
  • Sousveillance Culture with A. Alexander, J. Magid and H. Elahi

Art Criminal: Hasan M. Elahi

This story at We Make Money Not Art describes the artwork of Hasan M. Elahi who isn’t actually a criminal, but was supected of being a terrorist and was investigated and interrogated between June and November 2002 by the FBI. Elahi says the FBI wanted to know everything he had been doing while overseas, “What was I doing there? Who was I speaking with? What did I see? Where did I sleep? And even down to what I ate and drank. I was eventually cleared and to the relief of my friends, family and co-workers, I am officially no longer considered a terrorist – after a 3 hour long polygraph exam which was repeated 9 times.”

Mr. Elahi’s art is influenced by Orwell’s vision of a future state of total surveillance and control. In one piece he wears a device which uploads images tagged with exact GPS coordinates of where the image was taken to a server which then sends the GPS tag to the United States Geological Survey which returns an aerial surveillance image of the his location. The server compiles the returned map with the uploaded images and small thumbnails of the previously used images into the web based file which can then be accessed online.

Artist’s Statement:

I like to think about the appearance of technology rather than technology itself. More importantly how the technology is packaged or should I say, marketed into an appearance of desire and need for the consumer. This need I feel is more based on a social understanding and [social] function of the technology. Just as any other product that has a pioneering stage, an acceptance stage and an obsolescence stage, I feel that the timing of how a certain technology is adopted by society is far more important than the technology itself. It is in these human borders and frontiers that I am interested in…and also the traces that they leave behind. I have been attempting to bridge these virtual conditions with physical geopolitical parallels and have been fascinated at the translations and the mis-translations of them. I find the most potential in these mutual misunderstandings. I find states of designed obsolescence in structures and systems of power as a global citizen. I prefer lo-fi to hi-fi–and in these absurd realities, I find my works attempting to balance and tumble simultaneously.