Regency TR1 First Pocket Radio
by Mark Richards
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Moore’s law runs the computer industry and has begun to determine the pace of human life as well. As the pace quickens, we rush to embrace the future as much as we race to discard the past. The technology I’ve photographed shows just the beginning of the computer and Internet age. Generations of computer design and beauty have been lost, undocumented, and as time continues, many more generations of this hidden art will continue to be lost. I am trying to preserve and make known at least a small part of it.
In a world run by so many machines I want to show the art, history, and humanity in this technology. In the photographs, a visual parallel between the wires delivering energy to a mechanical memory and the neural pathways of human anatomy becomes apparent. The pieces of machines are re-framed as something more than cold technology; I hope I can provide emotion, unexpected beauty and history.
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Sixteenth in an occasional series.
Joshua Glenn is an editor, publisher, and a freelance writer and semiologist. He does business as KING MIXER, LLC.
He's cofounder of the websites
HiLobrow,
Significant Objects, and
Semionaut; and cofounder of
HiLoBooks, which will reissue six Radium Age sci fi novels in 2012. In 2011, he produced and co-designed the
iPhone app KER-PUNCH. He's coauthored and co-edited
Taking Things Seriously,
The Idler's Glossary,
The Wage Slave's Glossary, the story collection
Significant Objects (forthcoming from Fantagraphics), and Unbored, a kids' field guide to life forthcoming from Bloomsbury.
In the '00s, Glenn was an associate editor and columnist at the
Boston Globe's IDEAS section; he also started the IDEAS blog
Brainiac. He has written for
Slate,
n+1,
Cabinet,
io9,
The Baffler,
Feed, and
The Idler.
In the '90s, Glenn published the seminal intellectual zine
Hermenaut; served as editorial director and co-producer of the pioneering DIY and online social networking website Tripod.com; and was an editor at the magazine
Utne Reader.
Glenn manages the
Hermenautic Circle, a secretive online community. He was born and raised in Boston, where he lives with his wife and sons.
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