Why Ask Me?

The current state, and perhaps the foreseeable mid-to-long term state as well of human and devices communications is that neither of the active parties values the other to the degree needed for productive dialog. Neither party can ask clarifying questions, something critical to successful communication. Whatever we ask these devices is asked with the loose freedom of knowing that, at least for now, they have no stake in communicating with us beyond what their makers, a silent third party, has to gain. The fact there being a third party means that the device is always a go-between--and the master it serves is not us. So we communicate with them frivolously,

So I have taken the most common and frequently used device, the smart phone, and presented both it and us as uncooporative or uncommitted partners. Indeed some times the failure to be able to respond is suspecting that the other party has violated what linguist call the cooperative theory, where the parties proceed in communication with the assumption that the other party is committed to the exchange. And as is the case here the suspecting parties lacks confidence in their own abilities to grasp the context necessary for participating.

All the panels blend multiple layers of my own digital photography. (In the case of "Can We Fix This" there are also layers of photographs of some of my traditional printmaking works.) In my production of this project I will print on aluminum, which I have not previously done, because I think it adds to the sense of the devices as technology.