Life is moving so fast you’re already a relic of the future. This site‐specific installation at Axle Contemporary mobile gallery looks to the insights of the Futurists of the late 20th century, particularly the ideas presented by Alvin Toffler, who referred to the technology/information age as ‘the Third Wave’. How do we navigate the sea change, what will fall away, what will be transformed, and what to do when big waves converge. It’s my first ‘exhificition’ on new media culture.

Audio transcript from the 2011 Futurology installation for Axle Contemporary:

“Welcome to the 3rd wave. Some call it the information age, the technosphere, the global village. Alvin Toffler called it the Third Wave,

Toffler used the Wave analogy to look at history as a succession of rolling waves of change. "The collision of wave fronts” he wrote, “ creates a raging ocean, full of clashing currents, eddies and maelstroms which conceal the deeper more important historic tides.”

The First Wave arrived took about 9000 years as hunters and gatherers started cultivating land. It was agricultural time, full moons, new moons, . powered by heartbeats and seasons, wind and water to turn the wheel of the necessary inventions, the winches wedges, pulleys and presses.

Hoe-dy hoe, chop wood, carry water.

By the 18th century a Second wave crashed into the First, the waters stirred up by thinkers like Descartes the century before.  “I think therefore I exist” and before long  cranks flywheels and steam power mixed the world up into cities and factory systems. The Industrial revolution, the Second Wave, gave birth to cultural characteristics that suited the system- Standardization, specialization, synchronization and centralization. Fossil fuels kept the engines running like clockwork and soon machines started giving birth to new machines. 1955 is the year Toffler credits with the growing force of the Third Wave as the Second Wave lost steam. Now we are hunter gatherers of seeking information to inform our de-massified world, retribalizing, fracturing, niche-ing, micro-chipping away at Second wave authority.

 Toffler wrote, "Most of us in the rich countries are essentially either 2nd wave people committed to maintaining the dying order, Third Wave people constructing a radically different tomorrow or a confused, self canceling mixture of the two...”
That brings me to futurist Marshall McLuhan who foresaw and named the Global Village in the 1970s.  McLuhan understood all technology or media to be an extension of the human body, the way a car is an extension of the foot. The computer, or digital media, extends our central nervous system. He cautioned 40 years ago that the power of new media to create the illusion of being at home everywhere with everybody could lead to the reality of  “discarnate mankind, at home nowhere and sustained by no illusion”.   Danger danger danger. He went on to add that in times of accelerated information exchange we have a censor to protect our nervous systems, the cooling system brings on a life long state of psychic rigor mortis or somnambulism……

Back to the body. Over half of the body is water, pulsing at higher and higher frequency, part of the wave we all share.  No more red, blue, conservative liberal, just the waves crashing. It’s Futurology 101- and change is coming at us not in a straight line but in an infinite number of directions. Think-Surprises. Here’s what my friend surfer guitar player, songwriter, and painter, Rob Bird Robinson has to say about waves. ….”