LIFT MetaZine: REDUX

LIFT MetaZine: Redux

I wrote and designed the first LIFT zine in 1997, when I was 23 years old,—a graduate student at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Burgeoning digital networks were on the brink of transforming every aspect of life itself, and my classmates and I were eager to engineer its aesthetic. And yet, nobody had a TV, much less a mobile phone.... I wrote about the sense of anxiety many young people had at the time: we knew that the Internet was about to change the very fabric of society, but we couldn't predict what our new lives would look like.

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Fast forward to 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic. Widespread social and physical isolation were both relieved and exacerbated by the very digital technologies I had written about more than 20 years earlier. When I revisited LIFT MetaZine during the Covid-19 lockdowns, I shuddered under an uncanny sense that I had predicted our complete submergence into the virtual world.

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The new LIFT MetaZine: Redux is a mashup of these two moments in history and blends together predictions I made and the events that took place in the meantime, along with autotheoretical inquiry about the nature of writing about and visualizing personal experiences in the first place.