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.
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.
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.