On Radical Interconnectivity — February 16, 2024

Sometime in 2009 I redesigned my personal website, then a portfolio of art and design work. I changed the tagline from “Hi, I’m Chris. I make art.” to “Hi, I’m Chris. I believe in radical interconnectivity.”

The right amount of pretentious posturing as I worked the post-grad school job market.

Behind that tagline were conversations I shared with an advisor on my interest in the web and art. I shared in a meeting that I was only interested in using the web to bring people together in person. To make things happen in the “real world.”

The viewpoint wasn’t shared by others in the room. The net.art camp cared about screens, databases and code as a medium for art. But I sort of stuck with the belief that the web could connect us in interesting new ways. I thought we could use the internet to get the gang together.

More than a decade later, the opposite has happened. Social media and smartphones have brought people online, yet somehow pushed us further apart.

I still believe in the potential of the web to connect us. It is part of what I will explore on this site and with upcoming projects.

We can say hello to strangers. We can build a shared context. And we can use little bits of code to knit it together.