InfoNation OverLoad

InfoNation OverLoad explores the ways in which information is conveyed and received. It’s readily apparent that tangible information, especially in the form of vinyl billboards, is rapidly becoming obsolete. Meanwhile, advertising and news are now being dispensed via LED screens, thereby reducing our purview to the size of digital devices. Thus, in the wake of Facebook and similar phenomena, “older” information is rapidly becoming irrelevant to both current and subsequent generations.

Jason Willaford explores this changing cultural terrain by reconfiguring billboard material and “quilting” iCloud forms. While a glut of cyber information pushes us all into cultural overload, his works ofer more manageable bits (bytes) that are formatted into segments of information that make for crafted “clouds of information.” They drift; they bisect; they overlap; and they also arrange material in ways reminiscent of the Internet itself.

However, by using a traditional mode of working, quilting, a collision of traditions is invoked. Thus, matriarchal construction methods come into direct opposition with our own contemporary (disposable) era. Past meets present and viewers are forced to examine a gamut of dichotomies: email versus storytelling; individuals versus community; and expansive gestures versus smaller, more meditative practices.

Ultimately, InfoNation OverLoad intimates that the quality of our lives is formed by the nature of commodities, the drastic morphing of which has not been fully explored. The juncture of this radical change has both banal and exciting aspects and, ultimately, it needs to be seen, observed, and examined. Otherwise, the “OverLoad” is likely to make victims, rather than victors, of us all.