At the end of the second year of my doctoral program, the first and second year PhD students were asked to create a poster communicating their doctoral research. Since my own research centred largely on aesthetics, form, and perception as framed by the media scholarship of Marshall McLuhan, the natural choice for me was to create an object that drew attention to its ‘formal cause’ as the very environment of spectatorship in which my poster was to be exhibited. Since, taking McLuhan a step further, we might say that it is not so much the city, but rather the internet that is the “classroom,” I wanted to communicate, in the style of Menippean satire and modernist formalism, the digital psyche to itself – particularly, the human-all-too-human ‘inforg’ as a product of social media and mimetic virality. Since I was reading Michel Serres’ The Parasite at the time, I thought organizing my percepts on the basis of the mischievous alliance between host/parasite, signal/noise (figure/ground?) might be a relevant and humorous way to poke a few holes into the complex thicket of speed-of-light information sharing. While the poster was designed for direct visual-tactile interaction, I have tried to translate this experience into virtual terms, which, while obsolescing the original, innocuous playfulness of the work, enhances its patterned groundlessness, providing perhaps a chuckle to the belly and a glint to the brain.
