For half of his life, Michael Stipe has lived in a world between worlds, a constantly shifting moiré pattern. The past world is defined by the analog, the future world by digital. It was the advent of digital technologies and their integration into our daily lives some 30 years ago that hurled us headfirst into this tumultuous in-between state. Visually speaking, the present doesn’t know what it wants to be. Our current horizon and all that wanders there is dictated by both the past and the future, but there is no clear understanding of where the ‘right now’ stands. It is an epic, woozy mishmash, thrilling and unsettling. These states of being don’t communicate well— there’s no clear point where they mesh, and no agreed upon language exists to easily translate one into another—or to integrate them into a new system altogether. The tug of war between pixels and halftone, between past memory and new memory, and their vagaries of representation, is an endlessly fascinating and technically challenging field. 'Our
