Bits, Bytes and Pixels
Space invaders, the classic 80s shoot-em-up arcade game raved the playground of my youth. Car phones were high tech, portable phones, weighing over 10 kilos, were only used by top-notch businessmen. “Doom” was the favorite pastime of all of the boys and the “Prince of Persia” was the subject of all of my dreams. Only 2 decades after space invaders, technology seems to have permanently invaded our daily lives. Almost everybody has their second life in RPG games, posts pictures on blogs or communicates with worldwide friends through skype. Eternally reachable on those cell phones and always accompanied by our portable offices called laptops, we seem to have become more mobile than ever.
Thanks to the Internet, globalization not only manifests itself in the economical field, but above all on our cultural perspectives. It becomes more and more difficult to visit a place like China, remote as it seems to most Europeans, without having any idea about how it looks or how people live. Asian pop music has a great influence on Western music and vice versa and somehow, that one architect who designed that right-angled bleu-glass building seems to have been everywhere around the globe.
The new generation grew up with electronic devices. Some of us were lucky to have an Atari or a commodore 64 to get through those rainy Wednesday afternoons. Maybe some dreamed of electronic racecars or remote controlled airplanes. And most of us got that microwave to warm up the meals mum insisted us on taking to our student dorms.
Having been surrounded by these devices all of our lives; it seems inevitable that they invade our way of working. We’d like to let communication through technology evolve into communication with technology and invite you to participate in this conversation that links the world.

Alexandra Verhaest, Shanghai 2007