PETER FRANK / PMCA EXHIBIT ESSAY / 10/12

The Digital Age has found its way into regions of the globe largely untouched by the Mechanical Age before it. Throughout the Third World, computers sit in schoolrooms that never saw typewriters, cellphones buzz where telegraphs were unimaginable, MP3 files play where LPs never did. The poor, the earthbound, and the indigenous, long the subjects (not to mention victims) of advanced technology, are now its confident operators. In his series of Encoded Textiles Guillermo Bert symbolizes, even embodies, this newfound mastery by collapsing traditional and newly invented methods of communication into one another.