Not An Alternative

The Subsumption Machine at Eyebeam’s MIXER: EXPO

Join us on March 6 and 7 at Eyebeam for MIXER: EXPO, an alternative “World’s Fair” with airborn surveillance balloons, guerilla media towers, and computerized prayer booths. Explore a temporary village occupied by a dozen engineered pavilions, performances, and DJ sets by Tim Sweeny and Juan MacLean. Not An Alternative’s interactive installation The Subsumption Machine will be featured in the show.

From London in 1851 to Chicago in 1893 and New York in 1939, the World’s Fair has been an influential cultural spectacle that promised a utopian “world of tomorrow” while packaging and promoting the national and corporate agendas of the day.

MIXER: EXPO is an alternate take on “World’s Fair” expositions, a faded cultural phenomenon that set the tone for urban planning in the 19th and 20th centuries. The World’s Fair also championed the philosophy of better living through technology, presenting innovative strategies that continue to resonate through contemporary life and leisure - from shopping malls and theme parks to natural history and science museums; broadcast media and exhibit display to sell consumer products, technological innovations, and nationalistic ideologies.

Like the best science fiction and social satire, MIXER: EXPO constructs a fictitious place in order to examine a world that might have been, that has come to be, or that might be on the horizon.