Life in postmodernity

I went to college at the University of Iowa in the middle and late 1990s. I studied painting and drawing and the new emerging field of digital media. My work was abstract and my subject matter was a barrage of pop images that my media-saturated brain had collected as I grew up a child of America. Sesame Street, Nintendo, Fog and Toad, Scoobie Doo, Captain Crunch, Kool-Aid Man, Super Mario Brothers, Lord of the Rings books, Star Wars, Gummie Bears and Smurfs all went into the blender of my imagination and came back out as wild, abstract things.

A focus of our studies in the BFA program was postmodern studies. Postmodernism is a cultural shift that has (and is) occuring in a world radically changed by the proliferation of new technology. As a group of young artists, a lot of our study was centered on defining how art would exist in the next era.

Just as industrialization informed Modernism, so would digitalization inform postmodernism. The computer, the Internet, flash video, mass communication, blogging, and global community are the dawning reality. Art will (it must) adapt to exist in this new world.

We made many conclusions. Some were starry-eyed and foolish, some where way out of left field, but some hit the nail right on the head. Art is changing in this new age. Just look at TV trends and YouTube and you can see this is true. There is nothing wrong with the old way, if it suits your needs that great. But know that the world is changing and that change is natural and it is inevitable.

The emergent church is the equivalent of that discussion group seeking to redefine art for the new age. Church too is changing. It always does. The church of the feudal age with its central power structure and big stone buildings changed. It didn’t look a thing like the church of the Reformation. The church of the last two hundred years was reformed by modernity and its pursuit of logic and reason. And this incarnation of the Body the Christ is also changing. It's having new life breathed into it by a new generation of pilgrims that are coming to the well and they are oh so thirsty.

More on change tomorrow.