I got a strange degree in college. It was called Conceptual and Information Art. When I started, it used to be called Conceptual Design and Information Arts, but the student body voted to change it so it was CIA because we were a bunch of pranksters. The name stuck and it’s now called Digital Media Arts & Emerging Technologies (Conceptual Information Arts). It’s an alphabet soup that means the intersection of art, science, technology and culture. It is where I met and fell in love with postmodernism.

What is postmodernism? Well! There are volumes of intellectual discourse on the subject. Check out this definition:

Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse defined by an attitude of skepticism toward what it considers as the grand narratives and ideologies of modernism, as well as opposition to epistemic certainty and the stability of meaning. Claims to objective fact are dismissed as naive realism. Postmodernism is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the “universal validity” of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization.

–Wikipedia entry for Postmodernism

Put it simply, it means to make work that questions normal assumptions. Basically, philosophy but throw in a bit of art, a pinch of humor, and some big words.

A large part of Postmodernism is using some really long words because you often need to be very specific to break apart a big idea. It’s really fun to drop some of these great 10 penny words like obfuscation or obscurantism – which literally mean to use big words to make a simple thing seem complex. The more letters I put in a row, the higher grade I would get on my essays.

But that was college. Now I find it more effective to use small words for the same purpose. It’s more of a challenge but it makes my thoughts more clear. It also makes it easier to talk to everyday people or even really smart people where English is not their native language.

When explaining to my mom what it meant to be a conceptual artist, I told her that it meant I could make art, but instead of using things like paint or clay, I could use anything. She said “even potatoes?” I said “Yes.” So she called me the potato artist. But Subway Sandwiches, my first job after college, called me a sandwich artist.