Manufacturing Dissent

2012 Talks

What Happened to the Big Idea in Music Technology? (with Dave Allen, David Ewald, Rick Moody, Jesse von Doom, and Anthony Batt)
2pm, March 14th, Room 17A
Austin Convention Center
SXSW
Austin, TX

My Books

I was Assistant Editor on Paul D. Miller a.k.a DJ Spooky's Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, which is available from The MIT Press and fine bookstores all over.

My first book, Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes, is an anthology of interviews with all kinds of minds. Disinformation named it "among the most important books published in 2007," and Erik Davis called it "a crisp and substantial remix of the major memes of the last decade or so."

I have a little piece in Disinformation's first book, You Are Being Lied To, a compendium of dissent, which also includes essays by Noam Chomsky, Howard Bloom, Douglas Rushkoff, Howard Zinn, Richard Metzger, Alex Burns, and Mark Pesce, among many others.

Shutter to Think

March 09th, 2003 | 4 Comments | Category: Me

I’m not much of a painter, but I found this canvas by a dumpster on my way home from campus one day here in San Diego. I had a tube of black and a tube of white acrylic paint left from my last stint attempting to paint, so I decided to try a new one. This piece was inspired by Kate Hayles’ book Writing Machines, code poetry, and (obviously) Noam Chomsky.

Manufacturing Dissent

“Manufacturing Dissent” — Black and white acrylic and decoupage on canvas.

Further Posting:

4 Comments »

rachel said:

i bought this picture recently. i love this piece and everyone (except my folks) who has seen it loves it. i feel fortunate to own it. why did you get rid of it? r

# November 24th, 2008 at 8:59 pm

Roy Christopher (author) said:

Hi, Rachel.

Where did you find it? In my mad dash from Portland earlier this year, I unleashed many possessions in the thrift stores and bookstores of the 503. This wasn’t one of the pieces I meant to get rid of. I am glad to know it has an appreciative new home though.

Thanks for the kind words.

# November 24th, 2008 at 9:09 pm

rachel said:

I found it at the thrift store connected to the Community Warehouse on Interstate and Mississippi. I am sorry you “misplaced” it, but I’m glad to have found the artist. It is in a much loved home. Best! r

# November 24th, 2008 at 10:17 pm

Roy Christopher (author) said:

Yep, they’re the ones who came and got my stuff. I ditched a lot of things that I really didn’t want to let go of, but I couldn’t move them all.

Thanks again for finding me. Be in touch and such.

# November 25th, 2008 at 9:25 am

Respond / React:

I marshal the middle between Mathers and McLuhan.

I am currently an Assistant Instructor corrupting the youth at The University of Texas at Austin, where I am also pursuing a Ph.D. in Communication Studies. My main interests are figurative language use and the social impacts of technology. My main goal as a writer is to entertain and as a scientist is to find novelty. I’m more of the former than the latter and more of a fan than a critic. This site is where all of these things play out. It’s where I think aloud about all of the above.

I’m an aging BMX/skateboard 'zine kid. That’s where I learned to turn events and interviews into pages with staples. The pages and staples have long since given way to links and scrollbars, but the rest is basically the same. I still ride bikes, and I still skateboard. I do still commit quite a bit to actual pages, too. Read on »