John Steiner
Former Staff
Future Memories
John Eric Steiner
Erie Art Museum
September 2, 2021 – January 30, 2022
With a series of installations with objects and videos that merge old and new media, Future Memories at the Erie Art Museum in Erie, PA, explores our complicated relationship with technology.
John Eric Steiner is a multimedia artist who relies on the language of cinema to create dreamlike moments. His work reflects on modern life as we experience being the first generation of humans on both sides of the camera simultaneously.
Future Memories is a series of videos, installations and objects that merge old and new media. Combining analog and digital technology including: slide projectors, raspberry pis, and a late 1970’s phone receiver, he pushes the limits of small machines within a context of techno-consumerism. Steiner’s work explores our complicated relationship with technology and its implications and intersections with sex, religion, and survival, in late capitalism. He mines his dreams for imagery and artifacts; utilizing these coded messages as a way to process uncertainty. He gives form to his fears, rendering them less powerful while leveraging their mysterious poetry.
Steiner pushes the limits of small analog and digital machines such as slide projectors, landline phones and modern computers to examine the connections between sexuality, religion and survival, in late capitalism.