Following the purchase of a box at a garage sale that contains, among other things, an interview with a conceptual artist, a novelty post card, a travel chess set, technical papers, unpublished stories and a coloring book, the unnamed author of this epistolary novel suddenly finds himself standing at the intersection of language, art and technology. It is a busy intersection. While waiting for the bus to show up, he uses the time and the tools at hand to answer those ageless questions that have kept so many great minds busy over the millennia. What is the true nature of consciousness? What is the difference between language and reality, especially when you're trying to state the facts? What is art? What isn't? Does every political system eventually evolve to totalitarianism? How quickly can things change before the human mind stops caring one way or the other? Is virtual reality destined to become the best low cost alternative to physical reality for the poor and destitute? Why is it that every time you change lanes in rush hour traffic the lane you are in stops moving and the lane you were in takes off? Are ghosts real? Do aliens believe in them? The third book in Michael Aro's The Names of Things Trilogy, Art & Technology attempts to answer these and many other equally important questions.
About the Author: Michael Harold writes under the name Michael Aro, his father's Spanish birth name. Born in 1952, he is a novelist, poet, multimedia artist and inventor. He has worked as a roofer, a truck driver, an urban planner, a teacher, a computer technologist and a founder or co-founder of several software companies. His books include five novels, three volumes of poetry and two chapbooks. His work has been published in The American Poet, The Journal of Experimental Fiction, Identity Theory, Smokebox, Harvey Bialy's bialystocker.net, Steve McCaffery's North American Center for Interdisciplinary Poetics, Unlikely Stories, In Posse Review and in the Unlikely Stories of the Third Kind Anthology by Unlikely Stories and the Dirty, Dirty: Anthology by Jaded Ibis Press. He has read and presented at venues that include &Now, AWP, the New Orleans Book Fair, The Maple Leaf Bar and McKeown's Books and Difficult Music. He has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives and works in Louisiana.