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uv cured inkjet on cnc cut acrylic mounted to composite aluminum
50.25″w x 48″h, edition of 3
I put a little twist of the hash symbol in this piece. Normally in the hash symbol, the horizontals are straight across and the verticals are slightly angled but here I made the horizontals slightly angled and the verticals straight up and down. This gives the composition a energy and movement.
For nerds out there like me who may be interested in the history of the hash symbol (also known as Pound and Number symbol), I refer you to this article in the New Statesmen #History: the journey and many faces of the hash symbol. But the article doesn’t go into its modern history.
The asterisk or star (*) and pound or hash (#) key was added in 1968 to the push button phone keypad invented by Bell Technology engineers drawing it from the ASCII character set. When Bell labs were designing push button phones, they added these symbols to allow for access to telephone based computer systems, exactly how they’re used today. In 2007 it was Chris Messina, an open source technology evangelist who first suggested using the hash symbol on twitter to assign metadata to group and categorize discussion feeds. And the reason he chose this symbol: because before the iphone and android phones came out and texting was done on a qwerty keypad you had to use the phone keypad and it was easy to get to on his nokia phone.
