Artist Statement written by Michael Menchaca:

Critics of the Big-Tech industry often draw parallels to the untamed frontier of the American west where lawless bandits and desperados make away with cornucopias of gold. #WildWildWeb3:The Musical is a “Musical" approach to this critical perspective recalling recurring themes in Hollywood Western posters to set the stage while outlining Big-Tech’s evolution to an autonomous, decentralized, unregulated virtual frontier, popularly referred to as “Web 3” within the industry. In recent years, Big Tech has aggressively ramped up their efforts to court BIPOC consumers by centering celebrities and communities of color in their 2022 techno-utopian, mythologically revisionist ad campaigns. While this increase in representation may be welcomed by some, and may even reflect progressive leaning values in a post-Floyd society and consumer market, it also serves to distract from the systemic racial inequalities underwriting the supply chain demands that tether corporate tech empires to their exploitation contracts with nations of the Global South, along with their diasporic communities living in the U.S. The top five most profitable Big Tech companies (Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon) rely disproportionately on the labor of “ghost workers” of color, i.e. Amazon’s “mechanical turkers” Meta’s “metamates”, etc., to maintain the digital infrastructure and virtual corpus of the Big Tech apparatus. The global caste system depends on the compliance and containment of historically oppressed communities, those very same BIPOC communities targeted by Amazon’s tailored algorithms and micro-targeted by online ads set to the tune of Nicki Minaj. The increased threat posed to global democracies by current CEO and reluctant owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, formerly the world’s wealthiest human and, to no one’s surprise, the world’s loudest online troll with a vested interest in Texas’ legendary brand of border imperialism, is the subject of the first in a series of Western Movie poster spoofs.

At the heart of my practice, is an appreciation for the art of the announcement in physical poster form. While I have cast myself out of the so called virtual "public square" or "town hall" of the social media multiverse and metaverses, I would like to publicly announce my upcoming project WildWildWeb3:The Musical to the Latinx/Latiné art community in the form of an IRL print installation in Behind the Cloud: Interrogating Digital Technologies at NYU.