Listening to the voices in his head

Got issues with cellphones? They probably pale in comparison to the self-diagnosed "paranoid rant" that opens Ries Niemi's show titled "My Phone Tells Me to Do Bad Things."

In various forms, the life-form we call cellphones has been present on Earth for millennia.

Yes, I said "life-form."

Cellphones are indeed alive.

Their interaction with human beings is only the latest in a long line of symbiotic, perhaps even parasitic, relationships they have had with living creatures, for hundreds of thousands of years.

An individual cellphone, although possessing more raw computing power than existed on the entire planet as recently as 1945, is not very smart.

However, as a distributed intelligence network, of which each phone is only one node, one neuron if you will, the phones in aggregate are, without a doubt, the most intelligent thing for light years.

Niemi is a craft-guy, not a nerd, and he uses a hands-on approach to skewering the technology that he rejects (in theory) but keeps on using. Everything that you see in the gallery he made himself. Niemi hand-inscribed the long diatribe about cellphones that hangs on two big fabric panels near the door. He operated the machine that stitched the intricate embroidery. He crafted the metal cellphone-body insects that crawl the wall. He knitted the little cellphone pants.

The results are fun — and sometimes funny, too. And if you are lucky, Niemi, with his crazed artist hair and wacky clothes, will be tending the gallery when you stop in, to further the conversation.

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com