The year is 2031. A popular new podcast format has swept the audio media space: Podcast hosts describe, at length, still images provided to them by their listenership. One image per episode described in painstaking detail. These images can be works of fashion photography, paintings, screengrabs from film and television, memes, or “vintage” physical print media. The descriptive format is soon referred to popularly as “Photo Pods.” The length and style of any given photo pod is unique to each podcaster and can vary greatly in both length and intention. Some are comedic in nature, rapid fire newsy revues while others are more academic recapturings. A seemingly infinite range of niche and fringe subgroups among this legion of content producers emerges. One such show is hosted by Norrid Matrice, an amatuer art collector and voiceover actor. His photo pod focuses mainly on unappreciated amateur work from the San Francisco art scene. In episode 91, “Humidity from My Clattering Bowl” he describes a work of art by lithographer Jenni Xi, who is deceased by the time of the recording. She was hit by a car and killed 4 years prior to episode 91’s broadcast.
Due to Matrice’s dazzling review of “Humidity from My Clattering Bowl” there is a sudden interest in Xi’s limited collection of work which spawns a proliferation of forged lithographs in her name. Noticing the strange market bubble, Xi’s more business minded sister, Bina, takes action. She purchases the secondary resale market of the forgeries, opens an art gallery in Oakland, CA with an accompanying photo pod of her own, describing the minute differences between all of the forgeries compared with his sister’s originals. Critiqued for its bland style and unoriginal premise, Xi’s photo pod soon fails and the collection’s notierty dissipates. The gallery is shuttered and both the forgeries and the originals are then sold to collage master Daniel McCrupsky who binds all of the lithographs together, both the forgeries and the originals, to create a single work of art called “46 of Xi, Smaze.” To formalize the piece, he takes a series of photographs of “46 of Xi, Smaze” which he later repurposes into a textile print. He submits the textile print to a corporate contest with an entrenched international retail distributor where it wins first prize. The textile print is now commonly found on many disposable paper products.
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