My partner Lukus Bertus & I started a small design studio
about 10 years ago in Austin TX. Since then we have let it
grow and morph over time. We are building a trans disciplinary
studio, committed to relationships within the wider community,
that can create positive social actions and the circumstances
needed for social change.
I am a graphic designer interested in all faucets of design
and media; I tend to describe myself as an interdisciplinary
designer. While most all of my personal projects use motion
and time-based, my professional design practice balances
my interest in print, web and publication design. What
I find to be exciting is all the overlapping connections; each
informing another.
We visualize social and cultural perspectives, to become
creative in a social sense. Our aim is to be designers who
are ‘a synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, social activist,
poetry and business.’ To do so, we create collaborations
between designers and other professionals, and between designers
and the local and global communities we support and work
with.
We like it that the relationships between people collaborating
professionally will create a space where you will find both
conflict and vast creative potential, it creates this inspiring
environment where things are possible. To design together
requires us to listen and develop a dialogue of what could
be possible. This lets us recognize prejudices, and forces
us to be open to new perspectives.
We are currently re-designing our design studio site. Stay
tuned for the updates on the site.
+ Fall
07 We designed for RESTSTOP, the U.S. Department
of State 2009 Venice Biennale proposal entry for
William Pope.L. Mark H.C. Bessire, director of
the Bates
College Museum of Art and Roger Conover, Custodians.
Western culture proceeds with such speed that there is hardly
time for digestion anymore.
We consume and we discharge. Whatever we ingest into our systems
one moment (food, art,
information), we eliminate the next. At biennials, the rate
at which visual consumption takes place induces a special kind
of art-sickness.
We propose a rest stop.
A rest stop where the experience of getting in line, going to the lavatory, and
taking some
refreshment afterwards offers relief. As you enter la zone de la merde, shit
is not what it seems to be. In RESTSTOP, it becomes a matière à penser. This
is not to say that the act of elimination hasn’t already been recognized by philosophers
as a kind of thinking, or that the toilet, as Slavoj Zizek reminds us, has not
been considered an ideological site. But in RESTSTOP, the act of disposal on
the part of art-wasted visitors will be given its own time, and the potty its
own place—not marginalized between pavilions or exiled to service sites. As such,
RESTSTOP will be more than an art stop. It will encourage those who come to the
American Pavilion to do so with a sense of purpose—reminding them why they are
there, and why, in 2009, the act of relieving oneself in a national art pavilion
is a critical act.
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+ Fall
06 We designed the publication Cryptozoology:
Out of Time Place Scale. Pulshished by JRP/Ringier and
edited by Mark Bessire, director of
the Bates
College Museum of Art and Raechell Smith.
Under the umbrella of cryptozoology (CZ) this project --
including a symposium, exhibition, book and film series
-- aims to explore a pursuit where the disciplines of science
and art share a mutual focal point, a desperately desired
visual encounter.
Cryptozoology
is the quest for unidentified and elusive species, and
as such is often treated as a marginalized science more
akin to farcical adventure. However, the subject makes
for a perfectly fascinating zone of inquiry for contemporary
artists interested in the fertile edges of the history
of science and museums, taxonomy, myth, spectacle and fraud.
Cryptozoology: Out of Time Place Scale mines the theoretical
and design terrains of the twenty-first-century graphic
novel and the medieval curio cabinet or Wunderkammer, exploring
cryptozoology in art and popular culture.
Originally exhibited at Maine's Bates College Museum of
Art, it begins with Mark Dion's installation of a bureaucratic
government agency, the Federal Wildlife Commission's Department
of Cryptozoology, Bureau for the Investigation of Paranormal
Phenomena and National Institute of Comparative Astrobiology,
and features drawings, paintings, dioramas, taxidermy and
performative photos by artists Rachel Berwick, Sarina Brewer,
Walmor Correa, Ellen Lesperance, Robert Marbury, Jill Miller,
Vic Muniz, Jeanine Oleson, Rosamond Purcell, Alexis Rockman,
Marc Swanson, Jeffrey Vallance and Jamie Wyeth.
We designed the identity, signage and posters for the exhibit,
as well as the catalogue, and were honored with three
design award for the publication:
> Print
Magazine Regional Design Annual 2007
> AIGA 50Cover/50 books Annual Juried selections
of Design Excellence 2007
> New England Museum Association, Second
Place, 2007 Publication Award Competition
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+ Summer
06 We designed the publication Sensorium, Embodied
Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art.
Co-publshished by MIT
Press and
the MIT List Visual Arts
Center. Edited by Caroline A. Jones.
In Sensorium, contemporary artists and writers explore the
implications of the techno-human interface. Ten artists, chosen
by an international team of curators, offer their own edgy
investigations of embodied technology and the technologized
body. These range from Matthieu Briand's experiment in "controlled
schizophrenia" and Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller's
uneasy psychological soundscapes to Bruce Nauman's uncanny
night visions and François Roche's destabilized architecture.
The art in Sensorium—which accompanies an exhibition at the
MIT List Visual Arts Center—captures the aesthetic attitude
of this hybrid moment, when modernist segmentation of the senses
is giving way to dramatic multisensory mixes or transpositions.
Artwork by each artist appears with an analytical essay by
a curator, all of it prefaced by an anchoring essay on "The
Mediated Sensorium" by Caroline Jones. In the second half
of Sensorium, scholars, scientists, and writers contribute
entries to an "Abecedarius of the New Sensorium." These
short, playful pieces include Bruno Latour on "Air," Barbara
Maria Stafford on "Hedonics," Michel Foucault (from
a little-known 1966 radio lecture) on the "Utopian Body," Donna
Haraway on "Compoundings," and Neal Stephenson on
the "Viral." Sensorium is both forensic and diagnostic,
viewing the culture of the technologized body from the inside,
by means of contemporary artists' provocations, and from a
distance, in essays that situate it historically and intellectually.
