FOLLOWERS
“IF YOU’RE A FOLLOWER, YOU HAVE TO BE DISCERNING. IF YOU’RE A CREATOR, YOU HAVE TO STAY COMMITTED TO CIRCULATING TRUTH ALL THE TIME.”
Clayton Collie, Wordpress Developer
BACHELOR THESIS
THE ABSTRACTION OF CRAFT & THE DISPLACEMENT OF SPECIALIZED DESIGN PRACTICE
GRAPHIC DESIGN IN THE AGE OF VIRTUAL MEDIA
Recent innovations in design technology such as template-based website builders, artificial design intelligence, and other digital media manipulation tools have expanded creative capabilities and optimized the process of visual content creation, but at what cost to originality, and specialization?
The aim of my Bachelor thesis was to investigate how computer mediation of the design process is conditioning creative outcomes, and how technological developments in the field are changing cultural and professional behavior.
The paper examines the marriage of design, technology, and digitized culture, questioning the impact of democratization on the changing cultural, commercial, and creative paradigms.
BACHELOR PROJECT
F O L L O W E R S is the creative project accompanying my Bachelor thesis on the abstraction of craft and the displacement of the specialized design practice. The project takes the form of a book and is comprised of a collection of photographs, collage pieces, and conversations with artists, designers, and craftspeople exploring what it means to be a maker in the digital age. The 100-page book discusses the shift from analog to digital practices in creative industries through interviews with experts and responsive visual knowledge production in the form of collage, design, and photography. The book is both poetic and informative in the exploration of virtual life and immateriality.
COLLAGE
Digitized collage and photomontage explore the forgotten potential of paper-based media. Through manipulation of the physical medium, with ripping, shredding, burning, and layering images, the collages are instilled with underlying symbolism of the changing creative landscape where paper has been discarded by society – a relic of the past.
Interviews with experts in the field of art and design accompany the visual narrative to address important questions surrounding design in the age of virtual media. Their stories provide insight into how the role and task of the designer have changed with the tools we use, what it means to translate ideas into code, and how the future of design might unfold.
PHOTOGRAPHY
The photographic series titled Intangible is a response to conversations with experts and practitioners in the fields of art and design. The series symbolizes the simulation of human interaction and and “touch through the disappearance of physicality – in life and in processes of creation. The images were created using a projector, which functions as a metaphor for simulation. When applied to human skin this projection creates an indistinct blend of virtuality and physicality making the human form disappear within the simulated projection – a comment on changing socio-technical paradigms.
This visual narrative is an expression of virtuality and a reference to Jean Baudrillard’s theories outlined in Simulacra and Simulation. For Baudrillard, we have embarked on a journey in which everything in our world is controlled by simulation, and code, where the hyperreal governs us more than the real. He warns of a future where reality is consumed by simulacra, “By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the end of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials.” (p.2) The photographs depict humans as referentials disappearing into the shadows of our digital selves.
