Methods

Inquiry

Work made through questioning and research as the primary mode: what a thing is doing? what thought produced its form? what infrastructure sustains it? what is the legacy that brought us this thing? etc.

Every project starts with questions. What is this thing actually doing? What thought produced its form? What infrastructure sustains it? What legacy brought it to us in this shape?

I don’t think design and art are made through taste; I think they’re made through asking and pursuing. Every question, nagging feeling, or lingering thought can be an aperture to new ideas, new understandings, or simply wonder at life.

I must confess I’ve made a slight taxonomical violation by putting inquiry at the same level as the other four, inquiry is (secretly) the overarching mode and the other four methods all happen inside it. They are, in a sense, the recurring shapes that inquiry takes when it starts producing forms.

Citation

My method of bringing in broad referential fields as material; an intentional relationship to the encoded meaning of a work by explicitly including the various threads which lead to its existence.

Nothing aesthetic exists without a connection to its milieu: to material histories, perception, ideology. Knowing and implementing a broad range of those references is integral to my work. I believe the designer and artist should have an intentional relationship to the encoded meaning of a work, explicitly understanding and including the threads that led to its existence, while retaining the magic and play of creation.

I see many broad topics as components of one relational field: political philosophy, typographic history, surveillance studies, occult and subterranean histories, urban geography, subcultural sounds, more. Any project may pull from anywhere in my field of interest, not just from its own immediate discourse or milieu. In discovery for client work, I like to think about this as a dragnet, or Baleen filter feeding.

I promiscuously seek material from across milieus. The resulting work is, perhaps paradoxically, more specific because the inputs are so wide.

Assemblage

Works as territories composed of disparate, sometimes contradictory inputs brought into relation; constellations over fixed singular objects, especially where there can be evolution of a work over time.

Assemblage, as Deleuze and Guattari theorize it, is a theoretical position rather than a technique. Making work through its lens means recognizing that many inputs (sometimes in flux, sometimes contradictory) are required to make a single work. A project is never a single object, it is a territory, a plane of meaning created from many elements brought into relation.

Especially in designing identity, my work isn’t about producing fixed singular objects but constellations of meaning: things which intermingle, recombine, and evolve over time. Citation is the gathering of the field and Assemblage is the bringing of its elements into relation.

To work this way is to refuse the singular narrative and the proprietary gesture, to refuse didactic meaning-making, and to honor the rhizomatic and combinatorial nature of creation as a given fact.

Superimposition

Overlapping two or more disparate registers against each other intentionally without resolution--meaning emerges in the layering of vantage, time, or context.

Nothing I encounter is unrelated to anything else I encounter, since for an object to be available at all to me means it has already been placed in relation to everything it is not.

Relation between things through meaning is superabundant and traversal of that relation is scarce. Most pairs of things have no perceptible route between them, and the pairs of objects that feel intimately connected are the ones whose route was cut long ago by a mechanism, an institution, an education or a childhood, then worn smooth enough that the cutting of the pathway became invisible and began presenting itself as a property of the objects themselves, rather than of a layer of meaning between them.

Superimposition is the deliberate cutting of a route between two objects which seem unrelated. When I find myself working on a project with a problem in it, I reach for an object brought in from far enough away that no path exists between it and the project, and the project becomes a lens the object is read through, and vice versa -- the project can be read through the object. Introducing this unknown variable often helps me overcome a stasis, and gives me a new lens with which to see both the object and the project. 

What the finished work looks like afterward varies. Sometimes both objects remain present and intact, and neither is subordinated (institutional and subcultural in the same gesture, museum archives and rave flyers in conversation). The contradiction between them is retained rather than smoothed. Sometimes the imported object does not survive into the project at all, having produced a realization or a structure that now stands without it, which is no less an instance of the method of superimposition. What’s necessary for the method to function if both the object and the project are retained wholly, but combined, is that the hook of meaning between the two be evident to me or to a viewer. Wanton combination made with the hope that someone will deduce a meaning is a different practice than what I’m describing.

This method comes from the recognition that the world humans live in is made of meaning, absolutely drenched in it, and that most of that meaning was routed and striated before any of us arrived and now passes for the way things are, and that the capacity to cut a route deliberately is a form of agency over the world rather than merely over the work. People make their own meaning, but not under conditions of their own choosing, since the conditions were “given and transmitted from the past” as the old man saysKarl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx 1852, Ch. I, and the practice of superimposition means working that narrow margin where the transmitted arrangement can still be altered and new relations imagined.

Glitch

Error and tool-limits as aperture. Glitch, for me, is about exploiting a tool or medium's own substance, infrastructure, or failure (compression vectors, datamosh, print texture and ink bleed) treated as structural part of the content.

The genre called “glitch art” is a small and exhausted subset of what glitch as a theoretical position makes available.

Glitch embraces error and the limits of tools: failures, accidents, and entropic excesses are not malfunctions to be eliminated but apertures into what the system couldn’t have planned for. A medium’s own substance, infrastructure, and failure (compression vectors, datamosh, print texture, ink bleed, etc) become structural parts of the content. I make the move frequently from treating accident as failure (“the tool didn’t work”) to treating accident as opportunity (“the tool reached a limit... let’s push it!”).

My position on glitch is ontologically open. I’m committed to the idea that what tools were not meant to do is at least as generative as what they were meant to do. Following Glissant, Russell, Menkman, and the cybernetic tradition, I’m trying to recover glitch as a stance toward systems (political, technological, aesthetic) and their failures, rather than simply as a style of surface distortion.