Early process works focused on creating a physical sense of place through two dimensional processes.
I am deeply curious about human relationships with each other and the environment. At the heart of this project is an examination of intention and consequence surrounding the ideal of community and the development of a method to deploy image across a variety of environments that have been left to decay.
Digital technologies make it easy to curate our individual and collective archives and memories on screen. It is a performance of self, love, place, and experience with a fleeting quality. Each moment we archive recedes from conscious thought quickly as it becomes buried under more of the same. Despite their perceived disappearance, these archives are still very much alive. They take on the ambiguous form of digital data stored somewhere in an ether, an ever-accumulating string of 1’s and 0’s. Communitas speculates on the form such accumulations of data might take in the future as digital debris.
Digital technologies make it easy to curate our individual and collective archives and memories on screen. It is a performance of self, love, place, and experience with a fleeting quality. Each moment we archive recedes from conscious thought quickly as it becomes buried under more of the same. Despite their perceived disappearance, these archives are still very much alive. They take on the ambiguous form of digital data stored somewhere in an ether, an ever-accumulating string of 1’s and 0’s. Communitas speculates on the form such accumulations of data might take in the future as digital debris.
This examination was based in collage and projection. Beginning with a process of selection, extraction, and juxtaposition of both still and motion media, I created a series of singular images and videos. Then using projection, I brought the imagery out into the physical environment where it was mapped to various surfaces at a chosen site to evoke the feeling of debris. I chose sites that are abandoned spaces or modern day ruins as the locations where the digital debris might manifest. Sutro Baths is one particular site that I focused on as a case study for this work.
Positioned at the intersection of the imagined and the real, this type of speculative design offers itself as a tool for questioning and reconstructing our relationship with the present and illuminating our collective agency in influencing future outcomes. The goal of this work is to examine the ideal of community both in the present and in the future, in the physical and virtual worlds, and to explore the moment where consequences emerge from the best of intentions. Rather than providing answers, the work serves to ask questions which invite reflection on the now, provoke imagination, and locate potentialities for future transformation.
Positioned at the intersection of the imagined and the real, this type of speculative design offers itself as a tool for questioning and reconstructing our relationship with the present and illuminating our collective agency in influencing future outcomes. The goal of this work is to examine the ideal of community both in the present and in the future, in the physical and virtual worlds, and to explore the moment where consequences emerge from the best of intentions. Rather than providing answers, the work serves to ask questions which invite reflection on the now, provoke imagination, and locate potentialities for future transformation.
︎︎︎Read Communitas in full here
︎︎︎Scroll down to view more work and selected pages from the final publication
The beginnings of my work focusing in on Sutro Baths.This particular process piece served as a jumping off point into reimagining the site itself. It helped me to highlight the possibilities for intervention at the site through the process I established in my earlier work: selection, extraction, and juxtaposition of imagery. This time my goal included maintaining a sense of place.
Collage studies conjuring place — Sutro Baths
Collage study exploring environmental disaster and architectural possibilities at Sutro Baths.Final selection of projection and video works from Communitas.
Selected pages from Communitas as published.