Spectulative Artifact
What would happen if the linkages between forms and their cultural connotations were torn down and rebuilt? Inspired by neural style transfer, a type of generative art that uses the Python programming language, and the Surrealist works by Méret Oppenheim these pictures merge icons of European modernism with non-western styles and materials. The end result is a surreal hybrid that explores André Breton's argument in "The Crisis of the Object": that mystifying functionalist objects would challenge reason and preconceived notions of time, space, and culture, forcing the viewer to connect with their subconscious. These works reject Modernism's elimination of decoration and symbolism by employing textures that convey loaded cultural and historic traditions while also connecting to Modernist form in contradictory and provocative ways.
This work is an individual contribution to a collective seminar/studio project where particpants survey and engage some of the critical conversations that shape graphic design thinking and practice today. Through a diet of reading, discussion, and writing, the seminar unpacks and questions the critical lenses and conventions that shape contemporary design discourse, confront graphic design’s relationship to structures of power, and explore some of the ways designers and thinkers have proposed rethinking design’s position. These concepts are explored through a series of studio projects that interpret and extend ideas from discussions, and publish everyone’s work through a class Instagram, exhibition, and collaborative publication. Taken together, these activities will model a design practice that engages its context in informed and intentional ways.
The publication examines how graphic design is entangled with its social and political environments. The works featured explore the conversations that designers and thinkers are having about these enmeshes. Personal agendas, views, and beliefs are developed based on these discussions. Reading and writing are used as tools of a critical graphic design practice.