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.

I believe the job of good art and design is not to resolve tension but to lean into it. Following Said’s contrapuntal reading and the dialectical materialist tradition, I am always learning to retain contradiction rather than smooth it over.

Resolution produces an artificial polish that isn’t honest to the experience of being alive, which contains unresolvable frictions always anyway, no matter how thoroughly the backend has been tidied. My work tends to hold conflictual things together: institutional and subcultural in the same gesture, museum archives and rave flyers in conversation, a Pantone fluorescent paired with an 1896 German grotesque.

Meaning emerges between two or more registers held against each other, creating a third that exceeds the sum of its parts. Superimposition troubles the Cartesian assumption that things are best understood by separating and classifying them, proposing instead that the layering of vantage, time, history, context, or register makes accessible what no single position could reach. It is the practice of putting things in relation without resolving them, and trusting that what is produced in the act of layering is meaningful, not incidental.

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.