Life as Thesis—Thesis as Practice
At thirteen, I departed New Orleans for a weekend trip to pursue my professional hockey dreams. Unknowingly, after this weekend, August 28th, 2005, I would never return home. I was displaced. The storm changed my neighborhood, my relationships, my own trajectory but Katrina couldn’t alter something my hometown and I cherished: our affinity for people.
I was born and raised in New Orleans. It’s governed by the camaraderie of its people rather than by its laws, and it escapes all perceptions of a city. Anthony Bourdain1 expresses this unfamiliarity: “there’s no explaining it, no describing it. You can’t compare it to anything. So far and away, New Orleans.”
Being from a space defined by its community inspired my personal ethos. I believe and trust in people. I am inspired and interested in people. As an ice hockey player for the majority of my past life, I was part of many formations—being a man up, or a man down, in the middle of a breakout or a regroup. This language of a team gestures to a method, a practice of order.
In my undergrad at LDSoA,2 Moon Jang introduced me to the conditional design of Luna Maurer, Roel Wouters, and Jonathan Pukey of Studio Moniker.3 I had never been exposed to this type of generative collaboration. The elements of team and community neatly aligned with this newfound form of design. Here, I discovered a community in graphic design, a field that felt deeply singular and isolated otherwise. Once exposed to this approach, I never looked back.
Creating C-U-B-E, an experimental design lab, Moon Jung, Jake Green, and I hosted a variety of projects including Workshop 03: On The Boundaries,4 a 24hr conditional design workshop. After graduating, I continued this practice and in 2016 I started project_sense:5 a year-long nationwide conditional design exercise recorded in books and mailed between participants. This project culminated in New Orleans where an exhibition recreated a year’s worth of content. The conditional design methodology created a foundation for my practice, which places physical connection at its center.
In Providence, the radical climate in which the MFA Graphic Design program functions, prompted my conditional practice to adjust. A program tailored to conceptional thinking and influenced by the political left empowered me to quickly become a “Social Illichian.”6 As I came to terms with my privilege and self-identity, as a straight white male, I searched for a meaning to the things that I wanted to create in the next two-years. Influenced by my peers (my new community) as they produced work cultivating cultural, racial, gender, and sexual equality I decided to investigate how my newly established practice might contribute. I started creating work as platforms for those in and outside RISD. My past experience in conditional design merged into an inter-disciplinary methodology, one that involves collaboration from different disciplines.
This thesis contains the resulting inquiry. It’s about people and the affective connection among them. It’s about a societal characteristic we cannot lose.
We love people.
I was born and raised in New Orleans. It’s governed by the camaraderie of its people rather than by its laws, and it escapes all perceptions of a city. Anthony Bourdain1 expresses this unfamiliarity: “there’s no explaining it, no describing it. You can’t compare it to anything. So far and away, New Orleans.”
Being from a space defined by its community inspired my personal ethos. I believe and trust in people. I am inspired and interested in people. As an ice hockey player for the majority of my past life, I was part of many formations—being a man up, or a man down, in the middle of a breakout or a regroup. This language of a team gestures to a method, a practice of order.
In my undergrad at LDSoA,2 Moon Jang introduced me to the conditional design of Luna Maurer, Roel Wouters, and Jonathan Pukey of Studio Moniker.3 I had never been exposed to this type of generative collaboration. The elements of team and community neatly aligned with this newfound form of design. Here, I discovered a community in graphic design, a field that felt deeply singular and isolated otherwise. Once exposed to this approach, I never looked back.
Creating C-U-B-E, an experimental design lab, Moon Jung, Jake Green, and I hosted a variety of projects including Workshop 03: On The Boundaries,4 a 24hr conditional design workshop. After graduating, I continued this practice and in 2016 I started project_sense:5 a year-long nationwide conditional design exercise recorded in books and mailed between participants. This project culminated in New Orleans where an exhibition recreated a year’s worth of content. The conditional design methodology created a foundation for my practice, which places physical connection at its center.
In Providence, the radical climate in which the MFA Graphic Design program functions, prompted my conditional practice to adjust. A program tailored to conceptional thinking and influenced by the political left empowered me to quickly become a “Social Illichian.”6 As I came to terms with my privilege and self-identity, as a straight white male, I searched for a meaning to the things that I wanted to create in the next two-years. Influenced by my peers (my new community) as they produced work cultivating cultural, racial, gender, and sexual equality I decided to investigate how my newly established practice might contribute. I started creating work as platforms for those in and outside RISD. My past experience in conditional design merged into an inter-disciplinary methodology, one that involves collaboration from different disciplines.
This thesis contains the resulting inquiry. It’s about people and the affective connection among them. It’s about a societal characteristic we cannot lose.
This thesis is here to encourage.
