So far, my unit two project has seen many lives. I began by exploring the concept of perceived value within digital and analogue forms of production — my project was about creating letterpress virtually and examining if the digital artifacts were coveted than the analogue byproducts of physical letterpress. I enjoyed working in Blender to make this and loved how uncanny and odd the visuals were. I kept hearing feedback about how interesting it was because the visuals were so “uncanny”. I came up with a few ideas about how to move this project forward in an iterative way, with one suggestion being changing the physics and materiality of scenes I designed on blender. I went ahead with this, creating 100+ scenes where the physical interactions of the objects I was producing went against the natural order of physics.

This wasn’t as fruitful for me in my opinion. I found it difficult to argue that my enquiry or work was critical at all. It was an obvious question — of course if you turn a glass of water into a glass of lava your brain doesn’t understand. It was not confusing, but simply just absurd. These experiments didn’t make you question anything — my goal was to have the viewer question the authenticity of the images they were being presented. I attempted to make more images using less absurd materials, but I found that my goal was shifting a bit from the question of authenticity of images, to discomfort. How could I make discomfort a part of my practice, and how could discomfort engage criticality in my audience?

I made a short film and a set of publications which interpreted films that made me uncomfortable. My publications were a bit more successful, in my opinion with this goal, and the film turned into something a bit incomprehensible and overtly political. The film tried to combine too many questions and topics into a singular thing. I was interested in the decay of urban spaces, the decay of social institutions and programmes, the decay of the political system, the decay of pop culture and society — but it was too much too fast.

After the summer break, I headed back into blender — to be frank— after being pressured by tutors and peers. I found myself in a bit of a slump, enquiry wise. I was unsure of how to find something new to investigate both in my medium, but also externally. I found myself making use of the lack of my Blender skill as a mechanism to interpret the world around us. At the core of all the phases of this project, the visuals are referencing an outside world in which everything is terrifying, maddening, and uncertain, using those themes as a visual reflection of who we are. Design in its current form is used to make things more tolerable, more beautiful. In a visual sense, we are constantly sweeping the ugliest parts of life underneath the rug. Even protest visuals are now carefully considered, designed, and created in a way that emphasizes idealism and beauty.

My project as it is now is a visual translation of what I call rot: or the decay of the state. The state has lost it’s ability to deliver infrastructure projects, operate vital government orginisations, and in general, provide a safe, healthy life for a large majority of the population. This is echoed across the western world; Rot began in the United States after Ronald Regan and after Margret Thatcher in the UK, but continuted under the neoliberal governments of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in both countries.

For the sake of this project, I am beginning to focus on the decay in urban spaces in the United States as it is by far the most evidenced area of some sort of devolutiuon in the quality of life—The UK didn’t decide to follow suit with extremist and maximalist American parking lots and strip malls (they do exist here, but more manageable, and much smaller.)