I had an idea after the posters idea; make a final project on final projects. I thought about how impossible the task seemed. To create a project that says everything you want it to say in 4 months, defining your academic experience in a master’s once and for all. Of course, the way the final project in MAGCD is framed is more about setting up questions that you aim to answer further down the line, but my issue was that I was seeing the deadline as just that — a line that once crossed, kills any critical, non “productive” design work. Everything seems so uncertain now and standards of life are ever changing. I don’t expect to ever own a house in my time on earth, and I’m not mad about that, but at the spiraling cost of even modest living. I don’t expect that I will ever be able to have a critical, creative practice in the increasingly feudal economy we live in.

What resulted was FINAL: a documentation of my peers and I — our processes, our thoughts, our fears, conversations we had about the masters. I wanted to capture the spirit of feeling unsure and unsafe. I asked my friends to contribute iterations, things they would’ve thrown out and created new visual components for my project from that. It was a represenation of what I had tried, what they had tried, and finding common ground between the two.

The result was an 80 page publication that was bound loosely, resembling the fragility of our mindsets at this time — and the mutability of experimentation. At the end though, I was given feedback that this more seen as data collection — there was an element of production that was missing. Aditionally, feedback confirmed what I feared — that focusing on others was a deflection of my own fear, a PROJECTION of my own fear on to others (good one dad). I knew that my next project needed to be the total opposite, if everyone wanted to know about me and why I was doing it, I would show them.