unfound
risd thesis blog: james j gradyArchive for RISD
thesis thoughts: unfound
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to best communicate my thesis. It has much to do with what I see everyday. I just came back from a trip to Kentucky and saw some beautiful horse farms on the outskirts of Lexington. There was a spot off one of the roads that said scenic viewpoint. This really made me think about my thesis. Why is this spot pointed out? While the gentle hills, iconic barns, and pristine stockade fencing were stunning, there were equally as many striking and artful images to be found in the ordinary or the “unfound,” most only existed for a moment in time.
I want to find the extraordinary in the ordinary and the beauty in the mundane and I want to share it with others. I want to stop people in their tracks, make them alter their routines for brief moments, and then shake them with the gorgeousness of the everyday. I want to be a part of sharing the beauty I find, so that others can share in this joy.
My thesis acts in a three-part process: as an operator, as a spectator and as the presenter. As an operator, I observe my surroundings and capture them through still photography and video. As a spectator, I review the captured footage, and am often bewildered by the new form it takes. I then distill and edit the footage to uncover the essence of the original observations. Finally, as the presenter, I transform the content into a new form: whether it be a printed matter, a video vignette, an interactive screen project, or a physical installation.
This thesis enters into a dialogue with the work and theory of other artists with similar concerns: the artist, Robert Rauschenberg, whose “combine” projects take objects off the street recontextualizing them into a new form of painting and sculpture; the photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, who photographs the movement of humans and animals and translates them into frame-by-frame still imagery to reflect this process; the filmmaker, Michel Gondry, whose films warp perception by using everyday objects to perform surreal experiences; and the historian, Michel de Certeau, who uncovers systems of the everyday as a process that includes all of us in it.
My work aims to be accessible to a wide audience and to represent new scenic viewpoints in our everyday. I look forward to uncovering Graphic Design in the details as well as the majestic moments of the everyday in order to transform and share my perspective with others.
everyday time-lapse
Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, a time-lapse film, initially inspires this project. Since November, I have been using an inexpensive time-lapse camera to document experiences from my everyday life. This camera has no viewfinder, so I never know exactly what is being captured. Pulling the files from the USB drive in the camera, is a great experiment in chance operation. It is also reminiscent of the magical experience of developing and printing from film. The algorithmic method of this piece comes from editing the duration, speed, and framing of the clips, but keeps the footage in a chronological order. My interest includes a set of seemingly disparate footage and how it combines to create a narrative. This voyeuristic point of view allows for a genuine capture of people and surroundings. Although the process is as important as the finished piece, the act of editing the footage helps me craft a unique narrative of everyday life.
I’m continuing to capture time-lapse footage everyday. Check here to the latest footage. Enjoy!
incarceration vacation
book view 1
book view 2
The video and book above are inspired by Michel de Certeau’s, The Practice of Everyday Life and my daily commute from Boston to Providence. Cheers!
Strategies and Tactics
Michel de Certeau’s, The Practice of Everyday Life explores the everyday operating in society. He describes two concepts, “strategies” and “tactics” that identify behaviors in the everyday: strategies become a way for corporations, governments and big businesses to control people as well as the environment around them; tactics are ways that individuals, negotiate these worlds. Certeau claims that individuals employ strategies by “constantly manipulating events in order to turn them into ‘opportunities’” [xix].
The chasm between strategies and tactics
In Chapter VIII, Railway Navigation and Incarceration, Certeau describes the experience of riding the train. The train is a great example of the chasm between the strategy and the tactic: the train is a strategy—it is part of a larger system that incarcerates the passengers. The passengers however, use tactics to overcome this system, making each trip a mini vacation of sight and sound. According to Certeau “The unchanged traveler is pigeonholed, numbered, and regulated in the grid of the railway car, which is a perfect actualization of the rational utopia” [111].
Order in chaos
The train gives passengers order in their everyday world of chaos. The train is a place of transition between geographical locations as well as home and work. Travelers often overlook the transitions in the everyday; instead, they focus on their destinations. The train offers them a time to look out the window, reflecting, wondering, listening and dreaming. Without this incarceration these possibilities would not necessarily be available.
Glass and Iron
Certeau eloquently describes the literal and figurative separation of the train and the travelers as “…the iron rail whose straight line cuts through space and transforms the serene identities of the soil into the speed with which they slip away into the distance. The windowpane is what allows us to see, and the rail, what allows us to move through”[112]. Travelers are incarcerated within a controlled system and at the same time they are set free by a sensorial experience.
Ambient sounds
Certeau describes the train sounds as “Only the partition makes noise. As it moves forward and creates two inverted silences, it taps out a rhythm, it whistles or moans. There is a beating of the rails, a vibrato of the windowpanes—a sort of rubbing together of spaces at the vanishing points of their frontier” [113].
Submission to the machine
As travelers are observing the everyday within this lens, they identify their independence within a system. Within everyday life there is so much to try and control individually; sometimes travelers could submit to the “machine” and take an “incarceration-vacation”.
Michel de Certeau’s, The Practice of Everyday Life, xix, 111, 112, 113.
blink!
blink, an interactive projection, was featured in the RISD Graphic Design MFA 2011 Biennial at the Sol Koffler Gallery. blink showcases the thirty-eight designers in the RISD Graphic Design MFA program. The large lobby outside the gallery was the home to this piece. In order to interact with this piece a viewer enters the marked area on the floor in front of the projection. A camera on the ceiling senses the movement and the faces on the projection blink. All thirty-eight students’ names marked on the floor correspond to the faces on the projection. Standing over a particular name makes only that individual blink. The more people in the area the more faces blink. If no one stands in the area all the faces on the projection close their eyes. This was a fun interaction and a great conversation piece while enjoying cocktails at the opening. This project was made possible with processing.
The artist statement reads:
Design is an individual and collaborative process. Art comes from individuals, and design comes from collaboration.
Meet all the 2011/12 students at the interactive web version of this project risd.gd/Class/2011/
This piece originally designed as the 2011/12 class poster (see below).
Thanks to Dinah Fried for giving me the inspiration in a dream 
Cheers!
poster
poster detail
Thesis Reflection
I can’t believe this is my 1st post since the summer. It’s been a crazy semester and my thesis is in transition so I’m glad I’ve waited. It’s been a difficult but rewarding process, and looking back, I’m really happy and excited to share some work. In order to bring things up to speed, I want to share my 11.30.2011 thesis presentation. A lot has changed since this presentation but it’s a good place to start.
If you’re not interested in watching the whole 10 minute presentation, please check out my thesis reflection pdf and some new videos I posted to vimeo. I will be posting all of my other projects soon. Cheers!
Things I did this summer
This summer I worked at Fathom Information Design. Fathom was founded by Ben Fry, 2011 Cooper Hewitt Interaction Design winner and co-creator of Processing. Processing is an open-source programming environment for teaching computational design and sketching interactive-media software. It provides artists and designers with accessible means of working with code while encouraging engineers and computer scientists to think about design concepts. The best way to describe what processing is all about is it’s mission statement:
Processing seeks to ruin the careers of talented designers by tempting them away from their usual tools and into the world of programming and computation. Similarly, the project is designed to turn engineers and computer scientists to less gainful employment as artists and designers.
I love that mission statement. I was successfully working as a graphic designer for over 10 years but decided to leave a profitable job and go back to graduate school to see what else design can offer. In the past I’ve been frustrated with the separation of design and programming. Mainstream software created for designers is also extremely frustrating, due to the separation between layout, photography, video, animation, interactivity, and coding. My experience working at Fathom not only broke down the walls between designer and developer but opened my mind to other ways of tackling design through programming and computation. I hope to continue to be tempted away from my usual tools and ideas as I look to the future of design.
This semester I will continue to work at Fathom one day a week on an independent study, Visualizing Data. I plan to incorporate this work into my thesis. More to come on that.
Most importantly, we had a ton of fun working together. Below is a sample of projects I worked on this summer. Enjoy!
genetics app
Prototype sketch for an iPhone app that covers the human genome and genetic conditions.
population density
A map of world population and density. Each circle denotes the number of people in that area: larger, darker circles show low density areas, and smaller, brighter circles highlight higher densities. The top 20 cities are marked with white outline circles.
chelsea football
Chelsea Football Club team practice and rehabilitation overview.
Last but not least, Rag Time, an interactive typography game. It was really fun working on this project.
The Rag Time game challenges you to fix a bad example of ragged text and make it Swiss-perfect. Rag Time puts you up against the clock to make the best rag you can. Don’t be a Scheisser Rag!
Nerd Night
Classes start at risd this week! Welcome week is off to a great start. I’m working with respond design on their communication this year. The first event of the year is Nerd Night. See what the RISD community is working on and dreaming up for sustainability measures around campus and beyond. It’s a pecha kucha where folks present 20 slides / 20 seconds per slide—quick, dirty and a great way to get a glimpse of what’s going on. Oh, and there’s free pizza!
More info at respond.risd.edu
nerd night poster
On the Threshold…
The 1st show of the semester is opening at the RISD Sol Koffler Gallery on Tuesday September 13, from 6-8pm. One of my works – full circle – will be on display with a selection other 2nd year grad students from all departments. I also designed the poster and postcard. Hope to see you there!
show poster
In her book, How to Do Things with Art, Dorthea von Hantelmann describes the “threshold of something else, something other” as a place where artists build confidence in their process and push forward into new territories. This exhibition features 46 artists from 15 different departments entering the final year of their RISD graduate programs. Incidentally, it provides a rare opportunity to see work from many departments and disciplines in one space. With half the graduate experience complete, our potential energy is on the verge of expanding, condensing or taking a completely new direction. One last year remains, another step towards a destination that will lead us into a wider context.
But right now, right here, we are at the threshold of something else, as expressed by the works in this exhibition. Ranging in technique and format, they represent a variety of transitional states—demonstrating control and overindulgence, confusion and clarity, endurance and ephemerality. Being aware of this threshold moment, while maintaining a state of openness, informs how our diverse interdisciplinary work approaches and surpasses something else and something other. This moment is not always easy or recognizable. Yet, what else is being an artist but the understanding that this threshold is only one of many to come as we pursue the creative challenges that lie ahead?
everyday observations: light
With the ability to have a camera phone in my pocket at all times, I can document the everyday, anytime. This book evaluates a typology of images I capture on my camera phone and identifies a dominant visual theme of light: natural, artificial and reflective. This book takes excerpts from Allen Ruppersberg’s 50 Helpful Hints on Art of The Everyday; and I capture 50 images of everyday observations of light. Ruppersberg uses what I call ‘didactic-lite ’ language in the title 50 Helpful Hints on Art of The Everyday; he does not actually list 50 hints but uses the common categorizing style headline as a way to showcase some of his philosophies on art. With my images, I am using this concept in a similar fashion in order to let the viewer look at the ordinary in an extraordinary way and to interpret a narrative in their own way. Enjoy!
This book is available at the blurb bookstore.
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- everyday inspiration: light
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- everyday inspiration: light
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- everyday inspiration: light
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- everyday inspiration: light
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- everyday inspiration: light
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- everyday inspiration: light
13/13
The 1st year at RISD is over. It was an incredible but exhausting experience. I’ve been updating my portfolio site and wanted to take some time to post about the final visiting designer workshop with Vaughan Oliver. It was a liberating experience. I teamed up with two fellow students, Camila Afanador and Milan Nedved. This project is an experimental approach to the idea of representing the 13th month. The 13th month is an abstract notion of time where anything can happen. Only having about 48 hours from start to finish on this project we needed to work fast. The 1st day started at the hardware store, we picked up as many 1′s and 3′s as we could find. With a macro lens we started experimenting. It was a lot of fun shooting the 13′s in a variety of environments. A lot of beautiful images emerged from this experiment, but it wasn’t until we went back to Milan’s house for dinner and drinks that we started projecting the images onto all different surfaces. We then started capturing images of the projections. We fell in love with this style of experimentation. We shot over 1300 images over the 2 days and created 13 (28″ x 40″) single image posters along with a 400 page book. The book contained many of the out takes. We printed 2 copies with blurb (highly recommend), one for us and one that we sent over the pond to VO. Thanks to Vaughan and thanks to Camila and Milan. Enjoy!
This book is available at the blurb bookstore.
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- 13/13 poster
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- 13/13 poster
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- 13/13 poster
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- 13/13 poster
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- 13/13 book
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- 13/13 team
Einstein’s Dreams
An essay in Alan Lightman’s book, Einstein’s Dreams, inspires this video. In this essay, he describes one of Einstein’s dreams as a place where time stands still: the place where we idealize life like a photograph capturing a perfect moment. The irony is that in that perfect moment, where time stands still, there is no life. Time travels outward in rotating concentric circles and rests at the center. The things that are the closest to the center of time move at a glacial pace, picking up speed in greater diameters towards the outer rings. Present life only exists in the outer rings where things are moving fast and uncontrollable.
I examine this concept of time standing still in an autobiographical way. Through three-dimensional typography, I visualize time in concentric rings, starting the year I was born (1977) and moving outward to today (2011). In contrast to the typography, I juxtapose my (self-made) childhood home videos to represent memories of a place where time stands still. The footage shows clips of a family vacation in Hawaii (1992). Even as a child, I find fascination with the ability to capture my life through video. Most of the footage is documenting every day life: myself at play, other people on vacation, the TV in the hotel room, almost anything but the typical picturesque Hawaii landscape and culture. The image that I represent as a place where time stands still is a surfer. The surfer riding a wave is a metaphor for trying to capture and hold onto something that is ephemeral. Just as the video almost stops and fades to black, the viewer is quickly pulled back to the high speed pace of life that exists on the outer rings.
Uncovering this archive of home videos sparks new inspiration and curiosity in my work and is helping me reflect on my everyday journey and process.
full circle
This video loop juxtaposes my (self-made) childhood home videos and current ultrasound images of my child-to-be. Through manipulation of speed and rotation, the two forms are a representation of life’s cycle through the past, present and future, merging together in a dream-like experience.
This video will be screening April 7 – 11 on the 2nd floor of the risd design center. Please swing by if you have a chance.
Enjoy!
social justice
I can’t believe the spring semester is already half over. Things are moving at light speed. I have not had time to breath never mind blog but I thought I’d give a quick update on a few things I’ve worked on. Two out of the four visiting designers (Jonathan Barnbrook and Jan Van Toorn) have come and gone. It’s been a great experience. I’m not sure if it was planed or just coincidence but both workshops had a social justice/human rights theme with an awareness poster as the final project. The Barnbrook workshop posters are anti ads in reaction to the Chevron, We Agree Ad campaign and the Jan Van Toorn workshop posters were dealing with the human right for fresh drinking water and sanitation around the world. I worked with fellow classmate Adam Lucas on the water rights poster. It was a a great collaboration. Enjoy!
water rights poster
water rights poster
james and adam
Chevron Anti Ad
Chevron Anti Ad 2
barnbrook class
RISD Visiting Designers
RISD spring semester starts in 2 days and I’m really looking forward to it. I say that now while I’m fully rested and amped to get going… We’ll see how I feel in a couple weeks. I’m especially excited for the visiting designers course. Four weeks throughout the the spring semester visiting designers come from all over the world to teach an intense four day workshop. This spring the esteemed visiting designers are: Jonathan Barnbrook, Jan Van Toorn, Lars Müller, and Vaughan Oliver. I was honored to be asked to design the poster for the visiting designers lecture series that takes place prior to the workshops. Click here to view the dates and times. The RISD graphic design visiting designers lectures are free and open to the public. Here is the selected poster I designed. Enjoy.
RISD Visiting Designers 2011
fail sail
The American Coast Pilot, printed in 1793 is a nautical journal without any charts, but instead verbal descriptions of sailing directions, tide tables, latitudes and longitudes, and navigational landmarks, as well as other information of use to sailors. This journal examines the old style typography within the 1793 version. Imagine the confusion it would cause if a navigator needed to use a guide with “the long s” character today. Navigation and communication go hand and hand. This journal looks at the fine line between success and failure, or sailing and failing. The journal navigates you to a video online that adds to the sensory experience from quiet and tactile to sound and motion.
See the larger version of the video here.
Enjoy!
traveling
I am. They are. We are. Traveling.
Inspired by my daily commute from Boston to Providence via MBTA commuter rail during my first semester at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Course: The Urgent Vignette
Instructor: Cavan Huang
Fall Semester: December 2010
Medium:
Video, Kinetic Typography, still photos, all footage shot with Canon 7D, and edited in Adobe After Effects
A huge thank you to David Ricard for providing the original music davidricard.com
tender buttons
Light blue and the same red with purple makes a change. It shows that there is no mistake. Any pink shows that and very likely it is reasonable.
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons -1914
I recently finished this vignette using an excerpt from Gertrude Stein’s, Tender Buttons. My medium was Color-aid sliced paper and stop motion animation set to the music of Alexander Scriabin Sonata No. 8, Op. 66. It was a pain staking process of slicing all the paper, shooting over 3000 frames and editing it to the music. I’m pretty happy with the results.
Thanks to my neighbor Bob for sharing this music with me. Please do watch it with the sound turned up. Enjoy
all aboard!
Select an object that inspires you. This object along with your choice of one of the following categories from Aristotle’s The Organon will be your starting point for this assignment.
1. substance
2. quantity
3. place
4. quality
5. place
6. time
7. position
8. state
9. action
10. affection
PART 1: Design a pair of posters, one that is primarily conceptual in it’s design and one that is primarily sensate in it’s design.
PART 2: Design one poster that is equally conceptual and sensate. This poster is required to be a completely new idea and not simply a merging of the first two.
My object was the train my category was time. I’ll leave it up to you to determine if I succeeded. Cheers!
train time poster
train time poster
train time poster
Vignette
Well, I’ve been at RISD now for a month and it’s been great! I’m more consumed than I could have imagined, but I’m having an inspirational and exciting time. I’ve been meaning to give a full recap of things I’m working on but I’ve just been too busy. Here is one project I finished yesterday for my Grad Elective: The Urgent Vignette, which I think is appropriate as this is just one vignette of my new life. This piece is titled: a time to strike. I hope to share some other things soon. Enjoy
