Video file
Adie Fein
ADIE Fein
Capture, Control, Circulate: Can We Queer Regulatory Power in Graphic Design?
Capture, Control, Circulate addresses regulatory power, the transmission and enforcement of culturally-sanctioned behaviors and identity. How does regulatory power operate in graphic design and what—if anything—can the graphic designer do to subvert that operation? The methodologies for subversion explored in this book typically draw from queer and trans* experience and thought. Therefore, the work herein takes up issues of identity, normativity, marginalization, and community.
This thesis also considers design education, and its contemporary emphasis on the capture and control of content. It advocates instead for an educational model that centers circulation; that is, graphic design’s capacity to platform, to publish, and to distribute. Capture, Control, Circulate imagines how design education can build community through informal platforms for reflection, collaboration, distribution, and collective celebration.
Gender Tools: Fixxer
Web Plugin
2021
Gender Tools is a project that explores how graphic design might subvert gender by refusing gendered language. Fixxer is a web-based plugin that obscures gendered language across the internet. Because gendered language is important and necessary in some contexts—as in the description of gender-based oppression—the words are revealed on hover. The necessity or triviality of gender in a text becomes evident.
Gender Tools: Times Neutral Roman
Typeface
2021
Gender Tools is a project that explores how graphic design might subvert gender by refusing gendered language. Times Neutral Roman is a typeface programmed to replace gender-based language with an unspecified marker (an X’d rectangle). TNR makes the writer aware of the use of gendered language, which may be composed instinctively, without deliberation. If gender is central to the concept of the work, then TNR presents formal opportunity. Could (and should all) gendered language announce itself? Intermixed fonts or written emphasis (**girl**) becomes strategies for maintaining gendered phrases with the text.
Melmoth
Typeface / Website
2022
Melmoth is a font—or an archive in the form of a font. The upper case assembles letters from documents that regulated Oscar Wilde’s life. Together, the capitals bring together moments in which the state exercised control over homosexuals—they visualize that network of power that ultimately killed Wilde. The lowercase letters are taken from Wilde’s correspondence. Where the capitals illustrate public control, the lowercase embodies Wilde’s private life. This creates two registers within the font. Programmed OpenType features allow the font to force certain words (like Bosie, the name of Wilde’s lover) into a specific register, reclaiming Wilde’s life. The Melmoth microsite allows users to write (and to view others') love letters. On idle, the microsite is slowly overlaid with kisses, a reference to Wilde’s tomb and (incriminating) love letters.
Image
The Politics of Non-Representation: Essay
Digital printing on 55gsm newsprint.
29.5 by 23.5 inches
2021
In this visual essay, I place the work of postcolonial thinker Gayatri Spivak in conversation with Jan Van Toorn and with Modernist graphic designers. I conclude that not even a critical, self-reflexive graphic design practice can address the issue of misrepresentation. Rather, this project offers non-representation as a solution. Graphic designers should not to visualize the invisible but instead to visually represent the absence of minoritarian speech
Image
The Politics of Non-Representation: Visual Collage
Digital printing on 55gsm newsprint.
29.5 by 23.5 inches
2021
wo visual ways of marking absence are explored: the intentionally blank page, refigured as a space reserved for future speech; and the anti-collage, a layered disassemblage of existing visual material that evokes absence.
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