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Serena Ho
Crossover Logics
As modern life is increasingly measured and calculated by computational machines, our realities are flattened into streams of data, bits, and binary. As a graphic designer operating under societal and technological systems that unrelentingly speed up, simplify, and reduce the individual into a form legible to machines, my response to these conditions is to search for moments of imagination, poetry, and play within these structures. In my practice, I pair machined forms with human gestures to bridge the duality between computer and human logic, the rational and the emotional, and the measurable and unmeasurable aspects of human experience.
Crossover Logics documents my explorations at the edges of the schematic, the linguistic, and the coded, using and subverting these conventional systems of communication to give form to personal thought. Rather than reject the technological, I leverage technology to make work that is generative, with a multiplicity of meanings. Crossing between these seemingly opposite tendencies, I create alternative maps, diagrams, and systems that generate a poetic friction between the hard instrumentality of data logic and the intimacy of internal logic.
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PELTON PAINTINGS
Scripted Image
2022
In Pelton Paintings, I develop the idea of canvas as cosmos by creating scripted images that pay homage to the cosmic, transcendental paintings of Agnes Pelton. I wrote a script in Photoshop that can produce an infinite number of permutations based on a palette of elements I extracted from Pelton’s body of work. I was interested in the capacity of a scripted image to evoke the creative hand of a painter, and to see whether it could project the symbolic richness and metaphysical vibration of Pelton’s paintings.
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EMERGENCE, FRACTAL, LEXICON
Posters
24"x36"
2022
Emergence, Fractal, Lexicon is a triptych of posters that reflects on and highlights key facets of my design process. The posters are created using a program written in Processing, which tiles together modular units that can be combined to form generative patterns. The making of these posters followed a process that I use often in my practice; the creation of constituent pieces which are collaged together with both programming and by hand to form the final composition. I describe this way of working as emergent and fractal because it relies on simple units that form a more complex composition through systematic recursion, repetition, and transformation. These units constitute the lexicon that defines the visual vocabulary of my work.
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MARIGOLD
Typeface
2021
In Marigold, I use type design technology to create playful floral glyphs that suggest their own kind of grammar. I adapt the conventions of language to create an asemic system, devising textual forms that have no specific semantic content. Although each glyph in Marigold maps to a letter on a standard keyboard, its syntax has its own logic inspired by floral ornamentation and plant growth. This grammar is implied by the formal qualities of the typeface—certain combinations of glyphs link together to form vines; ligatures cause glyphs to branch; capitalizations turn buds into flowers.
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MARKET PICTURE
Spreadsheet & Prints
In Market Picture, I generate patterns using live stock price data in Google Sheets. Spreadsheets are tools often used by highly paid financial analysts to divine the unknowable movements of the market, but are used in this project to create images that recall weaving, a de-valued yet very tangible form of labor.
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MARKET PICTURE
Spreadsheet & Prints
In Market Picture, I generate patterns using live stock price data in Google Sheets. Spreadsheets are tools often used by highly paid financial analysts to divine the unknowable movements of the market, but are used in this project to create images that recall weaving, a de-valued yet very tangible form of labor.
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MARKET PICTURE
Spreadsheet & Prints
In Market Picture, I generate patterns using live stock price data in Google Sheets. Spreadsheets are tools often used by highly paid financial analysts to divine the unknowable movements of the market, but are used in this project to create images that recall weaving, a de-valued yet very tangible form of labor.
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MARKET PICTURE
Spreadsheet & Prints
In Market Picture, I generate patterns using live stock price data in Google Sheets. Spreadsheets are tools often used by highly paid financial analysts to divine the unknowable movements of the market, but are used in this project to create images that recall weaving, a de-valued yet very tangible form of labor.
MARKET PICTURE
Spreadsheet & Prints
2022
In Market Picture, I generate patterns using live stock price data in Google Sheets. Spreadsheets are tools often used by highly paid financial analysts to divine the unknowable movements of the market, but are used in this project to create images that recall weaving, a de-valued yet very tangible form of labor.
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THIS SILENCE CAN ALSO BE HEARD
Installation
2022
In This Silence Can Also Be Heard, I turn an empty classroom into a meditation space, using technology to create an experience that makes people feel transported, inducing interior calm and mind-body connection. A projection visualizes the meditator’s auditory and physical experience, responding to ambient sound and movement. While incessant scrolling and swiping on digital devices often distances us from our physical bodies, my goal was to use technology to do the opposite. Can technology be utilized to sharpen one’s receptivity to the present moment and one’s awareness of the body in space through thoughtful experience design?
