What I have experienced in my own job titles over the years—Commercial Artist → Graphic Designer → Visual Designer—isn’t just semantics. It’s a compressed history of the entire discipline trying to keep up with culture, technology, and commerce. The names change when the center of gravity shifts. Here’s that story,…
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There is a long-standing assumption embedded in the word transparency: that to see through something is to understand it. Glass, clarity, openness—these are typically aligned with truth. TRANSPARENCY PROJECT challenges that assumption directly. It proposes instead that the more transparently we are allowed to see, the more complex—and unstable—our understanding…
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Concept & Proposal For An Art Exhibit Build An Architecture For Seeing Through 1) Build a structure 30 feet long, 20 feet wide with 15 foot walls and a simple entry in the front of one of the wide sides. No ceiling. 2) Build a cube 10 foot wide, 10…
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In 1990, I introduced a term for an exhibition that has continued to unfold in meaning over time: The HumanFactory™. The metaphor is direct, but not simplistic. It proposes that a human being can be understood as a production system—structured, compartmentalized, staffed, and ultimately finite. Within this system, output is…
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Yes, all art is abstract—to a degree. And, that idea has a long, quietly subversive lineage. Even the most “realistic” painting is an abstraction. The moment an artist translates the three-dimensional, time-bound world into a flat, framed surface, something is selected, something is omitted, and something is interpreted. That act…
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There’s something delicious about saying chiaroscuro out loud—it rolls through the mouth like a studio secret you’ve earned. And, if you may feel this word is a bit less spoken today, almost as if it’s been absorbed into the bloodstream of art and no longer needs to announce itself. Here,…
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Some phrases don’t explain themselves—they lodge. They bypass understanding and take up residence. “Remove the optic callous” is one of those phrases. My sculpture professor enlightened me with this phrase in art school and it has stuck with me all these years. It sounds vaguely medical, faintly accusatory, and just…
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Originality has long occupied a peculiar position in the creative hierarchy—revered, pursued, and frequently misunderstood. It is often described as the act of making something entirely new, yet in practice it more closely resembles the careful rearrangement of what already exists. Ideas echo other ideas. Forms borrow from forms. Even…
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For unknown reasons, somehow I imagined a universe. Not a metaphorical universe, but a literal, functioning universe with its own physics, ecology, infrastructure, and municipal maintenance problems. Urbia is that universe. Let’s explore this imagination … At first glance the diagram resembles a scientific illustration—something halfway between a biology textbook…
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The Artist