The work presented in this application explores what it means to choose to disconnect from a digital presence in today’s post-digital environment. Post-Digital is the discourse around the relationships between our technologies and their effects on us as humans. I question whether the possibility of experiencing a sense of connection or transcendence is directly correlated with disconnecting from an online presence.

Human connections are no longer limited to face-to-face encounters, mouth to ear, or the subtleties of our shifting limbs. The digital world fosters new and different communication as it continues to expand our interactions daily—constant, ever-present, threading itself through the most intimate moments we experience. We use these digital frameworks of interaction for the same purposes as physical interaction, because this realm is real. No longer a secondary virtual existence, the web is now a cultural and existential norm. From this viewpoint I explore the notions of disconnection in relation to ubiquitous digital culture and presence. This work focuses on the conscious decision to disconnect working towards informing a future reconnection with combined cultural and societal existence. Technology’s fluidity, complementary to our existence, facilitates a personal self-awareness—or presence—but disconnecting oneself from these connective tools facilitates the feelings of connection and presence in nature.

CMYK Digital, 6.5x8.6in, Edition of 5.

Throughout my graduate process, I found myself using the same few photoshop files to edit assets for projects I was creating. One day all the layers turned on and the outcome wasn’t dissimilar to these images. I have since continued to pursue these visual mashups and they have ultimately informed a good deal of my practice. They have become a defining aspect to my production and methodological process.

Digital, not yet physical.

A collection of album artwork with the full intention of growing over the years. Lend a hand in that process and contact me about your album! <3

Record, Tape.

“The deep infiltration of digital information into our lives has created a fervor around the supposed corresponding loss of logged-off real life. Each moment is over-saturated with digital potential: These fractured moments are assumed to take precedence over our current physical connections between each other. Since the birth of the Internet the thought is that the creation of commonplaces has become less about fostering connections with each other and more about individual environments for us to inhabit online. This edict to be online “…has long been portrayed as an elsewhere, a new and different cyberspace with the habit of viewing the online and offline as largely distinct. The common (mis)understanding is experience is zero-sum: time spent online means less spent offline. We are either jacked into the Matrix or not; we are either looking at our devices or not…”“The smartphone has come to be ‘the perfect symbol’ of leaving the here and now for something digital, some other, cyber, space…”

1 Jurgenson, By Nathan. “The IRL Fetish.” The New Inquiry. 2012. Accessed September 23, 2016. http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-irl-fetish/.

2 Price, Seth. “PURPOSE / URGENCY —.” ROLU Blog. August 24, 2015. Accessed September 23, 2016. http://www.rolublog.com/2015/08/purpose-urgency/.

4x6 in, 8 pg. CMYK Digital, Edition of 20.

.gif, projection.

36x48 in, Toner Digital.

Not Enough is an exhibition which explores how our experience of natural landscapes has been permanently altered by an increasingly digital culture. Inspired by the work of George Shiras III, a forefather of nature photography, and the writings of John Berger, artist and author of Ways of Seeing, this installation is a foray into the Frankenstein landscapes created and subsequently sought by a public that has little experience with an unfiltered, unedited, unidealized natural world.

Not Enough was an installation at Gallery 148 in Minneapolis during my MFA candidacy at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Exhibition.

The Evidence of Intimacy is a prolegomena, it introduces my critique on the current culture’s mindset, mainly the millennial mindset of interconnectivity. I go into detail about the effects that the internet has had on our relation to each other, as well as how design has effectively been altered by—and arguably is altering the landscape of personal social relationships

100 pg. Risograph and Toner, 4x6 in, Edition of 10.