Benevolent Flux

Abstract

A year and a half ago, I found myself in the parking lot of Long John Silver’s with a bucket of chalk. My goal was to re-examine a personal experience through typography. With chalk and a camera, I recorded the event on the impartial pavement of the lot and photographed as a disinterested worker followed the order to wash it away. What I didn’t know then is that I was entering a world of changed graphic design based on complexity, uncertainty and interference. My thoughts on complexity arise from the tension between redundancy in the advertising industry and the strategies of Friedrich Nietzche and the Dada movement. I engage these historically grounded tensions through design interventions in public faces, critiquing the cultural dialogue between accepted norms and the economic potency that our society has found comfort and complacency in. Using Haridimous Tsoukas’s research on organizational epistemology and integrating Tsoukas’s theory of complex systems, I will build from my own history in the advertising industry a theory of complex graphic design that in my opinion will slow societal speed, enabling viewers to engage visual culture on a deeper and more meaningful level. this thesis is divided into sections in order to provide background information and a framework for my creative work which will supplement my theories and ideas on complexity and interference in contemporary visual culture. I will draw from past digital projects as well as performed public experiments that have led me to define the role of complexity in my studio practice as well as the dynamic role it has in my professional design practice.