AUTOMATION AND INTUITION
School of Art & Design,
University of Illinois at Chicago
2006-2007
The idea was to construct a program in Karl Gerstner’s sense: a programmatic grid that could successfully adapt itself to any context.
The grid is simple: the 7 departments of the School of Art and Design are expressed as 7 equal columns in whatever format is at hand, and a
unified grid of squares is then constructed from this value.
As explorations grew from these flexible premises, a deeper theme within the program began to emerge: the line between manual or intuitive solutions and
automatic or scripted ones.
The goal was always to develop a system flexible enough that a human hand could intervene to make an improvement or mark a deviation, but one well-formed and clear enough that almost anybody could be empowered to use it. This antithesis animates what follows, and is never resolved.
beginning to fill in the grid
Themes: complexity, writing over—-revision, interruption, connection, movement, systematicity, process, reversal.
ad-hoc collage of elements from earlier posters, scaled and positioned according to the grid specifications of the page (letter-width). Fragments from larger grid fields are fitted to smaller ones, collaging measures.
