TOWARD A RESPONSIBILITY OF AESTHETIC DISTANCE: Thoughts on Visual Communication     *     Communication is the very fabric of relation. It is an atmosphere of sensing and responding — endlessly conferring. Through this, we’re able to access something: a friend, a home, a feeling, our surroundings, ourselves. It is embodied sense-making. For us humans, it is language in its most plural form.      **      Visual communication, which involves graphic design along with the multitude of visual traditions and varying forms of writing and mark making, is attentive to how visual forms mediate sense. It looks at how visual forms and their practices as mediums and platforms render possible/impossible specific ways of knowing. Attempting to navigate this requires us to look closely at the contexts which frame particular visual forms (from the past, from the future, in the present). Aesthetics becomes a matter of ethics. It matters what histories we surface, who we suggest listening to and through what forms, how this is done, who with, and who for.      ***      In my practice, I see visual communication as sense-making tools. Its traditions are situated and entangled, so it becomes necessary to confer with other ways of knowing across the already polycultural and multi-disciplined. This is to say that our work begins and ends in study; I believe this to be the responsibility of our discursive acts. In my work, I must recognize my position in relation, navigate commitments, and surface the visual negotiation of different perspectives, ways of knowing, and ways of relating. This is where I hope to contribute: the slow, tedious, and necessarily collective efforts of remaking and reorienting sense.      ****

TOWARD A RESPONSIBILITY OF AESTHETIC DISTANCE: Thoughts on Visual Communication     *     Communication is the very fabric of relation. It is an atmosphere of sensing and responding — endlessly conferring. Through this, we’re able to access something: a friend, a home, a feeling, our surroundings, ourselves. It is embodied sense-making. For us humans, it is language in its most plural form.      **      Visual communication, which involves graphic design along with the multitude of visual traditions and varying forms of writing and mark making, is attentive to how visual forms mediate sense. It looks at how visual forms and their practices as mediums and platforms render possible/impossible specific ways of knowing. Attempting to navigate this requires us to look closely at the contexts which frame particular visual forms (from the past, from the future, in the present). Aesthetics becomes a matter of ethics. It matters what histories we surface, who we suggest listening to and through what forms, how this is done, who with, and who for.      ***      In my practice, I see visual communication as sense-making tools. Its traditions are situated and entangled, so it becomes necessary to confer with other ways of knowing across the already polycultural and multi-disciplined. This is to say that our work begins and ends in study; I believe this to be the responsibility of our discursive acts. In my work, I must recognize my position in relation, navigate commitments, and surface the visual negotiation of different perspectives, ways of knowing, and ways of relating. This is where I hope to contribute: the slow, tedious, and necessarily collective efforts of remaking and reorienting sense.      ****