Ever since I have been consciously capable of intellectual thinking, I have had a deep interest in systems—understanding, organizing, developing and adapting them. Everything from legos to mathematics to social/cultural cognition. Although the basic initial idea has been expanded on, it is in the general, continuous vein of thought about systems that I naturally happened on this project idea.
The basic overarching idea is to take an inanimate, inorganic object and to personify, classify and describe it and all of its variations (“species,” if you will) as a taxonomic family of biological organisms. The research of three objects in total would be headed by a fake organization called the Macrosyntherid Research Group (MRG), with its own logo and identity. A research journal of three sections, each with its own flavor yet cohesive as a series, was written and designed to introduce the MRG's research. Here is the group's mission statement:
The human race has achieved great feats in the world of science. Yet, even with our advanced brains and brilliant minds, there is much we fail to understand, or more importantly, much for which we have only scratched the surface. It appears we simply do not know what is going on within even common everyday "objects."
The Macrosyntherid Research Group (MRG) was formed in 2012 when its founder was using a hairbrush to straighten out her hair and began thinking about the way a hairbrush or comb eliminates waste materials and redistributes oil throughout hair. What facilitates this process? Could there be a well-oiled mechanism or an intricate interaction going on within that is invisible to the naked eye? Just as it was revealed that there is a world of microsyntherids such as the bread clip (Occulupanid), found to be a parasitoid generally feeding on bagged pastries in supermarkets[1], it turns out there is a vast number of macrosyntherids in existence that we have yet to discover. Once this idea was posited, we had countless inquiries come in about other similar mysteries, from how sound is delivered from a device to the ear via headphones to the way hangers seem to replicate, and sometimes disappear, inside closets[2].
This exhibition, with its scientific yet reader-friendly research journal and accompanying live specimen, is an introduction to the type of research MRG is involved in and an invitation to explore the unlimited possibilities and solutions that can be reached by looking at everyday things at a different scale or from a different perspective.
1 The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group. (2011, July). What are Occlupanids? Retrieved from http://www.horg.com/horg/?page_id=2
2 Walters, Christian. (1999, October). Where the hell are my socks? Retrieved from http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/90q3/socks.html

The assignment of creating at least 10 letters of the alphabet (must include H, K, M, O, R and S) using a technique, media, or method that involves neither drawing or other standard letter-making techniques, nor any analog or digital drawing/art tools was given in Lettering & Typography, a class taught by Bruce Willen and Nolen Strals of Post Typography at MICA during the Spring 2013 semester. The other requirement was to create/present all of our letters to spell a word or phrase. To make things interesting, the one additional rule I set for the project on my own was that the outcome must be unpredictable, meaning the process could not reveal what the final letterforms would look like. After finding that working with my hands would not easily allow me to relinquish enough control, I decided to use my feet instead. (The phrase refers to it being 28 degrees outside when I performed this experiment.)

This project was aimed at exploring various ways to manipulate typography to depict the city of Olinda, as described below in an excerpt from Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities:
"In Olinda, if you go out with a magnifying glass and hunt carefully, you may find somewhere a point no bigger than the head of a pin which, if you look at it slightly enlarged, reveals within itself the roofs, the antennas, the skylights, the gardens, the pools, the streamers across the streets, the kiosks in the squeares, the horse-racing track. That point does not remain there: a year later you will find it the size of half a lemon, then as large as a mushroom, then a soup plate. And then it becomes a full-size city, enclosed within the earlier city: a new city that forces its way ahead in the earlier city and presses its way toward the outside.
Olinda is certainly not the only city that grows in concentric circles, like tree trunks which each year add one more ring. But in other cities there remains, in the center, the old narrow girdle of the walls from which the withered spires rise, the towers, the tiled roofs, the domes, while the new quarters sprawl around them like a loosened belt. Not Olinda: the old walls expand bearing the old quarters with them, enlarged but maintaining their proportions an a broader horizon at the edges of the city; they surround the slightly newer quarters, which also grew up on the margins and became thinner to make room for still more recent ones pressing from inside; and so, on and on, to the heart of the city, a totally new Olinda which, in its reduced dimensions retains the features and the flow of lymph of the first Olinda and of all the Olindas that have blossomed one from the other; and within this innermost circle there are always blossoming—though it is hard to discern them—the next Olinda and those that will grow after it."
It was completed before the Olinda identity project and served as a way to better understand the city. The booklet folds out into a poster on the reverse side, to represent the growing nature of Olinda.

The invite, a project given by designer Tim Goodman in a workshop for Flex Design at MICA in the Spring 2012 semester, is a balance of referencing the painter's work and its subject matter of light, silence, intimate interior spaces and nostalgia, while not overpowering or using the work itself. It emulates the feelings that well up when I view the artist’s work, in the most simple and authentic way. Due to the sparse nature of the design, I made sure to insure that every element/decision, from printing on canvas paper to the quiet, non-disruptive type, was deliberate and intentional.