S.O.S. is a ceremony designed for the creative community that attended Non-Native Native Fair, an experimental environment of alternative exchange centred around the theme PRO$PERITY NOW! Using native folklore as inspiration, it is the adaption of Boita Bandini, an ancient Odia maritime tradition into a rite of passage ritual for the modern day creative worker, I was able to share my heritage in a hybrid manner, reflecting on job market fostering a new sense of belonging as an (accepted) alien in the Dutch design scene.
Framer Framed is the community-oriented, participatory exhibition site where my work was located. I set up shop in the marketplace, juxtaposed against walls adorned by the works of Taring Padi, amidst publications, performances and products purchasable through ca$h mon€y or NNN tokens by little over a thousand visitors during the three days.
The offerings of my stall included the S.O.S ritual, which took form as a pathfinding ceremony incorporating storytelling through miniature elements emblematic of the creative's challenges as well as sensory elements such as incense and a prayer bell (ଘଣ୍ଟା) sound bath.
In preparation for the Summit of Success Ritual, I consumed a copious amount of self-help and self-development content, stringing together glass, plastic and pearl to keep my hands busy, producing accessories to assist the busy creative professional achieve peak levels of prosperity.
Knowledge workers in the attention economy, in their over-stimulated, under-compensated, ever-entrepreneurial, free-floating flexible purveying of media magic, can be considered as the ultimate precariat. At stall 48, we found each other in different stages of our careers with varying degrees of success, none a stranger to the path of doubt and self-optimisation ahead of becoming a 🧿🎱🪙🌑🌒🌓🌔🌛✨Star Designer™️💫🌜🌖🌗🌘🌑🪙🎱🧿
The virtual ritual opened up a sacred safe space to collectively validate each others' tears & tribulations, success & stagnation, cycles & spirals; mutually affirming one another's position, path and prayer in an immersive ceremony to transmute energetic state into personal power.
Together we reflected on the ☁ cloud-working silver linings ☁ freelance rhythms of feast & famine cycle ☁ triggers and glimmers of the creative process, recognising that they do not exist in a vacuum but in their alienation, fragment into a kaleidoscope of professional experiences.
Defining success as the alignment of the Head, Heart and Hands, I encouraged each participant to look inward while immersed in 3-7 Hz healing frequencies, aiming to:
Connect and ground with radical honesty to the tune of the bell sonic affirmation
illuminate and center their personal vision of success
inscribe the path in their own words, languages and symbols
sealed in a boarding pass for a journey towards the horizon of prosperity
with the ceremonial paper plane flight determining the direction in which to think, feel and will.
The experience illuminated the realities of alchemising ones' self-worth into market value as well as successful coping stragies from algorithmic advice to regenerative routines in to navigate the intrecracies of creative evolution.
☁©️®️🪷☕️🌥⛅️🌤☀🧿🎱🪙🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕🌛✨🫥✨🫧☁️🫧☁️🫧☁️🫧☁️🫧✨💸✨🔮✨🌀💻⭐️💻🌀✨🔮✨💸✨🫧☁️🫧☁️🫧☁️🫧☁️🫧✨🫥✨🌜🌖🌗🌘🌑🪙🎱🧿☀️🌤⛅️🌥☕️🪷®️©️☁
☁☁☁©️®️🪷☕️✨🌥⛅️🌤☀🧿🎱🪙🌑🌒🌓🌔✨🟡✨🌀✨☁️✨☁️✨☁️✨☁️✨☁️✨☁️✨☁️✨☁️✨☁️✨☁️✨☁️✨☁️✨☁️✨☁️✨🌀✨🟡✨🌖🌗🌘🌑🪙🎱🧿☀️🌤⛅️🌥☕️🪷®️©️☁☁☁
It was a fortuitous meeting of energies, visions and opportunities for which I am grateful to the Non-Native Native Embassy, fellow participants and visitors
We love to make some amazing, fun and interesting Webflow cloneables for the Webflow community. Here are some of our recents one.
This was a fun project that we wanted to do to show the power of Webflow. Not just a clone of MacOS but a portfolio that is built to look like MacOS.
Clone it now!
This is an invoicing workflow that uses Zapier to allow you to send invoices to your clients by just filling out a form!
howcase your app features in a much more interesting way! This was a heavily requested cloneable from one of our previous work. Only built using Webflow interactions.Responsive for ALL breakpoints.Specific tablet and mobile versions included!
Edition III of the biannual is back with urgent words from Mark Fisher, Gregory Sholette and fellow literary giants; expertly edited by Sebastian Olma and Justin O' Connor, this issue
addresses communal organisation and the pursuit of collective aesthetic experiences. The very heart of this exploration confronts the neoliberal privatization of cultural assets, emphasizing a paradigm where culture is no longer commodified but evolves into a shared, abundant experience. Echoing Kristin Ross's notion of "communal luxury," the essays envision a world enriched by aesthetic richness accessible to all, from the unbounded creativity within factory floors to the re-imagination of union halls as community space.
The introduction kicks into gear, weaving through the contributions which highlight live on-ground approaches, such as the struggle for worker rights that inspired the ⇡ graphic coat of bread and roses. This issue gives visual, visceral context via the affects, objects and sites involved. With the inclusion of Mark Fisher's words that have inspired Making & Breaking since its inception, comes a full circle moment. I hope to have done justice to the responsibility of visually illuminating the practices presented in the publication.
A previously unpublished transcript of a talk by Mark Fisher is the opening contribution. To reanimate the messages delivered by him at the Luxury Communism conference of late spring 2016 in Weimar, Germany, as part of the Digital Bauhaus Summit series, I chose to employ a brutalist rendering to the text, set against iconic imagery.
With the contribution by Milanese Collettivo Sentiero Futuro Autoproduzioni, there was the chance to play with DALL-E to generate images of a city branded as a creative centre but whose reality amounts to no more than “an AI-generated picture of a thriving metropolis.”
Gregory Sholette's prose peels back the curtain shadowing the scenes of artistic production, referring to the spontaneous creativity hidden in "commonplace invisibility” that uphold the existence and smooth functioning of everyday life as well as the institutional art world. I imaged this through an exhibition-in-construction obstructed by an Art warehouse worker job posting (one of many invisible indispensable roles), watched over by San Precario, the patron Saint of Neoliberalism and the Wobblies' Black cat.
Lastly, Letizia Chiappini's Collective Pleasure against Platform Dystopia, an emancipatory retelling of pleasure as a tactic to subvert oppressive platform dynamics allowed room for experimentation with feminine motifs juxtaposed against the stark sanity of neoliberal aesthetics.
Ethnically ambiguous hand sourced from Facebook Design Resources' Diverse device hands, screenshots from the author's archive and Frankensteined together by yours truly.
Keeping in theme with the isolated appendages, I arranged some dainty arms cut from vintage paper dolls into an assemblage demonstrating desirable skills for domestic duties & bliss.
Nestled deep within the forests of south-western Odisha, Niyamgiri hills form a pristine ecology with the Kondh, Dongria, Kutia, Jharania tribes, tall mango trees, lush paddy fields, elephants, leopards and tigers. Niyamgiri is more than just home to its inhabitants; it is their God. Having sustained them for generations, it has provided everything they need to survive. This rare resource richness, while being a boon, has also attracted a crop of industrial giants. For beneath the perennial streams, wild roots, and shrines lie vast reserves of bauxite: the raw material from which come cement and aluminium. While bauxite is the very cornerstone of the foundation of modern infrastructure, it is indispensable to the tribals' way of life, as its presence in the soil helps it hold water, keeping it fertile and the streams fed. Thus, the hills have become an unlikely site for a clash of civilisations, between diverging notions of development and value systems.
The case of the resource curse that plagues Niyamgiri due to its vehement pursuit as a source of profit and progress by companies such as Vedanta Resources has led to an inequitable situation upheld through the sheer enormity of their capital power, extensive strategically positioned networks, and an actively broadcasted self-fabricated image as a strong trustworthy entity. The pursuit of higher profit margins achieves clean polished aluminium, but this product fails to shed the baggage of the violent and ecologically destructive procurement and processing of naturally occurring resources. This is conflicting to say the least, when the very device used in the making of this investigation, is sheathed in aluminium.
In the first phase of understanding the story of Niyamgiri, I watched news coverage, accounts by on-ground activists, documentaries like 'Mine - Story of a Sacred Mountain' and 'Niyamgiri-the mountain of law'. Moving further, I collected earth observation data(sourced through satellite imagery) in order to map the impact of bauxite mining on the landscape. I was very intrigued about the texture of bauxite and the visual quality of its(violent) transformation into aluminium, contrasted against the pacing and aesthetic of "satisfying videos" typically involving few second loops of 3D renders.
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Sculpting clay combined with Photogrammetry emerged an interesting medium with endless possibilities of scanning and layering upon existing objects or parts thereof to create hybrid artefacts that attempt to understand and ask questions about the complex systems that we find ourselves part of. In working with red clay and shaping it, the texture and cracks reminded me that the process of creation of our civilisation is a pursuit that forgets its own casualties. In my work, I wanted to acknowledge the compounded artificiality of the world surrounding us and I found digital representation of nature as an interesting way to do so. I decided to juxtapose the chemical process of converting bauxite to Aluminium onto the indigenous body, represented by a figure inspired by traditional dhokra art.
I was approached by the founder of Clover to create the digital presence for the brand of up-cycled fruit and vegetable snacks inspired by the ancient Iranian conservation method of making lavashak. This involved the design and development of a website with the goal of introducing Clover, showcasing the product and showing where the brand is/will be in its journey.
The Clover Brand Philosophy
Clover was founded to explore opportunities to improve the quality of people’s diet and enhance their experience of food, while positively impacting the supply-chain and the livelihood of the people that operate it.
The Product = The Process
Clover is the taste of a unique blend of fruits and vegetables in every bite, made by dehydrating a carefully curated cocktail of fruits and veggies rescued from side streams. (A fact I can personally attest to, having been treated to a taste test!) https://www.clovertogether.com/
From the outset, the approach was to craft the website to have a concise, conversational tone; informing and enabling people to register interest in Clover's circular economy journey. Drawing from the natural hues of the clover bites and their ingredients, a color palette was decided. This was done in a way to let the product and packaging take centre stage and to subvert the expectations of what sustainable brand can look like. Clover wants to remind us of the intimacy of seasonal fruits and vegetables which has been lost to the convenience of industrial agriculture. With every bite, Clover hopes to rekindle the notion of fruits and vegetables as magical gifts from nature and cultivate a community around appreciating and cherishing them.
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Self-sufficient nodes is an examination of the human labor that feeds into machine ‘intelligence’, in the form of the ghost-work of metadata tagging, data set curation and content moderation. The work moves between compliance with and critique of computational systems wherein the bodies, senses, and cognition of diverse workers are rendered into computational resources. Enmeshing myself further in the very same apparatus, through the re-enactment of digitally mediated wage labor relations and my implication in it, I attempt to think through and with this technology to investigate and disclose some of its hidden mechanics.
The slick, seamless facade of AI abstracts the labor of a global infrastructure of embedded human semantic engines, translating the complexity of the world in terms a computer can quantify and process. For workers on the cloud-sourcing platform Amazon Mechanical Turk, 'micro-tasks' are bread. These subdivided units of work consist of the “cleaning”, annotating, and categorising massive volumes of data that feed into machine learning algorithms. Interested in how cognitive labor is made invisible and mediated through the material composition of AI; I set out to investigate the platform, its mechanics and globally diffused workforce of human interfaces for machinic perception.
Who collects the data and processes them for use? Whose hands labored over this data for the concomitant patterns and arising intelligence to exist? What does it mean to produce global standard business intelligence that mustn't bear any etchings or cultural dimensions of ones' bodies? These are some of the questions I set out to answer through an ethnographic approach of interviewing the workers regarding the pressures, constraints, and anxieties they endure on and off the job, their wishes, dreams, hopes, and demands for the future.
I explored the use and limitations of the requester interface to see and listen to the everyday experiences of living and working on the platform through surveys, gifs, screenshots, playlists, camera roll images, validations. I tried to repurpose the tasks to create a break in the monotony, a pause, an oasis, an invitation to clock out, a (mini) paid vacation in their browser using animations, guided meditations, shared playlists, daily routines, reminders to drink water and instructions to perform hand exercises. Through shared google docs/ and the magic of the internet we even got to visit the inside of 'The Spheres', the (then) headquarters of Amazon in Seattle, collectively visualising the workers' dream offices, at contrast with their actual workspaces which could often mean a table in a shared multi-generational household and a personal computer. In this way the workers take on the most risk, relegated as independent contractors, even bearing the cost of the hardware that plugs them into the artificial information matrix.
By documenting the conditions of work, showing the way the workers organize, we can create friction and demystify the vision of AI as a black-box/monolith. The result is a mesh of fragmentary notes, gestures, reflections and extracts from conversations, creating a fictional meeting space to challenge the decentralisation of the workers amidst the cacophony of click work; a collaborative process- and time-based experience aiming to excavate and share tendencies of resistance in everyday life.
The interface design prevents any interaction among workers, leaving them isolated, atomised. Communication between the requester and the worker is entirely depersonalized. Most requesters use pseudonyms and workers appear to them as AMZXXXXXXXX. In search of ways to give visual presence to the work maintaining the information economy, I forwent the shiny, seamless, pixel perfect aesthetic of the platform for the viscerality of low quality handmade images. The abstraction of the human labor necessary for computation is a political and ideological process that merits deconstruction. Where technology is expected to free laborers from the curse of labor, rendering work obsolete, it tends to make workers prone to more exploitation and ends up extracting machine-like labor from automated humans.
When asked if I wanted to join the design team of Making and Breaking, I jumped at the chance! It was a huge opportunity to work with cultural theorists and practitioners I could've only admired from afar. The joy of reading everybody's contributions immediately conjured up vivid images in my mind and excited me to harness the compound effect of text and image to create a cohesive experience for our readers. Full disclosure, it took me a couple of reads to parse the material, but it definitely helped me understand the pacing better to determine the natural points to position graphic elements. I simultaneously started accumulating an image bank which helped me visually translate the ideas conveyed, partly for the sake of my own comprehension and to inspire the process of composing original images.
The approach for each article had to be different, as they all speculated on the future of aesthetic practice and cultural production grounded in different perspectives. While some took on policies, statistics and otherwise fertile ground for visual material, others were more abstract and theoretical in their approach. The thumbnail images acted as windows into the world that was each essay, desaturated to have a degree of sameness while offering a peek or a gaze back. All the images on the site are carefully created/curated in response to the call to 'rediscover the fundamental connection between aesthetics and politics'.
The foreword by the research chair, Sebastian Olma, initiates the reader into the issue while addressing the elephant in the room, the global pandemic among other political developments. Speaking of monumental occurrences, he draws parallels between the 1755 lisbon earthquake and Covid-19 as having brought about a rupture on philosophical grounds in the case of the former and rupture of economic activity in the latter. This can be seen in an accompanying diptych of a painterly depiction of the earthquake's aftermath superimposed with the proclamation 'God is no longer suitable as a foundation' and the John hopkins covid tracker stat as of that day demonstrating the failure of extractive capitalism as a foundation.
Further into the text, a caricature of a cultural worker running on a perpetual hamster wheel, churning out endless content, fuelled by bottomless coffee (and haunted by some signifiers of current social conditions of cultural production), seemed to perfectly illustrate the author's disenchantment with neoliberal politics and concomitant ‘symbolic misery’ while attending to the larger metaphor of ‘the loop of the contemporary’.
In the essay, ‘The Great Deflation: Arts and Culture after the Creative Industries’, Justin O’Connor rethinks cultural policy beyond a progressive 'creative industries imaginary'. The phrase 'white heat of technology' in reference to British PM Harold Wilson’s speech promoting the need for scientific revolution inspired me to make an image of a comet projected on the screen of a Commodore PET Personal Computer (one of the first pc models ever made) in an almost deified form aglow with a dreamy halo of enterprise possibilities.
The author's prescriptive message in favour of cultural policy that recognises arts and culture as a foundational element of the economy as well as a public good, and 're-aligns arts and culture with public services', is typeset in an industrial font and rendered to evoke grit and the functional intertwining of art with the everyday.
From Postmodernism to the Alt-right: Notes on the Loss of Objective Reality’ by art historian Angela Dimitrakaki delves into the historical relationship between globalisation, postmodernism and the alt-right. She points out that the relativistic and skeptic view of objective reality entrenched in current alt-right ideology, was first introduced by postmodernism. The image of famed contemporary artist Damien Hirst's skull-pture in all its diamond encrusted glory sporting a MAGA hat served this concept well.
In the end, I translated the layout for pdf so the essays could be downloaded and accessed offline. After making sure everything was properly cited and cross referenced, a few finishing touches and last-minute updates later, Making & Breaking 2 was a complete work of art. My involvement in the production process of an online publication of such high calibre from conceptualisation to launch contributed immensely to my knowledge and understanding of editorial design.
We love to make some amazing, fun and interesting Webflow cloneables for the Webflow community. Here are some of our recents one.
This was a fun project that we wanted to do to show the power of Webflow. Not just a clone of MacOS but a portfolio that is built to look like MacOS.
Clone it now!This is an invoicing workflow that uses Zapier to allow you to send invoices to your clients by just filling out a form!
howcase your app features in a much more interesting way! This was a heavily requested cloneable from one of our previous work. Only built using Webflow interactions.Responsive for ALL breakpoints.Specific tablet and mobile versions included!
I had the opportunity to work closesly with the product and marketing teams of Trell, India's largest travel-based content sharing app used in over 50 languages by 10,000+ users.
Trell is an exclusive community of travellers, tireless vagabonds, explorers and backpackers - who never fail to impress us with their stories.Their stories need to be heard, to be passed on - to the next budding traveller who never thought twice before backpacking, to the woman who dared to travel solo in dreary places, to the novice explorers who created their own paths out of nothingness.
When the Trell headquarters shifted from Tippasandra to a plush new workspace in Bangalore’s startup capital, I was given the honor of translating the brand’s guiding values and pursuits into a slick new mural befitting the space.
With the spaceship as a vessel for exploration and shared experiences at a focal point, I visualised all the experiences waiting to be experiences on the platform through clean monoline illustrations.
translate the look and feel of the app across the content and app experience, keeping the tone of voice consistent and seamless.
crafting the messaging through social media, outbound newsletters creator programs and in-app communication.
During my internship at Capgemini, I was tasked with creating brand assets used for marketing, internal communication, presentation decks etc. One of the exciting projects I was assigned to was to come up with an icon design for the diversity and inclusion team, which was created to ensure a comfortable work environment for all employees by accommodating cultural and religion-specific suggestions. This being a subject of personal interest, along with an opportunity to flex my creative muscles, made me even more interested to dive right in!
I started by looking at the brand book, logos of contemporary departments within the company, and followed by a loose visual exploration to get a lay of the land. I compiled my findings into a moodboard below:
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