When I think of nature, I can not fix an         image in my head. It is different from thinking of a square or a circle. When I imagine a shape, I can see it in my mind, growing in size, gradually altering in color. When I try to imagine nature, various landscapes and phenomena emerge all at once, shifting with greater degrees, constantly, and rich in complexity.

Pictures, written languages, moving pictures, and constructed environments reveal stages in the development of image technology.

These formats, as means of expression in graphic design today, make it possible to preserve a focused representation of elements set in some relationship, isolated from the natural world. In other words, they act as a lens filter to a projected world that counter weighs the details of existing reality, similar to when an accidental sunbeam lights up an unnoticed area of a face.

The word nature bears two common meanings under our current usage: the nature that refers to the external world in its entirety; and the nature that refers to the inherent character or basic constitution of a person or thing. The actual word nature comes from Latin word natus, past participle of nasci—to be born. During early 12th century, the definition of nature has meant the active force that establishes and maintains the order of the universe, group of properties, or characteristics that define objects. (*OED)

Visual order is at the heart of the graphic     design discipline. Graphic design embraces a multidisciplinary range of visual modes, and is as much ideal for the investigation of the process of seeing as is for the development of alternative ways of seeing. Particular modes such as prints, books, videos, and interactive interfaces extend and help us understand our ability to capture and carry imagery, motion, and meaning.

As someone who instrumentalizes these     resources, I am especially concerned with seeing, and thus I focus my thesis around the notion of seeing and providing ways of seeing. I am especially interested in how a form can become a poetic and expressive entity that in turn influences its content and enliven the act of looking.

My work in the past two years has consisted mostly of reactions against the notion of a singular focus. Conventional thinking has resulted in the expectation that graphic design occupies only what is ‘flat’. This compressed quality has a bizarre similarity to the ‘flat’ relationship that the majority of graphic design bears to society as a service to the creation of mediated messages.

When graphic design works for the benefit of commercial or political objectives, it can not avoid but strip down the polarity of content into a single-minded voice. This over-powering dominance has affected the general understanding of what graphic design is and what it can be.

I attempted to build a more comprehensive understanding of the interrelated web that the man-made visual mediums hold. As an investigator into the basics of visual representation essentially, I tried to not use these forms to communicate messages, but rather, somehow, I tried to live in these forms in order to develop a more acute and organic awareness.

I chose to work with subjects that I have     taken for granted in the past, notions and habits that have entered my system unconsciously to make me function better without thinking about them. By having subjects such as air, the alphabet system, or color, I tried to find visual forms that     reverberate preconceived ideas by relating back to them in some physical way. My other experiments have taken inspiration from paper, coin, and the discarded popsicle stick.

The work that I have done during my thesis study has only provided me a small foundation to understand the visual world. They are at most a series of tests that attempt to bring together     aspects of the learned and felt visual worlds. As the soil from which to grow further work, these explorations help bridge my interest in the notion of seeing to my interest in dreams.

The images that we see now is different from the images that we saw when we were just born. Still, both are different from the images that we see in dreams.
When we were just born, we only saw colors and patterns. Later, we learn and associate certain things we see with particular meanings. When we are in a dream, the conventions of seeing that we have learned is once again broken. The logics of dimensionality, depth, sequence, and authenticity of objects are no longer intact.

Dreams provide the study of seeing with a softer referential structure than that of a mechanical one. Almost anything can happen in a dream because it is a simulated construction of imagination based on known associations that we have made up through experience.

In a way, surreal qualities we find in everyday life have to do with some kind of a breakage of existing seeing convention.

In the book “Theory of Prose”, Russian critic and writer Viktor Shklovsky discusses extensively the phrase “thinking in images”. This phrase evokes in me an attitude that constantly relates to the origin of things. As much as the phrase connotes a literal interpretation for a pictorial translation of thought, it also aspires to a metaphorical interpretation of a state of mind that’s primitive, or free of linguistic rationals.

Imagery was once as pure as sound and as atmospheric as temperature, only becoming complex through our processes of naming and categorization. I am interested in the transformation that happens when we comprehend, interact, and reshape parts of the things that exist in this world.

Our minds create abstracted notions in place of physical experience. As one grows in age, color shifts to become processed in the brain’s language centers instead of pre-linguistic parts. The gesture of editing and revising towards a certain objective tends to be a characteristic of the adult, as well as coincidentally any design work that intends to distill chaos into useful logic. I look to this phenomena as a source that leads to the     creation of dynamic imagery reading.

The notion of design suggests strong intention and purpose. It is a demonstration of intent rather than something that’s categorical physically. In this sense, the definition of graphic design is one that’s malleable. I am interested in the widest sense of graphic design, mainly as a process that defines visual relationships.

With the aid of graphic forms, ideas take shape in a specificity that can not exist otherwise. I am intrigued by the potential and personality of this specificity, and the effect it has as an     accompaniment to our natural day-to-day navigation. Rather than constructing absolute messages using visual conventions developed in the past,     I prefer to construct visual relationships and possibly create my own conventions.

While the notion of attention demands a     concentration of focus, the opposite of attention implies an awareness devoid of center—a state of anti or super attention or endless focii of equal importance. It is different from the notion of     inattention which is inattentive. I have tried to     understand these relationships through my explorations while looking for what drives the hierarchical ordering of visual activity.

I value states of wander, loose focus, and contradiction. I am interested in observing and exploring the implications of these tendencies. To me, this wish to diverge from any sort of singular attention is one that anticipates a fuller participation in the continuous stream of shifting.

I see the potential of graphic design as an     opportunity to stir up multiple points of visual entry in order to brings to life a dynamic reading that has not previously existed.