I study how computational systems reshape communication and cognition. This catalog files the research, art, and studio engagements that ask those questions in different registers. Tagged so you can read one track, or all three at once.
Ephemeral Intelligence [working title] is an audio installation where language-specific models reason aloud exploring how intelligence isn't a fixed thing to be engineered but something that emerges and evolves, in conversation, in between languages and disappears when you optimize for clarity.
Contemporary machine learning (ML) systems optimize for clarity, minimizing noise in pursuit of reproduction. Yet Claude E. Shannon recognizes noise as an irreducible element of communication — the equivocation that remains even in well-designed systems. This paper asks whether that liminal space, the gap between transmitter and receiver, holds epistemic significance.
Tokenization encodes a specific theory of the relationship between language structure and cognition, one derived from English morphology and word-boundary logic; that encoding forecloses other theories of how meaning is made. This paper examines this claim across a spectrum of three languages that occupy different positions relative to the tokenizer's assumptions: Spanish, which largely confirms them; Hindi, which stresses them at the level of script and morphological structure; and Japanese, which falsifies them at the level of architectural assumption.
Responding to the national open call for the new Museo Nacional del Ecuador (MUNA), an international team led by EFE (Estudio Felipe Escudero), with OPEN Architecture, DLPS (De la Piedra Arquitectos) and HLA (Harari Landscape), crafted a speculative design for a museum built to hold the country's memory across the turning of worlds — and to hold it, above all, by refusing to keep it for itself.
A strategic plan and decision-making toolkit for Kansas City Art Institute, developed in a moment when art and design education was facing renewed questions about its value and place. Co-created with students, faculty, staff, alumni, community members and board through practices native to an arts community, the Prism's center holds the Institute's own values for how to engage with the world; its outer rim holds aspirations for the type of art and design school it wants to become. The framework treats everyone who arrives at KCAI as a practitioner of their own creative process.
An institutional transformation that redefined the Gallery's role as host of conversation between art and its people. Ethnographic research across audiences — from under-engaged local communities to specialized arts practitioners — produced a framework of five experience principles articulated in the visitors' voice, locating meaning at the encounter rather than at the institution.
The First Smartphone program asks parents and children to reflect on their digital lives, both as individuals and as a family. Its architecture mediates digital citizenship through four pillars: introspection, critical thinking, fiscal responsibility, and relatedness. Tension drivers across these pillars become evaluative moments, reframing parent-child conflict as a design site for meaning-making, by holding those tensions rather than resolving them with technology.
A behavioral taxonomy built on developmental psychology and relational dynamics — across family, mentorship and love — that became a framework for how families share stories with each other across generations. The taxonomy crosses life arenas with moments, positioning specific intersections of relational context and life-stage as formative rather than an aggregate. Tested through a paid journal study across New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, each prompt asks individuals about their traditions, those who mentored them, or heartbreaks that defined them — turning those stories into permission for conversations that aren't easily shared on their own.
morpheme is a research tool built to further understand our identity and its communication through the structure of our data. The toolkit is an emulation of data structures. It collects and sorts users' personal data and offers them a portal to view and reconstruct identity as our networks communicate them. It aims to bring an awareness of how the design of our information affects our identities and their extensions.
Neither western nor eastern metaphysics is tied directly to its mysticism such that it cannot be understood without the other; however, in understanding metaphysics comparatively it is important to consider the cultures they developed within and therefore the difference of methodology and scholarship. And so it becomes nearly impossible to study eastern and western metaphysics in a one-to-one comparison. This case study compares an example of Indian philosophy through the lens of western mysticism and the basic parameters of metaphysics.
This project aims to explore how space mediates itself, through a collection of photographs cataloging the experiences of four individuals. Through visual documentation the four individuals intervene in their space of experiencing. Unlike the object, which exists in form; or the subject, that exists as the mental self-identification; experiencing exists within the space of mediation. Photography acts as the "transitional object," or the intervention between the reality or physical space, and the inner or mental space. The final yield of this testing resulted in eight catalogs of space and two proposed folding installations, one layered and one reductive.