Recent work: State Historic Preservation Office

Recently I have had the opportunity to work on a series of identity projects for a diverse group of clients. One of the most exciting has been the challenge to re-design the visual language of Puerto Rico’s State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO).

In a collaboration with Jorge Rigau FAIA and Miguel Ortiz, the approach intends to provide a framework on which SHPO can now establish a permanent visual structure. The project is currently being implemented, and a full system roll-out should be done in the next 2 months. Here I share some of the elements that have been generated.
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On (the future of) Refraction: Coming of the Other

L’avenir, for philosopher Jacques Derrida, conceptualizes the coming of the Other. In juxtaposition with the Future, which can be known beforehand, l’avenir references the unpredictable appearance of the Other.

For this blog, I currently represent the Future, i.e. an intentional attempt by my brother, Alberto, to (re)invent the content of his page. Yet, what subsequent years hold for us, I do not/cannot know. How will I affect my brother’s design thinking? And – more importantly for my wellbeing –  How will he deflect my way(s) of perceiving the Human Being and its World, which (mis)guides me towards specific problematizations and reconcialiations.

In short, how will l’avenir unravel in Refraction? I can never predict it.

Nonetheless, Refraction will write the evolution of our project. Not only by focusing on different themes, but by seeing how those thoughts bounce back into unforeseen realms. We hope that our thoughts, deflected, will survive.

But what does that mean: that our vestige will survive us? Is it possible? For how long? (Obviously not for eternity.) Derrida asserted: “The trace neither lives nor dies, but survives us.” Such a claim denies existence to the trace, but endows it with a personal utility of extension or continuation of one’s life after death. Yet, this quasi-satisfactory move towards the achievement of immortality (always knowing its implied impossibility) may confuse a reader into believing in an explicit, discoverable link between an origin and its footprint. The trace, always-already disentangled from the origin and henceforth being observed through varying interpretative eyes, can never open the path to recapture an original essence (i.e. thought, feeling, concept, experience, etc.). So, even if MY-trace can never be recovered, my-trace  does not merely survive, but is exists! It has its own existence, endowed by the eye of the beholder. Don’t get me wrong, my writing exists because of me, but continues to be in spite of me. (I hope that the reader nourishes the life of my-trace, to prevent its inevitable death.)

Betwixt being and non-being

Betwixt being and non-being
An ontologically altered perception through the personal blog platform

In developing an individual identity and its consequential representations, a human being, as a cultural, social, and psychological entity, interprets, uses, and garners information from its surrounding environments. In the process, contexts are synthesized and associations are established. The management of these intuitive processes leads to the creation of personal thoughts, views and perspectives which are later shared through various forms of exchange.

The emergence of social networking sites, instant messaging platforms, discussion forums, email, collaborative online games, digital worlds, and particularly blogs, have transmuted the nature of these exchanges. Introspection has now become projection. Private realities have now expanded into contemporary shared conditions of public life. These outlets of personality provide versatile ways of sharing internal, and beforehand private anecdotal information with others.

The introduction of online blogging platforms during the late 1990’s made it easier than ever to share, communicate and contrast one’s individuality with the ideas of others in similar techno-social realities. As of March 2008, Technorati¹ calculated an estimated 112.8 million online blogs worldwide, a datum that needs to be pruned carefully since online does not equal active. There maybe that many blogs, but that does not mean there are exactly that same amount of active content generators behind them. There is no precise quantitative data on how many abandoned blogs exist, yet the available data does suggest a parallel growth between that of new blogs being published and those being simultaneously abandoned. Due to the free-of-charge nature of the majority of blog hosting domains, most of the blogs, even after being abandoned, remain online indefinitely.

I will try to make that case that through this ever-lasting online presence, contemporary communication platforms, such as the blog, can extend our sense of being, even after we become non-being.
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