Thesis Site: Christopherswift.work

My MFA work explores the creative networks between a graphic designer and their collaborators, both human and non-human (other designers, but also software, papers, inks, presses, cameras, the internet, design history, cultural knowledge, language, etc). My thesis project examines how the interplay of control and trust in a designer’s relationship with their network of tools (creative, cultural, technological) can be attended to, challenged, and reimagined. The black boxes which envelop our tools obscure the complexity and scale of the collaborative and relational space we work in. My work reconsiders the designer as one among many in a creative and collaborative network of active participants full of agency and potential.

My thesis seeks ways to give the tools of my creative network fully agented status as collaborator by foregrounding instead of avoiding their active participation in what we create together. Through coding in various languages (javascript and Processing programs, InDesign scripts, and machine learning models) I created new digital tools in which the agency of the tool itself is highlighted. I use these new tools to undertake an intentionally nonhierarchical mode of making, decentering my role as designer to create a vast and potentially endless series of posters, zines, album covers, music, and poetry. Each of my projects pushes me further away from a mode of control towards one of care and trust in the creative design process, anchored in a belief that as long as there is collaborative care, respect, and trust (love?), the work we make together is worthwhile.

I am a full-time practicing graphic designer working in higher-ed for the past eight years. I have taught graphic design in Canada and the US for the past decade. I recently taught courses on letterpress printing and color (focusing on Risograph printing) at Rhode Island School of Design.

My main interest as a graphic designer is an exploration of the collaborative creative networks we work within. These networks can be large and complex but are often overlooked or ignored by designers who may not recognize the collaborative network in which they find themselves. My research and creative work seek to highlight these networks and to consider the impact of seeing ourselves as one among many in a collaboration of agential objects. This work has primarily been in a code-based space, most recently focusing on machine learning and artificial intelligence.

My latest project is titled Speculative Anthropology of the Unknown and Maybe. The project explores creating with machine learning models to imagine a new collaborative design process that decenters the graphic designer as the primary maker. The works explore the relationships between objects in a creative network (human and non-human), ways of knowing, nostalgia, and is an attempt to work through the very human impulse to try to — or assume you can — control the non-humans we work alongside and with.

What Might Be
by Christopher Swift

And   W h a t   M i g h t   B e .
If the days were made of years?
And the years, of hours?
And time itself, were put
In a cup, like water?
Then the sun would not be
A golden disk,
But a window, in the house
Where the years live.
And the moon would be
A visitor,
Like a thought,
That had come and gone
In a minute.
Then the stars would not be
Fixed for eternity,
But shooting over the sky,
As the breath of a child,
Or a bird, on the wing.

(AI song reference: “Dreams” by The Cranberries)