I am an artist constantly questioning our society whom thrives to categorise and identify everything and everyone they discover. We seem to depend on a system of categorisation. We pile up information. I am fascinated by the endless material we gather. Also driven by a passion for print and publishing I find the physicality of research forming into a work rewarding. When the ideas and materials become something you can hold. I truly experienced that for the first time during my internship at the Future Publishing and Printing when immersed daily in the creation of publications.
The digital can never replace the feeling of print. The paper soaking in information, the sound of the printer and the touch of paper. However through this latest crisis we have all been facing I have started to challenge this physicality as I was restricted to the digital. I am expending print and the machine into the digital and continue to challenge the mess of gender and sex categorisations.
GRADUATION PROJECT
oF oM
oF oM is an experimental publication combining the digital and print. Expressed through a website together linked to a printer it becomes an experience of the bureaucratic categorisation of gender and sex. It is formed by different layers of interaction such as hidden messages, print dialogues, animations, etc, and thus brings the multiple digital aspects of a publication together with physical outputs. Over time the website opens up many tabs to represent the overload of information that comes with the notion of gender and sex in our society. It thus aims to bring light to the simple yet complex topic of gender and sex. Making people notice how gender and sex is enforced and always present. Making oneself realise something we’ve become so used to that we stoped noticing it.
THESIS
oF oM
Gender and sex markers co-exist but not in harmony. These markers are based on the binary notion of sex and used as such in our society and bureaucracy without much thought. We use them as binaries because they’ve been established as such, we blindly assume that is how they should be. Sex marker attribution is based on the flawed evaluation of our genitalia at birth, which blindly disregards biological (or physical) discrepancies. The approach to classifying gender is similarly flawed and incomplete. Thus, as gender categories expand and evolve the use of bureaucratic markers for sex and gender ought to be revised. We too often have to assume what is meant by the oF or oM on a form or survey. These markers should be clearly defined and ultimately, their necessity is to be put into question.