Dominyka Sekonaite (she/her)
I am an enthusiastic graphic designer and creative researcher with a strong focus on editorial design and identity. I enjoy playing with bright colours and modular structures to create engaging work; and my projects are often speculative and experimental. I love exploring a wide range of themes which varies from scientific theories to personal narratives, while psychogeography is a subject I am particularly passionate about. I am eager to bring the audience to discussion, therefore I have organised some project-related workshops this year which involved an alternative Glasgow bus tour and a concrete poetry class under the motorway.
The Underpass
The Underpass is a speculative design project that questions the potentiality of overlooked places and seeks to prove that everything depends on our creative thinking. Its locus, ironically, could be seen as something of a non- or anti-place: a rather grim passage under the M8 motorway in Glasgow’s East End. The site, however, has several bizarre brick structures, designed for unknown purpose. The project took this space as a blank canvas that would encourage the audience to creatively reimagine the location, and reuse the rough urban area as a performative playground. The Underpass has manifested in eight visual provocations and an augmented outdoor exhibition, followed by a conceptual project book. The provocations aimed to explore the area from many different perspectives which involved surface examination, myth creation, and explored aspects of social interaction, history, liminality, philosophy, art and environmental impact. Aiming to highlight a car-centric nature of the site, the project employed the visual language of road signage: the provocations can be read as instructions for various possible interactions. The exhibition can be currently explored by scanning QR-coded captions which are hidden within the underpass (55.867116, -4.234409), thus transforming it into a gallery space.
Project Links
Hofstadter
Hofstadter is a conceptual typeface based on a chapter from Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid; a philosophical discourse on cognition and intelligence by Douglas R. Hofstadter. To explain his various theories, the author looks at examples from mathematics, art, music, programming and genetics. The typeface is illustrating Layers of Stability; a short section in which Hofstadter suggests that any event in life could be measured in constants, parameters and variables. The system was adapted to create a strict set of rules to work with — the weight and proportions of letters were “constants”; stroke angles — “parameters” (“less constant constants”); and serifs — “variables”. To reflect this modular structure and a lego-like working process, the type specimen was designed as an interactive zine which allows the reader to play with various folding possibilities and create new, unexpected forms.
Hop On, Hop Off!
Hop On, Hop Off! is a project circling around the themes of slow and sustainable tourism, alternative urban experiences and psychogeographical adventures. The main idea is to use public transport to explore the lesser-known areas of a city — hopping on and off at various stops, but avoiding the obvious. After successfully curating a route in Glasgow which runs along the line of First No. 75, the project was put to the test with a public workshop. A small group of people was invited to an urban expedition which started at Milton (North Glasgow) and ended at Castlemilk (South Glasgow). Taken to five different stops, the participants were asked to do small writing and drawing tasks which stimulated their conscious observation of the surroundings. The visited places included a wild meadow behind Scaraway Terrace, a former site of an iron factory at Saracen Street, the mysterious Southside Necropolis, Toryglen ASDA, and Cathkin Braes Country Park with its wind turbine and the best panoramic view in Glasgow.
