Dominyka Sekonaite

Dominyka joined the course as a graduate of the undergraduate communication design course at GSA and graduated, with a Distinction, in 2022.

The Underpass

The Underpass was 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
The Underpass

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.