Folder designs interfaces, publications, and systems for organizing, encountering, and carrying information forward. We help museums, universities, civic institutions, and others engaged in the stewardship and sharing of knowledge create ways for language, media, and material to surface and endure.
We are interested in what happens to information over time, and how form can reveal the connections that give it meaning. Projects come in a variety of configurations rooted in partnerships that honor the material and its strategic presentation.
Hosted at UCLA, Experimental Translations in/with East Asian Languages was a translingual laboratory challenging Eurocentric models by exploring East Asian translation through visual poetics, media materiality, and radical creative formats. The word “translation,” in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, is built as one wood-joined object, shown from five angles as it moves between the three scripts.
Bungaku Bideo is a film series bringing together films rooted in literature, moving poetry exploring the relationship between cinematic and written form. The initiative partnered with acclaimed independent animators and contemporary writers to introduce Japanese prose and poetry to international film festival audiences.
The Art of the Benshi World Tour, presented by the Yanai Initiative and the UCLA Film & Television Archive, brings the rare, century-old Japanese cinematic tradition back to live audiences. The tour travels to New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Provo, and Santa Barbara.
Finely produced in limited quantities, this hand scroll was created for supporters of Masaki Fujhata’s BeHere / 1942 project. The makimono features an extended print of the augmented reality artwork showing Japanese Americans in line with their belongings, boarding buses bound for internment camps.
Japan Past & Present (JPP) is a global information hub and digital repository created to promote research, teaching, and collaboration in Japanese humanities. The initiative provides and presents grant opportunities, digital projects, global networks, educational resources, student workshops, institutional partnerships, researcher directories, and translation databases.
