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.
Memory Landscapes presents a body of work developed by Robert Hutchison Architecture across decades, addressing the seawalls built along Japan’s Tohoku coast after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. These proposals, which include contributions from Hutchison’s firm along with Japanese architects, artists, and community members, consider how collective memory might inform the future of fishing communities these walls protect while at the same time separating them from the sea.
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.
The World of the Benshi is a companion volume to the Art of the Benshi world tour organized by the Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities. The book features more than 300 rare images compiled from archives and private collections around the world, showcasing historic movie theaters, promotional materials, and rare film stills. Essays uncover the phenomenon of the benshi stardom, evolution of the theater architecture, how live performance changed in Japan in the silent film era.
BeHere / 1942 is the companion book to media artist Masaki Fujihata’s project and exhibition at the Japanese American National Museum reframing the historic forced incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II through photographic detective work and re-examination through augmented reality. This volume contains a variety of contributions each of which engages with the history of the incarceration and its representation in photographs and exhibitions.
Masaki Fujihata’s multimedia project and exhibition at the Japanese American National Museum re-examines the Japanese American Incarceration through the lens of various media forms, from hyper-enlarged photographs to cutting-edge augmented reality technology, to help us see, in a new light, this dark moment in the history of Los Angeles, and of the United States.
A Section of Now: Social Norms and Rituals as Sites for Architectural Intervention is the companion publication to the exhibition presented by the Canadian Centre for Architecture. The reader, published in both French and English, brings projects presented in the show into contact with critical essays by sociologists, technologists, and cultural critics diagnosing the meta-societal landscapes on which the architecture intervenes.
Multivalent values of family, property ownership, activism, work, technology, and life expectations are mirrored through architectural postures in A Section of Now presented by the Canadian Centre for Architecture. The exhibition brings together a highly ecumenical mix of architecture projects, documentary photography, pop-culture artifacts, and commercial products. The graphic design for the show reflects the corporate backdrop of the themes through logo-like supergraphics which read sharply while remaining formally vague enough to encompass conflicting propositions.
Catching Up With Life is a year-long, institution-wide research investigation launched in March 2021 by the CCA, culminating in the exhibition A Section of Now: Social Norms and Rituals as Sites for Architectural Intervention. The multi-platform investigation took place through distinct physical, digital, and broadcast channels including online editorials, live-streamed public programs, documentary filmmaking, audio podcasting, and social media pilots.
