As Kast-A-Way Swimwear has expanded their business further into Guard equipment (not lifeguard, someone owns that…), they are gradually producing more of their own products. They had me design a logo to put on their KAW-branded Rescue Tube. Yes, that’s what these things are called, even though they aren’t tubes.

For my Undergraduate Honors Thesis, I dissected four laptop computers (all of them very old and very broken) and replaced their backlights with LED’s. I used acrylic paints mixed with a gel gloss medium to paint Windows 98 defragmentation imagery on acetate, and I installed this acetate in the screens of the laptops so the LED/diffuser assembly lit them evenly and gave them the appearance of being the image on the computer screen.

My project addressed the file fragmentation map of a Windows computer as a portrait of the shared lives of computers and their users. I created a (woefully undocumented) life story for each user as I painted, keeping each one to a different life’s usage patterns. Each also expanded the imagery a bit more, adding more colors and in one even changing the shapes.

My final for my Final Cut class at OSU. The overlayed video is my secondary Hard Disk defragmenting. Behind that is DV of me reassembling my keyboard after taking it apart to clean it.