ras+e is now, but let's rewind. i grew up in an arts family in bucolic lancaster county, pa. in a rare act of rebellion, i took up drums before jetting to college to be an artist and designer. my work at moravian college involved abducting and abusing mediums at will, treating design as an umbrella for impish collisions of disparate ideas and materials. activist art fueled my interest in fine arts design as a means to force-feed a fractured american culture back to itself. while earning my mfa at maryland institute college of art, i focused my frenetic toolbox on addressing graphic design post-print in relationship to the decline of presentness, recognizing and admitting a universe where the universe is condensed to a few inches of handheld pixels. i adapted my songwriting background into frenzied essays detailing an artist’s personal descent into lucidity. i blended my paradoxical personal philosophy of pessimistic idealism with my mica colleague elizabeth herrmann’s written personal narrative, stroke & fill. the re: projects were conceived as a comment on contemporary forms of mitigated communication, specifically through inhuman and ubiquitous systems, such as e-mail and social media. our collaboration continues as ras+e, a cross-medium design investigation of the digital/physical relationship of modern conversation. my current projects include playing drums for my band, the fibs, building interruptive design projects, and pranking reality. future-me wants to teach collegiately while collaborating artistically, and eventually, to be reincarnated as a thunderhead.