Sofia Pace

Project Context

Ornament exists where purpose becomes uncertain. It is decoration, embellishment, excess: the supposedly superfluous made essential.

ADJACENT’s Issue 13 —NYU ITP/IMA’s emerging media publication— explores the curiosity of this inner conflict within “ornament”, a tightly-wound paradox of objects we simultaneously hold and dismiss. Ornaments are relational, their meaning comes alive through context, but more specifically, culture. This issue foregrounds the ornament, and introduces the world around them through literary, artistic, poetic, and technological perspectives.

The Approach

For this issue, a series of Q&A posts were designed to highlighting each contributor’s project, creative process, and ideas. To reflect the theme of ornament, each post uses bold colors, textured typography, and layered backgrounds to create visually rich compositions while emphasizing the individuality of each contributor’s work.

The layouts were designed in Figma and exported as images for publication on Instagram, creating a cohesive visual system across the series while allowing each contributor’s work to remain distinct.

Project Context

Body as Textile is a web and installation project that explores textile as a form of hypertext, extending beyond thread and fabric to consider how information can be woven through bodies, spaces, and histories.

By expanding ideas on human kinesthetics and exploring the potential for unconventional archival mediums, we can rethink how bodies inhabit space and how textiles both enclose and provide comfort within it—ultimately revealing how even the clothing we wear may serve as carriers of information.

The Approach

The project's zine was created as a conceptual resource for participants. It introduces the project's description, concepts, and participatory guide. Its visual language draws from textile and textile-adjacent elements, incorporating fabric textures, embroidery-inspired typography, and hand-drawn illustrations of needles and thread. These elements guide participants through the zine while visually connecting its ideas and concepts.

A sample image of the web experience is featured on the title page, establishing a connection between the digital and physical components of the project. Overall, the design seeks to materialize how kinetic elements can manifest within space and create connections between bodies, movement, and ideas, making these relationships more tangible and accessible.

Embroidery kits were provided alongside the zine for visitors to take home, allowing them to translate their movement patterns into physical form and recreate their movements through thread.