Student Highlight: Collin Caywood M.Arch 3

This week we are excited to highlight third-year M.Arch 3 student Collin Caywood’s thesis project.

These drawings, part of the material scaffolding of his thesis project, engage with representations of the American countryside as encountered in advertisements, propaganda posters, periodical illustrations, and user-generated online media. By extracting and displacing found objects from media into a reconfigurable digital space, this method looks to create new assemblages of signs, allowing for the study of broader histories regarding the roles images and myths have played in rural communities. This digitally mediated approach, merging the discrete properties of collage with the uniform resolution of a kitbash, has enabled a more engaging exploration of the prevailing cultural attitudes and ideologies embedded within media from specific eras, and their intentions surrounding leisure, labor, and collective identity.

The projections are plotted using a ‘hacked’ CR-10 3D printer, a technique that has been enhanced and driven by a collaborative effort within Dr. Luis Borunda’s thesis cohort. For Collin, this process is a way to negotiate topics of authorship with machines and technologically driven deskilling, as fears surrounding automated labor resurface in the context of an expanding data industry reshaping the physical and social landscape of the countryside.