◈ Portfolio · Segment I
Photographs
A highlighted collection of photography from the Monolyth (VR) research phases — Pittsburgh/Braddock, Detroit, and Chicago. Environmental documentation, community spaces, and concept environments that form the visual foundation of the open-world VR platform.
◈ Portfolio · Segment II
Graphics
Graphic design work from the Monolyth era — glyph systems encoding community data, environmental visualizations, mapping graphics, and the visual identity language that evolved into the Haal Project's design system.
◈ Monolyth (VR) — Visual Language System · 2018–2021
◎ Portfolio · Segment III
3D
3D environment design and rendering from the Monolyth (VR) project — virtual landscapes generated from community data, architectural reconstructions of Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Chicago, and the surreal open-world environments that form the immersive backbone of the platform.
◎ Monolyth (VR) — 3D Environment System · 2018–2021
Vision
I seek to remedy the structural violence of environmental racism by platforming the underserved communities it affects most through an interactive game-like experience that presents my research alongside cultural products from local creatives and small minority owned businesses. The platform I will build is an open world virtual cultural center, a series of digital venues that creatively reclaim the industrial corridors my research focuses on by presenting data driven streetmap Glyphs as surreal environments to be explored, and learned from.
The viewer, now an urbexer (Urban Explorer) much like myself when visiting these locations, is tasked with exploring these landscapes in search of artifacts. Virtual urban archaeology, the retrieval of each artifact presents the viewer with a bit of information/research regarding the community/culture it represents. These artifacts are made by individuals from the communities represented in the street map glyphs embedded in each virtual environment. They vary widely, from scans of handmade jewelry, pottery/sculptures to murals, poem inscribed tablets and virtual performances. I will maintain this project as an ongoing virtual platform by updating the game over time to feature more creatives and small businesses from a growing list of communities affected by industry. As I continue my research the open world of the game will grow and serve as a living archive.
The surreal environments of this open world are presented as once home to vibrant cultures whose structural remnants are embedded in each landscape. The experience takes place after a series of erosion events that embody a progression of industrial pollution, based on the research I've done of real world locations driving the erosion of industry adjacent communities of color.
This platform, Monolyth, presents my research with a virtual cultural center/museum of work from local creatives and catalog of minority owned small business and creatives from underserved communities as a virtual marketplace. I envision a way to reinvest in our communities by increasing our awareness of them and counteracting the forms of structural violence we've grown accustomed to.
Assets and structures I've already built out for the open world landscape I'm currently designing to place them in.
These areas closest to the factory are mostly low income communities of color. The mill is the primary source of both smog and income in these areas. Ive taken drone photographs of the site and overlayed street maps of the affected neighboorhoods.
I then took the vectors of the street maps broke them apart and reassembeled the fragments into complex symbols/pictographs that resemble older written languages. This site is one of three (so far) that have gone on to drive digital illustrations and motion graphic pieces as a way of reclaiming some agency through a surreal surreal enviormental recreations.
Fragmented map selections extruded and backlit.
Click + Drag - Look Around
Powers the archive and hangar, aquired/powered from the Diawara level. A portal to the ruins of a hybrid culture that formed as a response enviormental erosion.
