Mindset Over Medium: Notes on Polymorphic Practice

Through my studio, Common Space, I often find myself in rooms where I am required to answer a deceptively simple question: what exactly do you do? It is one of those questions that sounds administrative but is actually philosophical. The person asking usually means well. They want to know whether to place me under design, curating, strategy, teaching, branding, organizing, or some more polite synonym for all the labor that doesn't sit comfortably inside one professional category. What they are really asking is how to file me. The problem is that the filing system is outdated.

For a long time I experienced that mismatch as a communication problem. One week I might be designing a website for an artist or institution. Another week I might be building a framework for a gathering, advising a cultural platform, developing language for a curatorial project, or teaching students how to think beyond the portfolio. To some people this reads as inconsistency. To me it has always felt strangely coherent. The forms change. The method does not.

The phrase that eventually gave this coherence a name was polymorphic practice. I arrived at it in conversation with Anicka Yi while trying to explain the shape of my work. What felt useful about the phrase was that it did not simply describe multiplicity. There are already plenty of ways to describe multiplicity. "Multidisciplinary" is serviceable. "Multihyphenate" has become almost compulsory. But neither term captures what I actually mean. Multihyphenate suggests parallel identities, a stack of roles one happens to perform. Polymorphic suggests something else: a consistent intelligence that changes form depending on the situation it enters.

That distinction matters. I do not experience curating, design, teaching, and organizing as unrelated activities. I experience them as variations on a common process. In each case I am arranging relationships. A designer arranges information, sequence, atmosphere, and access. A curator arranges works, contexts, references, and points of contact. A teacher arranges frameworks through which students can recognize their own agency. Even a gathering, if it is designed with intention, is an arrangement of tempo, attention, invitation, and proximity. The medium changes, but the underlying labor remains recognizably similar. It is a practice of composition, but composition understood socially and structurally rather than merely aesthetically.

This way of thinking did not emerge from theory first. It emerged from life. I came into design somewhat late, after spending a significant amount of time in and around the techno scene. My own education was never confined to school. It happened through parties, sound systems, friendships, spatial experiences, and the peculiar intensity of creative subcultures that teach you to take atmosphere seriously. If you spend enough time in those environments, you learn that culture is never only the thing on stage, or the object on the wall, or the image on the screen. Culture is also the room, the timing, the invitation, the social wiring, the tone, the sequence of experiences that lets meaning emerge. That recognition still sits at the center of how I work.

When I was in design school, my thesis project was called Musical Notation for Describing Space. I was trying, perhaps somewhat naively but sincerely, to understand techno music through systems of geometry, cymatics, and mathematical pattern. I was looking at sacred geometry, Pythagoras, harmonic structures, all the old and enduring attempts to explain how form, vibration, and meaning might be connected. In practical terms, I was trying to assign structure to something that felt immersive and difficult to pin down. Eventually I realized the mission was partly futile. Techno did not need me to decode it. But the work was not wasted. What I learned through that process was that different media often share deeper structural principles. Sound, image, architecture, interface, and social choreography are not as separate as the professional world likes to pretend.

That insight later became foundational to Common Space. I began to understand design less as a flat practice of making images and more as a spatial and relational practice concerned with how people encounter one another, how knowledge moves, and how attention is organized. Once that shift happened, the apparent contradictions in my practice no longer felt contradictory. They felt like different surfaces of the same object.

This is one reason I have never been particularly persuaded by the ideology of specialization, at least not in its more rigid form. Specialization is useful up to a point. Nobody wants a surgeon who identifies mainly as a conceptual generalist. But in cultural work, specialization often becomes an administrative fantasy masquerading as professionalism. It assumes that disciplines remain intact, that institutions know what they are, and that the problems we face politely respect those boundaries. They do not. Artists are expected to think like publishers, technologists, archivists, and community builders. Designers are asked to shape ecosystems, not just outputs. Curators increasingly operate as editors, diplomats, producers, and infrastructure planners. The categories remain because institutions love categories. Reality, regrettably for them, has moved on.

Through my studio, Common Space, I see polymorphic practice not just as a description of my own work but as a framework for understanding a broader shift in cultural labor. Many people I know, especially in art and design, are already working this way. They may not use the term, but the condition is familiar. They are building careers by moving across forms while maintaining a recognizable intelligence. The real challenge is not whether this way of working is valid. It plainly is. The challenge is how to articulate it in a way that others can understand and trust.

That last point matters more than it might seem. Language is infrastructure. When a practice lacks language, it is harder to fund, harder to explain, harder to organize, and easier for others to misread. One reason I continue returning to polymorphic practice is that it offers a way to frame complexity without reducing it to branding fluff. It says that the work may appear to move across mediums, but it is not arbitrary. It is governed by a stable method. It has a point of convergence.

For me, that point of convergence has to do with how people understand and interact with one another through culture. It has to do with the creation of platforms, environments, and systems that allow new relationships to form. This is why teaching belongs in the same frame as design. At Pratt, I taught within what was called cross-platform in the communications design department, but what interested me most was not merely preparing students to work across channels. It was helping them understand how design could be used to build communities and create forms of empowerment within their own circles. In other words, how practice itself could become infrastructural.

Polymorphic practice therefore is not a plea for people to accept that I do many things. That would be a rather boring proposition. It is a claim that a single line of thought can travel through multiple forms and remain coherent while doing so. It is a way of resisting the old flat understanding of design as surface treatment and replacing it with a more expansive understanding of cultural work as environmental, relational, and systemic.

In a moment when the art world is increasingly entangled with technology, education, archives, hospitality, and platform economics, this seems less like a personal eccentricity and more like a realistic account of how serious creative work now functions. The more interesting question is not whether one discipline can contain a practice. It usually cannot. The more interesting question is whether the practice has enough internal rigor to move between disciplines without collapsing into vagueness. That is the standard I care about. Not neat categorization, but coherence under transformation.

Polymorphic practice, at its best, is exactly that.