WELCOME to the LABORATORY.

The word GEOCOMMUNETRICS comes from three base understandings ::

GEO :: place-based
COMMU :: social group identity
NETRICS :: calculated graphics

Geocommunetrics pieces are experimental explorations, visualizing places as data and design, to provided backdrops for life and lenses for learning.

Through Geocommunetrics pieces, we see "home" and "Self" as a work of place and time, art and science, and, well, a bit of magical thinking.

The HYPOTHESIS::

Geocommunetrics works and workshops open a new look at old philosophy: we belong to our places, and our places make us who we are. In a highly mobile and digital society, we can forget that it is the physical, the tangible, and the temporal things in this world that form us. Places - a home, a path, a watershed, a swing set - imprint their importance on your identity, and they become a part of your Self.

Getting to know one's Self is crucial to knowing one’s role in their community. Getting to know one's community helps one to feel at home in that place. Feeling at home allows one to feel more comfortable expressing one's Self creatively, and to be hospitable to others' creative expressions of the Self.

Self- and Community-care demand Creativity.

Geocommunetrics hopes to combine the questions of place and identity in artistic expression, visual research, and collective analysis. The hope is that through art works, participatory workshops, and shared inquiry, you might find more creative and more critical ways to make your Self at home.

The view from the Map Lab in Evanston, 2018.

EXPLORE Jason’s
Graduate RESEARCH

From 2019 to 2021, Jason worked on is Master’s in Design and Urban Ecologies. This research was derived from and was a fruit of Geocommunetrics experiments and community workshops. Check out his graduate portfolio to see how these designs and processes became park of a larger work pursuing community equity.

view portfolio

art + WORKS

dispatches from the design studio…

ongoing series :: PLACE PROPHETS ::

In this series, activists - living and passed - are remembered and honored
with a brilliant halo derived from their local zip code pattern.

ROSA PARKS
// Montgomery, AL
:: 36104

A prophet of Holy Stubbornness, Rosa Parks helped to lead the charge during the Civil Rights movement by not moving from the bus seat she knew she had the right to sit upon.

WINONA LADUKE
// White Earth, MN
:: 56591

A prophet of Sacred Soil, Winona LaDuke continually leads the charge against water- and environment-threatening oil pipelines, while sticking to a Native tradition of slow growth and grounded development.

LARYCIA HAWKINS
// Wheaton, IL
:: 60187

A prophet of Embodied Solidarity, Larycia Hawkins sits, stands, and dresses with the marginalized to foster interfaith dialogue and sacred togetherness in opposition to Church-enabled and State-sanctioned fracture.

HARVEY MILK
// San Francisco, CA
:: 94114

Gallivanting Gardener of Grassroots, a queer brother who knew that flags would not suffice for survival in the Castro, or for any marginalized population, but pushed that seated representation and visible voice were quintessential to social vitality.

RUSSELL MEANS
// Wounded Knee, SD
:: 57794

Protector of a People, Killer of Columbus, one who reminds us that history is long, and that our relatives are many, but the scars of massacre and ongoing cultural genocide would not be ignored at Wounded Knee, or upon every inch of Native land on which Natives stand - and have been denied. Native inheritance and identity must be claimed.

GRACE LEE BOGGS
// Detroit, MI
:: 48207

Reveler of Rust and Resurrection, a social and philosophical minister in reclaiming Detroit - a living land and a vital community that capitalism had held captive to a fickle industry - through the slow, deep work of collective liberation. A place is its people.