Passenger Information

A COMMITMENT TO THE ORGANIC THRU ENGAGEMENT LOS ANGELES, 2007 Imagine finding an old "Nixon for President" t-shirt in pristine condition. You understand what it signified in 1968 and you understand what it signifies now. You see it for the loaded artifact that it is. The t-shirt may be an artifact, an object, but it is by no means inanimate. It is in many ways an event--wearable and highly visible. When we wear printed t-shirts, we enact a part of ourselves for people we don't know. We play with them, and expect a reaction. Playing like this is like staging a performance in which the shirt, the wearer and the casual viewer each play a role. We transmit and receive, judge and stand judged. We experiment. Some brands reference themselves on their shirts. In such cases, the brand is the message, the aesthetic and cultural proclamation. Rather than present itself as source and message, Passenger looks to newspapers and magazines for cultural references. Like paintings that depict moments in history, our projects depict and code real cultural events: war and peace, environment and celebrity, borders and transgressions. In lieu of following aesthetic trends, themes are deliberated from news sources, and soon thereafter a collection is generated from the researched materials. Using cotton as canvas, our goal is to create a limited body of work that peers at the 21st century and uses what it sees to challenge the senses. Reading. Research. Dream diaries. Costuming. Computing. Personal histories. Play. A visual timeline of t-shirts. A wearable cultural storyboard.