This is the link to my video essay: https://youtu.be/UZ2HOdsSmNY
Posted on May 30, 2026.
This video essay covers the development of my enquiry from Positions through Iterating and Positions through Contextualizing, as I position that enquiry within the graphic design field.
I. SITUATION
WHAT IS CIRCULATION?
Circulation is not a new concept. It describes the movement of blood through the body, money through an economy, news through a city. At its most basic, circulation is the process by which something moves through a system and returns changed.
SAGE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF JOURNALISM: CIRCULATION |
The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism defines circulation as a process shaped by dissemination, engagement, and recontextualisation, where meaning is produced through movement rather than fixed output (Borchard, 2022). For this project, that is the definition that matters. Not circulation as distribution.
CIRCULATION IN THIS PROJECT
Circulation, as this project defines it, is the process by which textual meaning is reconfigured through changing contexts of mediation.
II. PROBLEM
Now the next part.
Graphic design has always focused on the human side. The designer, the author, the reader, but I want to shift that focus to the system itself.
In The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan, Agel and Fiore (1967) said the medium shapes how we think more than the actual content it carries. Because media doesn’t just carry information, it actively works us over. It conditions us and our societies more profoundly than whatever content is being shared.
And it is an invisible system. We don’t notice it happening, we think we’re just sending an email or posting a story but the platform has already decided how we write, what tone we use, how long it should be, who we’re speaking to. The system is doing all of that before we’ve typed a single word.
And all media are extensions of us. The book extends the eye, electronic media extends the nervous system. These technologies create environments that condition how we think, communicate, and organise our lives without us even realising. The invisible system isn’t something outside of us. It’s become part of how we function.
In Fuck Content, Rock (2009) took that idea into design specifically and said form isn’t just carrying information, it’s where meaning is actually made.
So platforms aren’t just channels. They are conditions that actively shape what gets communicated before anyone has a chance to change it.
That’s the question my project is built around: how do you make something invisible, visible?
III. RESPONSE
The starting point was a typeface based on an Emigre publication (Licko and VanderLans, 1990). Extrapolated through Steyerl’s (2012) concept of the poor image: images gain significance through circulation rather than clarity.
Each copy carries traces of its previous forms. I compressed the publication over and over, and took the degraded result and converted it into a typeface.
The typeface carries its history of circulation in its form. This is where the project began.
The Conditional Design Manifesto (Maurer et al., 2013) gave me a framework: the process becomes the product. Each iteration informs the next. Difference should have a reason. Rather than designing fixed outcomes, I established conditions that allowed text to transform.
I iterated the letter ‘a’ across five directions: legibility, freehand transition, pixel by pixel transition, movement through colour, life cycle.
Then I expanded into a sentence. Typographically through tracking, leading, scale. Individually through rewriting from memory. Socially through the telephone game (Wikipedia, 2024).
Each experiment showed that meaning shifts through circulation. But the question remained: is it people doing the shifting, or something else?
To explore this, I sent the same text to people and asked them to rewrite it as if they were sending it through a specific platform.
WhatsApp became abbreviated and casual. Gmail became formal and structured. Instagram became a single compressed sentence.
The letter became personal and expressive. The post-it became fragmented and incomplete. And most strikingly, people automatically handwrote the letter and the post-it without being asked. Nobody decided that. The platform decided it for them.
Rather than manually rewriting content across platforms, I wanted a single space where that process could happen, be tracked, and be made visible. The content is fixed. Not because it is unimportant, but because fixing it isolates the variable that does matter: the platform.
The transformation does not happen through human transmission. It happens through the machine. No one is misreading, misremembering, or reinterpreting. The drift is purely systemic. That makes it a more direct test of what the platform itself does to language.
The circulation log was directly inspired by Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index (Seu, n.d.). In most design practice, a project is finished when it is released. Seu’s index refuses that. It is always incomplete, always in progress. The longer it runs, the more it reveals. Incompleteness is not a failure. It is the argument.
Every row in the log is not documentation. It is evidence. The accumulation is the work. And crucially, where Seu’s archive is built by people, mine is built by platforms. That distinction is what this project is trying to make visible.
IV. REALIZATION
The simulation revealed a question McLuhan never asked (McLuhan, Agel and Fiore, 1967). Not just what the medium does to content, but what it discards. The website makes that visible. What each platform keeps. What it throws away.
This project is not finished. It cannot be. The longer it runs, the more it reveals. It is circulating within itself.
References
Borchard, G.A. (ed.) (2022) ‘Circulation’, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism. 2nd edn. Sage Publications.
Licko, Z. and VanderLans, R. (1990) Emigre #15: Do You Read Me? Emigre.
Maurer, L., Paulus, E., Puckey, J. and Wouters, R. (2013) Conditional Design Workbook. Amsterdam: Valiz.
McLuhan, M., Agel, J. and Fiore, Q. (1967) The Medium is the Massage. Penguin.
Rock, M. (2009) ‘Fuck Content’, 2×4. Available at: 2×4.org/ideas/2009/fuck-content/
Seu, M. (n.d.) Cyberfeminism Index. Available at: cyberfeminismindex.com
Steyerl, H. (2012) The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Wikipedia (2024) ‘Telephone game’. Available at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_game
Iterated the sentence “you read best what you read most,” by Zuzana Licko, accross three directions:
Typographically through tracking, leading, scale.
Individually through rewriting from memory.
Socially through the telephone game.
Each experiment showed that meaning shifts through circulation.
Extended Critical Analyses
The Medium is the Massage means that the technological platforms we use to communicate, conditions us and our societies far more profoundly than the actual content they carry. The word “massage” is used in place of “message” to emphasize that media doesn’t just carry information, it actively “works us over completely.”
According to McLuhan, all media are extensions of human faculties: the wheel extends the foot, the book extends the eye, and electronic media extend the nervous system. These technologies create environments that subtly condition how people think, communicate, and organize social life. The text contrasts the print era, which encouraged linear thinking, specialization, and individualism, with the electric era, which fosters simultaneity, participation, and global interconnectedness. It also argues that institutions such as education, government, and work are being transformed by electronic media, though people often fail to recognize these changes because they interpret new technologies through outdated ways of thinking. Ultimately, the book suggests that artists and intellectuals help society perceive these hidden effects by revealing the invisible structures created by media environments.
The key idea is reflected through expressive typography, fragmented composition, and heavy use of images. Instead of presenting information in a traditional linear structure, the book combines photographs, bold graphics, varying type sizes, and short disconnected statements spread across the pages. This design forces readers to experience the text in a simultaneous and participatory way rather than through orderly, sequential reading associated with print culture. The fragmented structure mirrors the fast, interconnected nature of electronic media and demonstrates McLuhan’s argument that the medium itself shapes understanding. By disrupting conventional reading habits, the book’s visual form becomes part of its message, embodying the shift from linear print thinking to the electric age of immediacy and “all-at-onceness.”
What this reference opened up most is the central question of my project: if the medium is the message, what happens when the same content passes through four different media in sequence? McLuhan observed this phenomenon at a cultural scale and made a structural claim about it. My project attempts to simulate it at the level of a single text, producing evidence pass by pass. The drift score, the ghost trail, the Filtered Out page, these are all attempts to make McLuhan’s invisible environments visible. Not through description, but through accumulation.
The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism deepens this by reframing circulation as a process shaped by dissemination, engagement, and recontextualisation rather than simple distribution. Together, the two references repositioned my understanding of what the project is doing. It is not tracking how content moves from point A to point B. It is tracking what each environment does to content as it passes through, and what it decides to leave behind.
Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index is a living feminist archive that grows through use and keeps every trace of its accumulation visible. It directly inspired the circulation log in this project. What I am borrowing is the structural logic, not the politics.
The Cyberfeminism Index is built on a single governing principle: incompleteness is not a failure of the archive, it is its argument. Seu describes the project as “always incomplete, always in progress.” Entries are added continuously, submitted by contributors around the world, and the record of that accumulation is always on display. The index does not present itself as authoritative or finished. It presents itself as a process. The longer it runs, the more it reveals. The accumulation is the work.
The formal decisions are inseparable from the conceptual position. Seu and her collaborator deliberately future-proofed the website by using as little extra technology as possible. The typeface is Arial, a system font chosen in part because it was designed by Patricia Saunders, one of few women to have designed a widely distributed typeface. Everything is stripped back and built to last, these are not neutral aesthetic choices. A site that relies on external frameworks risks becoming inaccessible as those dependencies disappear. The form performs the values. This draws a parallel to my own project, which is built as a single HTML file with no frameworks. The restraint is structural, and in that sense the two projects share a formal kinship even if the content and politics differ entirely.
Seu’s project challenges a conventional understanding of what a designed communication object is. In most graphic design practice, a project is finished when it is released. The Cyberfeminism Index refuses this. It is explicitly unfinished, explicitly collaborative, explicitly dependent on future input. This asks a question underexplored in communication design: what does it mean to design something that keeps going after you let go of it? The gaps in the index, which Seu acknowledges openly, are themselves evidence of the limits of what the archive does not yet know. The holes are part of the argument.
The most direct influence on my project is the circulation log. Before encountering Seu’s work, I thought of the log primarily as a functional feature. Seu’s practice reframed it. A log that accumulates and keeps every trace visible is not just a record. It is the argument made tangible. This led me to think of the In Circulation page differently, not as a history of what has been processed, but as evidence. Every row is a record of a platform conditioning content. Every trace is a ghost trail of transformation.
Where my project diverges from Seu’s is in authorship. The Cyberfeminism Index invites human contributors. My simulation replaces human transmission with machine processing. The log grows not through human intention but through systemic indifference. What the two projects share structurally, they separate conceptually. Seu’s archive is built by people, mine is by platforms. That distinction is what my project is trying to make visible.