Archiving
Signs, symbols, and ephemera around the world bear distinct languages. I explore them through my archival practice, combining photography and door-to-door interview to document their pattern and variations as examples of cultural fingerprinting.
INTERFERENCE ARCHIVE | PARK SLOPE, BROOKLYN
I volunteer at Interference Archive, a community-run archive and gathering space in Park Slope, Brooklyn that holds an incredible collection of ephemera, books, posters, records, and other media from cultural and social movements around the world. I'm prototyping new methods in digital archiving, visualization, and sonic/sensory experience for a few of their upcoming exhibitions!
CHOKING.NYC
I hunt for the most creative choking signs in New York City food service establishments, interviewing designers and restaurant staff to understand their stories. I began this project in December 2025 and have documented over 250 of them so far. My goal is to find 1,000 by June.
I study these signs as examples of how humans communicate creatively and intelligently in real-world environments, and specifically when operating under vague linguistic and graphical constraints (see NYC choking sign regulation). This is directly inspired by my research at Stanford, where I sought to understand and manipulate the division of information between images and text in vision-language models (VLMs).
Please reach out to me if you find an interesting choking sign in New York, or if you'd like to chat more about them!
And, to see my project in action, watch this video where Brooklyn Eagle reporters come with me on a walking tour of these signs: