States of Incarceration

At the time of this project, George Floyd was still alive, and mobile technology ignited a spark of innovation in the social sciences and humanities. New ways of capturing and communicating information about complex subjects was receiving funding to catch the wave of trends like social media and experiments in the journalism business model.

At the time the physical infrastructure of the prison system in New York was a topic getting a lot of attention. Advocacy to close Rikers Island and the property development behind creating new, smaller prisons throughout the city surfaced the acute difficulty of wrestling with the complex topic of carceral justice in the US.

With this momentum the States of Incarceration project was founded. Leadership created a consortium of campuses which all agreed to commit courses to the topic, and took on the challenge to work visually and in multimedia formats.

I was brought in to manage the pipeline of digital assets from each of the 20 campuses, process them into usable assets for the web developer to work with, and manage the pipeline of uploading the assets into the website. The volume of assets in this project made the work exceed any one person’s ability to handle the job, so it was essential that I work with platform developers to keep the assets organized and manageable for all stakeholders.

As the work progressed I was pulled closer to the digital development side of the project, as the interface, functionality and creative direction of the project was difficult to land on when the contents and themes were so heterogenous. The project was a microcosm of all the reasons why the topic exceeded any one disciplinary or discursive approach.

With the incredible talent of the side designer and developer, we managed to pull of a beautiful project that is still live and available for viewing.