Rick Valicenti: Human Presence
Graphic design legend Rick Valicenti incites us to “bring life to form,” using design and technology to mediate real human presence. His talk is an exploration of creative methods that help today’s leaders gain perspective and inspire change.
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ABOUT Rick Valicenti
“Rick Valicenti is the founder and Design Director of Thirst, a firm that has been influencing design discourse internationally since 1988. In October 2006, Rick was awarded the prestigious AIGA Medal for his sustained contribution to design excellence and the development of the profession.
The medal is the highest honour of the graphic design profession. In 2004, he was awarded the AIGA Chicago Chapter Fellow, and he has been a member of AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale) since being invited in 1996. He gave a presentation at 2009 Design Indaba, the world’-s largest multi-disciplinary annual conference in Cape Town, South Africa.
In Rick’s personal work, all of his love, humour, angst and anger come to the fore. Slyly political, visually sarcastic, aggressively angry, sorrowful and lonely, the work both repels and attracts, toying with our reactions to a bloody heart pinned, still pumping, to his virtual sleeve. And while he is a master of wordplay, the communication in Rick’s work is ultimately visual. If graphics are a language, Rick uses it to Shakespearean levels—with abundance, exuberance and sheer delight in visual play.
Always known for his early adoption of technology, and never afraid of special FX, Rick’s interests have turned to technology’s use as visual production, as evidenced by his 2005 piece “Intelligent Design.” Perhaps a commentary on the Religion of Commerce or the Commerce of Religion, this piece employed the use of programming to convert the Book of Genesis to binary code, and then replace the 0s and 1s with an image of either Coke or Pepsi. He has since used this programme to collect and place large numbers of images in other projects, and continues to scour the universe for technologies he can bend to the designer’s hand.
When done, his life’s work will be his life: his story as played out on the retinas of countless human presences. One piece of his reads, “I often wonder if I’ll have anything profound to say,” but to those who look, it’s clear that he already has.
Selected works have also been included in the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s permanent collection and the STA Chicago Design Archive. In April 2005, a 356-page monograph on the Thirst work, “Emotion as Promotion,” was published by The Monacelli Press.”
The VIDEO
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