DET
Nothing here makes sense. Not in familiar ways. But everything here has meaning.
In May 2022, Andrew Kastner graduated from the GWU Corcoran with a Master of Arts in Exhibition Design. His capstone installation, “Seeing Signs: New Views on Landscape Interpretation,” won the exhibition design program’s NEXT degree prize in a sweep of both faculty and student votes. In October 2022, Andrew was working full-time at the History Factory and adjunct teaching in the GWU Corcoran’s Master of Arts in Exhibition Design program. And, in October 2022, Andrew suffered a massive stroke.
Andrew’s stroke, caused by a clot in his carotid artery, cut off the flow of blood to the left side of his brain. The left side of the brain plays a critical role in the processing and production of language. Andrew’s stroke left him with aphasia or loss of language. More accurately, Andrew’s stroke left him with a confusion of language.
Andrew understands both the spoken and written word. And Andrew communicates—effectively and powerfully. But few words leave his mind as they enter. When he writes, the geometries of the letters invert, scale, split, rotate, and trade places. When he speaks, sound comes out of order or blurs together. And Andrew experiences a lag between the production and the processing of his words. It takes a moment before he recognizes that something he wrote or something he said is not the thing he intended to write or to say. For a moment, for Andrew, Larb Swangin is Brain Turn.
In October 2022, Andrew’s world turned upside down. Larb Swangin Brain Turn is a window on
Andrew’s upside-down world. Larb Swangin Brain Turn also is an expression of Andrew’s indomitable creativity.
Retrospectively, there is a prescient irony in the subject of Andrew’s capstone installation. “Seeing Signs” sought a nonlinguistic approach to wayside interpretive signage, a visual strategy for encouraging deep reading and revelation of place that did not require explanation or instruction. Andrew found an answer to his capstone query in point-clouds. Point clouds are three-dimensional data sets that assign an X, Y, Z coordinate to individual points in space; they are generated using lidar or remote sensing scans. They map, in other words, a physical object’s contours in a digital cloud of points. Andrew understood, then, and Andrew understands, now, that point-clouds both construct and deconstruct the things they depict. Viewed one way, that cloud of points presents a true and recognizable image of its
source form. Viewed askew, it projects images that are foreign, incomprehensible, and generative.
Post-stroke, Andrew’s point-cloud appreciation takes up new and poignant purpose. Andrew’s point clouds are now his interpretive signs. They communicate his view on the world. They communicate his changed experience of the world—in which the parts that comprise the recognizable are somehow also the parts of the unrecognizable. And, just as Andrew first set out to do, they communicate more about (a personal) landscape than words ever could.
Andrea H. Dietz, AIA
Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies for the Master of Arts in Exhibition Design
The GWU Corcoran School of the Arts & Design
August 2023