JESSIE GEMMER
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Iconic Autobiography

While I was at Virginia Tech, Valerio Olgiati came to the architecture school to give a lecture. He started his talk with the idea of the iconic autobiography, a compilation of the images that formed a person’s initial perceptions of the world. He explained it as a way to document who you are as a thinker and designer and why.

For my final project in a class on Context, Creativity, and Consciousness, I made my own iconic autobiography. From the woodcut image hanging in my nursery to the Boticelli print that has been hanging in my family’s house for decades, I found the images that hung in the rooms of my creative mind. I overlaid them with text that resonated with me equally; fragments of literature, excerpts of the numerous lists I made, and poems. I felt strangely vulnerable as I handed in the assignment, like I was submitting a diorama of my soul, but I am so glad I have it. The combinations, in the form of an abstract tarot deck, documented who I was in 2011.