Pirate Bodies
Jyudeh Maximilian Russ Jarrett
Reading about various anti-piracy movements worldwide led me to ask questions about the term “piracy” itself. What does it mean to be a pirate today? What is the difference between what something looks like and what it actually means? Am I a pirate? Struggling with these ideas, I wanted to answer these questions by collecting examples what piracy looks like as a whole, representing pirates from as early as the 16th century to pirates today, including the more “traditional” pirate (think Blackbeard) to more modern “pirates” (scam rappers, venture capitalists, etc.). These ideas are collected in a Risograph-printed journal as well as a “pirate” typeface. One of my goals with this thesis project is to understand the materiality of printing methods through use of the Risograph printer. The journal is a thoughtfully designed consideration of the many faces of piracy through history, presenting how one word can be representative of multiple experiences. Finally, I connected with my inner pirate in doing so. By designing “pirate” type I synthesized different blackletter and more current type design sensibilities in order to understand what it looks like and means to make “pirate” type in the year 2020.