The Young Never Sleep
It’s a way of approaching the infinite:
The restless desire for understanding, and the
fractal nature of whY.
The Young Never Sleep signature “Y” mark encapsulates this reverence for the power of questions and the infinite unfolding of fractal geometry.
Everything is connected in an infinite unfolding.
Every idea, every dream, every thought, every object, every person... contains within each its own infinity.
Fractals appearing in all scales of nature.
An eternity can exist in a single idea, a single question.
Somewhere at the center of my journey of discovery, returns a central question:
Why are things the way they are?
I never could have imagined that this question, among others would lead me down an ever-winding labirynth of self-discovery. This search for knowledge was reveealed as more of a journey through our collective wisdom, woven with an unbroken thread of memory from our ancestors both human and not, through the mind of the natural world, into the foundations of the very fabric of our shared reality.
The answer to this question, a perspective that has emerged for me through time and experience, is the unfolding and transformation of the ego that comes with connecting more deeply with ones inner self, and seeing infinite refractions of that self reflected in our communities and the world in and around us. This living archive is my single piece of this continuum of self-reflective understanding, this is but a single slice. This index is a mark of gratitude for all those who have shared in shaping the contours of my story and expanded what was possible for me.
But the story didn’t start here. My instance of this story began in my home in Cleveland, Ohio, the birthplace of my yearning for self-discovery, and the all-too-familiar restlessness that comes with youth. The quest to understand why.
I started The Young Never Sleep studio sometime around 2010. The Young Never Sleep began as essentially a “free space” for me to explore the bounds of my creative curiousity and connect with like minds through collaboration. Through collaboration and connection, I was able to expand my own creative skillset and envision more for the collective worlding I was doing with my peers. As we continued to evolve collectively and individualy, the YNS network became something like a creative neural network; a shared creative consciousness with a shared awareness that though collaboration there was very little that we couldn’t accomplish. We created a shared a vision of another world.
Wonderful World Of
Poster Design, 2010
Poster Design, 2010
The ethos of The Young Never Sleep was inspired by, and inspired the formation of creative collectives like The Big Up!, whose former members has included the likes of Brittany Bosco, Omar Ferrer, Danny Swain, and Lloyd Harold, Jack of Hearts, and The Wonderful World Of , a short-lived experimental experiential agency that operated simultaneously as think-tank, school, peer-to-peer investment platform and events agency . All worldbuilding practices rooted in solidarity, inclusion, diversity, shared struggles, faith and passion for creating a better world through art & design. We were constantly searching for the appropriate language to describe what we were doing. I can only really speak for myself, but I didn’t find the words for our collective practice until somewhat recently.
Here are some:
Trend Forecasting
Futures Index (See: Index, Commodities Index, Cyberfeminism Index)
New Media Art
Game Design
Socio-Cyberneering
The word that has resonated with me most in recent years is Worldbuilding.
It immedeately resonated with me, and as I continued to see this idea spread, it reminded me of those past collectives I’d been apart of throughout the years and the generations of worldbuilders before us who laid the foundation for our understanding of the possibilities of imagination and creativity.