What happens when a grid built for selection becomes a space for connection?
Felt U began with rejection, particularly the small, repeated forms of rejection that can shape queer digital life. On Grindr, people are arranged into a grid: bodies and profiles placed beside one another, opened, evaluated, messaged, ignored, blocked, or passed over.
We took that familiar digital structure and rebuilt it physically. Instead of a grid people moved through alone on a screen, Felt U became one people could enter together.
01 — ORIGIN
A grid designed for selection.
On Grindr, people are arranged into a grid. Profiles sit side by side to be opened, evaluated, messaged, ignored, blocked, or passed over.
For a project about rejection, that structure became an important starting point. The grid gave a visual form to something that can otherwise feel intensely personal: the repeated experience of seeking connection while simultaneously being evaluated by others.
Rather than rejecting that structure entirely, we became interested in changing what it could do.
02 — TRANSLATION
What accumulated inside it changed.
We carried the grid out of the screen and into the exhibition. Individual works occupied its cells, but this version was designed to change: visitors could touch it, respond to prompts, add their own contributions, and encounter what others had left behind.
03 — PARTICIPATION
A grid made for looking became one for leaving a mark.
Felt U wasn't designed to be complete when the doors opened. Visitors wrote, drew, responded, touched, and added to the work throughout the night.
As those contributions accumulated, a grid shaped by individual rejection became a collective record of connection.
04 — THE EXHIBITION
Grids, gardens, and everything in-between.
05 — IDENTITY AND ENVIRONMENT
Making the system feel human
The identity mirrored the exhibition itself: structured but imperfect. A repeated grid created order while handmade lettering, illustration, color, plants, and tactile materials introduced personality and unpredictability.
The goal wasn't to make everything match. It was to give different voices a shared place to belong.
06 — PROCESS
Building a system that could be changed.
Felt U developed through conversation, sketching, digital experiments, installation tests, and constant iteration in the space.
Because participation was part of the concept, we couldn't design every outcome in advance. Instead, we designed the conditions for participation: where work could live, how visitors could interact with it, and how the exhibition could remain coherent as people changed it.
The finished exhibition was intentionally only a starting point.
07 — ANIMATION
Returning to the screen..
Felt U developed through conversation, sketching, installation tests, digital experiments, and constant iteration in the space.
Because participation was part of the concept, we couldn't design every outcome in advance. Instead, we designed a framework: where work could live, how visitors could interact with it, and how the exhibition could remain coherent as people changed it throughout the night.
The finished exhibition was intentionally only a starting point.
08 — OUTCOME
100+ people came to see the work.
They also became part of it.
By the end of the night, the grid no longer looked the way it had when the exhibition opened. It carried drawings, writing, responses, and traces of the people who had moved through the space.
What began as a structure for exploring rejection became something collective: a record of people choosing to leave something behind.
Felt U: grids & gardens
Los Angeles · 2025
Created with Clay Stevens, Emily Kwok, Katalina Valez, and Mallory Wilson.
Photography by Sammi Wong.