KK: As a Brazilian living in Norway, with a BA from PUC-Rio in Brazil and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in the USA, how do you think national heritage and possible national sensibilities play into the practice of GD, and specifically your own practice?

JD: When I was in school in Rio there was a lot of separation between schools that had a more social-oriented approach, the ones that would be market-oriented and the ones who were direct heirs of the School of Ulm. Even so, what the students from those schools had mostly in common was the economic pressure that made independent practices a privilege rather than a possible choice. I spent a lot of time and effort (travels, visits, writing and interviewing people etc.) trying to understand such dynamics and how countries such as the Netherlands and Switzerland managed to achieve something that "look Dutch" or "look Swiss". That affected me a lot in my first years in Norway because I was also looking for something that "looked Norwegian".

What was really refreshing about going to Yale and the USA is that I totally stopped caring about those issues and went through a process of learning to shape my GD practice out of who I am and what my personal interests are. So to answer your question I think GD work can be regional and can be historical but to me it is the personal that has the force to give new meaning to any constraints.

This way the historical and the national affect my practice just in the sense that I look around for possible matches between what can/needs to be done locally and what I'm in fact personally interested in and can effectively contribute (as opposed to doing it because it's right and going around thinking everyone needs to do it too). Sounds quite selfish I know but I found it to be a lot more productive and sincere.

KK: Lately you have been VJing at different music events, creating form to music and stories of legendary musicians such as Sonny Rollins and Thelonious Monk. Firstly how have you responded to or worked with their music and history? And secondly, how did you work with the video format?

JD: When I arrived at Yale, Sheila (de Bretteville, Professor and YGDMFA course director) told me — Hey, I can already see you can do books but the pace here is a lot quicker and you won't always have neither the time nor the production facilities nor the budget to do big books, so why don't you invest in becoming fluent in two or three other media? In the worst case if you hate everything you did after two years you will end up by doing better books because your world will be broader.

Then I incorporated video and projection as important parts of my approach to GD and when returning to Oslo I asked my friend Kent Horne to join Classic Album Sundays as their resident VJ and Graphic Designer. In each party an album is selected and I prepare the visuals for it, either sourcing relevant footage from anywhere or filming it myself.

In the specific event you mentioned (Thelonious Monk's Brilliant Corners at Victoria Nasjonal Jazzscene) I was quite interested in activating the venue's preexisting architecture through projection/use of color and content-wise with doing something that wouldn't narrate the songs but rather create space for the crowd to enjoy more of the sound and hopefully provoke some synesthesia. Performance-wise it was important for me to do it live and test myself on whether I could improvise or would be too worried about following what was being played.

Then I mapped a lot of walls with color and went through the documentary Straight no Chaser, selecting all shots of Thelonious doing everything BUT playing Jazz (sequences of TM dancing, smoking, tapping his foot on the floor, giggling, many things) and assigned one of the knobs in my sampler to change the hue of all color surfaces whenever activated. It is quite important to me that I can arrive at the venue, look around and figure out what to do in a very short time span so I stick with the feeling. I am really trying to run away from what projection screens do for the video format when it comes to confining it to a white rectangle; if a wall or a ventilation shaft or a speaker of whatever is already on the space can become a projection surface it gets me a lot more excited about it. Plus I get to do more posters!