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Alex Suppan

MFA in Graphic Design - 3 Yr Path — Graduate Graphic Design
Course:
Graduate Thesis 1 + 2
Faculty:
Samantha Fleming
Term:
2026 Spring

read/write

The internet is the accumulation of an infinite number of human choices. And this might seem so obvious it's not worth articulating, but I think it is, because we engage with it as if we have no agency. The internet has never felt like something I could be capable of understanding. I imagine this is true of most people. But we have to think about who benefits when we count ourselves out, and whether we've been designed to feel this way all along.

An original intellectual argument developed over a year and expressed through a book and website. Book going to print spring 2026.

Project Website:
https://readwrite.world/
Tags:
Research-Based Design,
Software Development,
Social Innovation,
Web Design,
World Building
At its surface, readwrite.world is a collaborative web-based collage. Anyone can sign up as a contributor and add to it: upload an image, place it anywhere on the shared canvas and let it become part of something accumulating.
The internet is structurally amnesiac: pages disappear, links rot, platforms shut down and take years of culture with them. Repeated erasure makes it harder to see the internet as something people built at all. The archive preserves every state in which the collage has ever existed. It's a record of collective making you can move through and return to.
Every webpage is delivered by a system that costs money, takes up physical space and exists somewhere specific. That specificity is almost never surfaced, which is part of why the internet feels like it comes from nowhere. The infrastructure panel pulls the numbers into the open: storage, bandwidth, users, server location, the distance your data traveled to reach you.
When you load a webpage, your computer talks to another computer somewhere else. That exchange is visible if you know where to look, but almost nobody does. On readwrite.world, the console, a live log of that conversation, is intentional UX.
I've been getting the word out by chain email. Like the internet, it connects us to people we can't see. But something about it still feels human in a way the internet stopped feeling long ago.