Biography
Joseph Makkos is Doctor of Design student studying Cultural Preservation with the School of Art + Design at Louisiana State University with a focus on Historic Archives and Artificial Intelligence.
Before joining LSU he worked as a printmaker and preservationist, having salvaged and restored historic printing equipment from over a dozen print shops to date. Using these resources he actively runs a design studio in New Orleans that focuses on artful print production and independent book publishing. While in another capacity he is an archivist who manages a rare collection of some 30,000 historic New Orleans newspapers dating from 1880s-1929. He has written for The Atlantic, The New Orleans Advocate, Bayou Brief, & Preservation In Print Magazine, has collaborated on pieces with WWNO & NPR, and has been featured in AP News, The Columbia Journalism Review, and more.
Research
This project brings together public history archives that illuminate how the development of the public roads and roadways across the Gulf Coast grew in tandem with the boom of the automobile and petrochemical industries. Visually resampling and referencing primary source materials will serve to illuminate factors that contributed to how we, as Americans, began our addiction to fossil fuels, including the commodification of the automobile and promise of the open road. The project will blend modern mapping with data rich primary source materials such as oil industry news, petroleum advertisements, and elaborate road trip narratives that chronicle the existence of long lost locations via historic photographs and graphic illustrations. This is the very media that holds the memory of a particular bygone era, and it depicts the elaborate and diverse culture that existed along the Gulf Coast when it was connected by a highway system for the very first time. In an evermore fitting way we will be incorporating hand drawn maps with modern mapping technologies effectively tethering and layering the content together for an engaging user experience, via a web interface.
