Disco Roof (for D🪩T) – Department of Transformation

Nov 2023–Mar 2024

Installed underneath the glass brick pavement in front of Canal Projects’ storefront gallery, designer David Reinfurt’s Disco Roof (for D🪩T) illuminates the sidewalk in the evenings with a lo-fi light show. This ephemeral work serves as subtle street-level signage for the Department of Transformation’s lower level library residency. Disco Roof (for D🪩T) also connects Canal Street with Reinfurt’s own basement studio and occasional bookshop at 38 Ludlow Street in New York’s Lower East Side.

Reinfurt has contributed two additional related pieces to Groundwork: a constantly-changing screensaver that recalls swirling ink patterns in water, as well as Black Whisky, a long-term conceptual liquor that he produced as part of the design duo Dexter Sinister. Tracing the invisible networks of friendship and exchange that lay the ground for creative transformation, Disco Roof (for D🪩T) and its accompanying works prefigure the shape of things (+ karaoke!) to come.

David Reinfurt

is an independent graphic designer (BA, 1993, University of North Carolina; MFA, 1999, Yale University). He worked at Two Twelve Associates from 1993–1995 and IDEO from 1995–1997, where he designed the Metrocard Vending Machine touchscreen interface with Masamichi Udagawa. In 2000 he formed O-R-G inc. In 2006 with Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, he established Dexter Sinister. From 2006–2011 Dexter Sinister published Dot Dot Dot. In 2011 with Bertolotti-Bailey and Angie Keefer, he founded The Serving Library. David teaches at Princeton University, was 2010 USA Rockefeller Design Fellow, has exhibited widely, and his work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Centres Pompidou, and the Whitney Museum. David was a 2016/2017 design fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He has written two books, Muriel Cooper (MIT Press, 2017) with Robert Wiesenberger, and A *New* Program For Graphic Design (Inventory Press/DAP, 2019).