INSIDE SWITCH ROCKS – with Kristian Rasmussen
He merge samples signs from across cultures and eras, letting meaning slip, mutate, and reappear. From ancient mark-making to digital symbols and graffiti, his work traces how humans keep trying to say something - even when the language breaks down. This is not about nostalgia or critique but closer to circulation and systems...
Kristian K. Rasmussen is a Copenhagen-based graphic designer and visual culture scholar working under the alias Stratentast.
His practice moves between signs, systems, and meaning — not as fixed forms, but as living structures in constant mutation. Rather than identifying strictly as an artist, he approaches his work as semantic research: an ongoing engagement with how visual language emerges, breaks down, and reassembles itself across time, cultures, and media.
We asked him, but he doesn’t recall a specific moment where this position became clear. “I don’t really see myself as an artist,” he says. “More as a semanticist. It was never a goal — just a flow."
The first moment that made him realize this was something worth pursuing came early. Watching Style Wars, the documentary on New York’s graffiti scene in the early 1980s, revealed visual language as something immediate and necessary. Not decorative. Not institutional. Just urgent communication.
Long before formal training or theory, there was already a fascination with imagery that carried force. As a child, one of the first drawings he remembers being proud of was a cyborg — half its facial skin torn off, revealing mechanical parts underneath. Terminator-style. Violence, technology, and identity colliding in a single image.
By his mid-teens, he felt he had found a kind of style, even if it was already a remix: comics, symbols, fragments, and references layered on top of each other. From the beginning, authorship mattered less than circulation and reuse.
Between Silence and Impact
His working rhythm shifts between two states. One is quiet and slow: mornings with coffee and white noise, focused and restrained.
The other comes later in the day, fueled by physical movement and intensity — fast, loud, and instinctive. When the process stalls, he steps away. Reading and walking become tools, not escapes. Inspiration doesn’t arrive as sudden ideas, but through prolonged exposure: silence, research, and deep dives into unexpected territories, including late-1980s British urban mysticism.
The biggest risk he’s taken as a practitioner, he says, has simply been to keep trying something new — again and again. It worked, but at the cost of time. And it still does.
The work itself resists stability. If it had a defining characteristic, it would be constant change. Style is not something to protect, but something that must remain in motion. Once it freezes, it stops being his. Materials reflect this mindset — from physical references to the most abstract ones. Pixels, for instance, are treated not as neutral units, but as cultural artefacts shaped by use, technology, and repetition.
Even negative space becomes an active decision rather than an absence. If his work had a superpower, he imagines it as the ability to see into the collective psyche — not one person at a time, but humanity’s shared psychosphere all at once. He even has a name for it: The Super Psyche Zapper.
Switch Rocks: Rewriting Meaning
In Switch Rocks, signs from across cultures are sampled and reorganized into a horizontal, timeline-inspired format with strict reading directions.
Hieroglyphs, cuneiform, graffiti, and digital symbols collide in a synthetic visual language that feels both ancient and contemporary. Color plays a structural role: manga reds, bad-taste pinks, comic-book blues — all pointing directly to reproduction, circulation, and media systems rather than painterly tradition.
If the works had a sound, he imagines it as a vast cacophony: from stone striking stone in Mesopotamian petroglyphs to the impatient tapping of a finger on a smartphone screen yesterday. Supranational. Polychronic.
The series is not a critique of signs or empty semantics, but a celebration of humanity’s ongoing ability to create, destroy, and rebuild meaning through abstract visual language.
