Our Team
Evan Collins - Founder
Evan Collins is an architect and design archivist based in Hollywood, California. His early research into the 'Y2K Aesthetic' beginning in 2014 helped to lay the foundation for the many branching eras studied by CARI; he brings expertise particularly in the fields of graphic, industrial, and interior design of the 1970s-2000s. He holds a Bachelors in Architecture from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and a Masters in Architecture from Columbia University.
Favorite Aesthetic: Factory Pomo
Froyo Tam - Founder
Froyo Tam is a multidisciplinary artist and curator, working across many disciplines in design, animation, and typography. She runs Y2K Aesthetic Institute's Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr along with Evan. Froyo also runs digicam.love with Sofi Xian + Bao Ngo, curating digital photography on point-and-shoots, and is an active member of Arte Et Labore, a design collective run by Mark Robinson. Froyo is a graduate of ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California with a BFA in Graphic Design. She is the finalist of the 2016 Adobe Design Achievement Awards in Social Impact. Her website can be found at: froyotam.info.
Sofi Xian - Founder
Sofi Xian (known mononymously as Sofi) is a Rotterdam-based photographer, design archivist, and computational linguist. She is a co-founder of CARI, where she first described and named the aesthetic Frutiger Aero. Her research explores 2000s culture across various modalities, particularly within technology and the tech industry, with a special focus on art in free and open-source software communities. Sofi founded digicam.love with Bảo Ngô and Froyo Tam, a worldwide community for users of digital point-and-shoot cameras generally deemed old or obsolete ('digicams'), and maintains an active local community in the Netherlands, digicamlove.nl. Sofi is a recipient of the Artist Trust grant and her work has exhibited in The Photographers' Gallery in London. As a linguist, she holds a master's degree in Text Mining from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and has published two papers on language modelling. Her website can be found at sofialee.info.
articution
Arti is a designer and illustrator based in Kentucky. Along with being an active member of Arte Et Labore, his work has also made appearances in various Y2K-related projects such as CROSSNIQ+ and u::r::here. He is a graduate from the Savannah College of Art and Design, with a BFA in graphic design. Arti has been a part of the CARI project since 2017, and is the creator of Cari-tan, the official mascot of CARI.
Favorite Aesthetic: Groovival
Chord Shore - Editor
Chord Shore is an Audio Designer for games, support/QA tester in tech, and 3D graphics hobbyist based in the Silicon Valley-Bay Area. A graduate of UC Santa Cruz, she holds a Bachelors of Arts in Games & Playable Media, with a focus on sound design for video games. Her sounds have been used on projects for
NASA
and
Xfer Records.
As CARI's Editor, she oversaw the 2021 Maintenance Effort to standardize essential metadata and improve descriptions for each aesthetic we track. In this process she has been managing CARI's internal database and documenting the early years of the project through our
Project History
page. Most recently she is collaborating with Sofi Xian on a forthcoming overhaul to our page on
Frutiger Aero.
Her main focus as a researcher is on future-optimism and pessimism—tracking how hope, anxiety, and nostalgia shape our vision of the future.
Her sound design portfolio can be found at
www.chordshore.com.
Favorite Aesthetic: Hexatron
Jack Grimes
Jack Grimes is a graphic designer & artist with a focus on typography, online spaces, and graphic culture. He has a BFA in graphic design from Appalachian State University and is currently located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. You can find his work at jackapedia.design.
Favorite Aesthetic: Factory Pomo
Linsang
Linsang is a SaaS support specialist located in the Denver, Colorado area. Outside of their work, they are passionate about music, design, and the ways in which the two intersect, which led them to discover CARI in 2019. Since joining the CARI team, Lin has worked as the administrator of the official CARI are.na group, with the aim of improving the standard of curation and attribution for the project and website, and assisted with hosting numerous community events.
Chad Miller - Webmaster
Chad Miller is a software engineer and musician based in Atlanta, Georgia. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. When not writing code, Chad plays guitar and drums in various bands around Georgia. He has been involved with the CARI project since 2020.
Favorite Aesthetic: Contempo Eclectic
