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Dylan Robinson

Dylan Robinson (born 2005) is an African American designer and student currently enrolled at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. He is the founder of Will of Spirit, an independent design studio, and editor of its associated editorial concerned with human will, consciousness, and what it means to live fully.

Whether his academic record reflects this positively remains, at time of publication, unconfirmed.^[1]

Interests

Robinson's intellectual interests are wide-ranging and resistant to easy categorization. He has described his approach to knowledge as "following the thread wherever it goes," a method that has produced an eclectic but coherent body of reference.^[2]

History

Robinson maintains a particular interest in pre-colonial African history, citing the Mali Empire as a formative example of sophisticated statecraft and cultural production that remains largely overlooked. His interest extends into sacred architecture, with the Church of Saint George in Lalibela, Ethiopia, carved entirely from a single block of rock in the 12th century, representing in his view one of the most extraordinary acts of human making on record.^[3]

Reading

Robinson is an avid reader with a noted preference for works that resist sentimentality. His primary literary reference is Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, a book about renunciation, becoming, and the particular freedom that comes from wanting nothing. He has also cited T.S. Eliot as a significant influence, particularly for the structural ambition of the longer poems and their treatment of fragmentation as a form of honesty.^[4]

Art History

Robinson's engagement with art history is drawn toward moments of unlikely collision. He has cited the Greco-Buddhist statues produced in the Gandhara region following Alexander the Great's eastward expansion, among the earliest depictions of the Buddha in human form rendered in a style unmistakably Greek, as an example of the kind of cultural contact he finds most generative: two worlds meeting and producing something neither could have made alone.^[5]

Philosophy

Robinson has cited Rumi as a significant influence, and unlike most people who say this, means it in the romantic sense. The longing, the wine, the beloved, the whole thing. He finds the mystical and the earnest more useful than the ironic.^[6]

Media

Robinson has identified Blade Runner: The Final Cut as a work of near-definitive importance to his visual sensibility, specifically its treatment of light, atmosphere, and the question of what constitutes a soul and whether that question has an answer.^[7]

Books

• Siddhartha — Hermann Hesse
• The History of Africa — Molefi Kete Asante
• The Book of Five Rings — Miyamoto Musashi
• The Masnavi — Rumi
• The Waste Land — T.S. Eliot
• No Exit — Jean-Paul Sartre
• Stoner — John Williams
• The Stranger — Albert Camus

Film and television

Television

• True Detective, Season 1 (HBO, 2014)
• The Sopranos (HBO, 1999-2007)
• Avatar: The Last Airbender (Nickelodeon, 2005-2008)
• Twin Peaks (ABC/Showtime, 1990-2017)
• Better Call Saul (AMC, 2015-2022)
• Severance (Apple TV+, 2022-present)
• Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011-2019)

Film

• Mulholland Drive (2001, dir. David Lynch)
• Excalibur (1981, dir. John Boorman)
• Blade Runner: The Final Cut (1982/2007, dir. Ridley Scott)
• Dead Poets Society (1989, dir. Peter Weir)
• Ran (1985, dir. Akira Kurosawa)
• Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992, dir. David Lynch)
• In the Mood for Love (2000, dir. Wong Kar-wai)

Music

Robinson is, by most accounts, particular about music. His taste spans Nujabes, After, underscores, Solange, and A Tribe Called Quest, among others.^[8]

References

1. ↑ He has a 3.7, lowkey.
2. ↑ Robinson, D. (n.d.). Unpublished notes. New York.
3. ↑ See also: Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali; Ibn Battuta, Rihla.
4. ↑ Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. 1922. Boni and Liveright.
5. ↑ See also: the Gandhara school; McEvilley, T. The Shape of Ancient Thought. 2002.
6. ↑ Rumi. The Masnavi. 13th century. Various translations.
7. ↑ Scott, R. (dir.) Blade Runner: The Final Cut. Warner Bros., 2007.
8. ↑ Source declined to elaborate. "You just have to be there."