Some History

This will do for now:

Like most things, The Royal Academy of Nuts + Bolts started as a joke. I was in my final year of design school at RISD and it seemed as though I had only then reached the point in the curriculum where I was asked to design actual, finished pieces rather than just exercises. There I was at one of the fanciest art schools in the country and I had spent three years on "the basics." It was a royal academy of nuts and bolts. It was not meant as a compliment.

But then, the more I thought about it, the more I had to admit that the basics were of course very important. And, furthermore, in my own work I had a tendency to perform an analogous act of elevating the insignificant, of taking the mundane, the trivial, the undervalued, and blowing it all out of proportion, of taking a simple idea and following it to its furthest point. Not quite the same thing, but it seemed to relate. I still had issues with the curriculum, but I had better things to worry about: I had to create a Degree Project to graduate.

In essence, like many people, my project was the branding of a fictional company. But rather than the usual record label, restaurant, or winery most students attend to, my idea was to create a company that was both more real and more fake. More real in that I actually, under its name, set up an office space, performed services, and created/sold some products; more fake in that the "purpose" of the company was never specified, the only employee was me, and yet the corporate mythology was larger than life. What did the company "do" or "make"? Whatever it did or made next. It was, first and foremost, an idea, a brand. This became The Royal Academy of Nuts + Bolts.

So what was the idea? Mostly a self-reflexive questioning of the role of a graphic designer, of "professionalism," and indeed of the notion of branding itself. The whole thing would've been left there, as a school project, except that it all became much more performative than I had originally intended. It became about "performing the self" -- and that is not something which ends at graduation. Thus, it lived on. And the Royal Academy became my nom de guerre, if you will. Initially it was just a name for my design activities but then, as my activities widened, I designated that sphere the D.O.D. and made the Academy the umbrella over everything.

So what's the idea now?

I'll tell you, that's a tough one. Because, really, when I list the things I believe in, the things I'm striving for and which I'd like my work to address, well, they make my actual output look pretty feeble. Truth, justice, democracy, diplomacy, education, equality? I am not sure how a t-shirt or a radio show addresses those things (though, if pressed, I have some theories). But, as I say, I'm trying. And that's not nothing.

Sean Deyoe, Busdriver
The Royal Academy of Nuts + Bolts