Edition 001 –
Soft Understandings of Hard Things
The cold collection of tubes we call the internet can sometimes surprise us and they might look more like a sauna filled with pool noodles. A slurry of kindness, beauty, community, and sometimes even love.
We're still living in the slow and drawn-out moment where the web is shifting into "simpler, sleeker services —think apps — [sic] less about the searching and more about the getting." (wired.com)
At its core, the internet is still what it was when it began – a bunch of connected text documents with images, videos, and links.
"Instead of a cloud, let’s use a metaphor that makes the web’s individual, cooperative nodes more visible. This way, we can remember the responsibility we each have in building a better web. The web is a flock of birds or a sea of punctuation marks, each tending or forgetting about their web garden or puddle home with a river of knowledge nearby."
I think it's empowering to think of the web through lenses of metaphor Schwulst talks about - websites become meandering streams, occasionally opening up to massive rivers, while the app ecosystems that mediate online experiences might become some sort of giant privatized reservoir, bottling up water and selling it or something.
"If a website has endless possibilities, and our identities, ideas, and dreams are created and expanded by them, then it’s instrumental that websites progress along with us.
It’s especially pressing when forces continue to threaten the web and the internet at large. In an age of information overload and an increasingly commercialized web, artists ... can think expansively about what a website can be. Each artist should create their own space on the web, for a website is an individual act of collective ambition."
- Laurel Schwulst
Even while the web is changing – changing itself, changing us, changing our relationship to our own ideas and our own production, we can, perhaps even should, remain optimistic!
"Artists have explored—and critiqued—technology throughout history; and technology is historically linked to craft. Both domains are devoted to experiment. They are never predictable or linear—quite the opposite."
"I was texting with someone who had just lost her father. I was about to send the words my phone is dying but caught myself. This typically innocuous phrase suddenly felt jarring, sharp, insensitive. Choosing clunky over colloquial, I texted her power running out!?"
-Amy Krouse Rosenthal in Textbook
Edition 001 –
Soft Understandings of Hard Things
The cold collection of tubes we call the internet can sometimes surprise us and they might look more like a sauna filled with pool noodles. A slurry of kindness, beauty, community, and sometimes even love.
We're still living in the slow and drawn-out moment where the web is shifting into "simpler, sleeker services —think apps — [sic] less about the searching and more about the getting." (wired.com)
At its core, the internet is still what it was when it began – a bunch of connected text documents with images, videos, and links.
"Instead of a cloud, let’s use a metaphor that makes the web’s individual, cooperative nodes more visible. This way, we can remember the responsibility we each have in building a better web. The web is a flock of birds or a sea of punctuation marks, each tending or forgetting about their web garden or puddle home with a river of knowledge nearby."
I think it's empowering to think of the web through lenses of metaphor Schwulst talks about - websites become meandering streams, occasionally opening up to massive rivers, while the app ecosystems that mediate online experiences might become some sort of giant privatized reservoir, bottling up water and selling it or something.
"If a website has endless possibilities, and our identities, ideas, and dreams are created and expanded by them, then it’s instrumental that websites progress along with us.
It’s especially pressing when forces continue to threaten the web and the internet at large. In an age of information overload and an increasingly commercialized web, artists ... can think expansively about what a website can be. Each artist should create their own space on the web, for a website is an individual act of collective ambition."
- Laurel Schwulst
Even while the web is changing – changing itself, changing us, changing our relationship to our own ideas and our own production, we can, perhaps even should, remain optimistic!
"Artists have explored—and critiqued—technology throughout history; and technology is historically linked to craft. Both domains are devoted to experiment. They are never predictable or linear—quite the opposite."
"I was texting with someone who had just lost her father. I was about to send the words my phone is dying but caught myself. This typically innocuous phrase suddenly felt jarring, sharp, insensitive. Choosing clunky over colloquial, I texted her power running out!?"
-Amy Krouse Rosenthal in Textbook
