Identity

I'd never seen legible photos of any of his projects at that point, except perhaps Julian Street. I recall a strong sense of flash recognition—I had no time to reason out the characteristics or perform an analysis. It wasn't any small set of things. My mind simply shouted, "this one," and I believed it.

Christopher Alexander turned to me and said simply, "Yes."

A website is a poem that is already in everyone's pocket, a house built from photos of other houses, a book where every chapter is another book where every chapter is another book. In this class we will be studying the poetics of the web: the raw material of HTML, the systemic visuals of CSS, the endless interactive possibilities of Javascript and the browsers, servers, protocols, and infrastructure that holds it all together. Each week we will make websites. We will make small websites that only convey a single, tiny idea. We will make large websites whose clutter and convoluted interlocking pages feel like exploring an abandoned mansion. We will make websites that speak, websites with secrets, and websites that tell one perfectly executed joke. And as we build the web we will also learn its history from the early geocities days to the ways we tried to be fully present over the pandemic, and all the wonderful and useless websites artists have made in between.

A brief exploration of “BANAL” MODULARITY VS “RADICAL” MODULARITY:

Banal Modularity can still LOOK and FEEL very gorgeous, you know?, and ADAPT to suit new arrangement needs. So it’s like, “boom! My sofa is now two chairs!”, or a Chadwick sofa that is super-curvy-snaking, twirling, goes-around-a-pole, etc. etc.

But, Radical Modularity is present when you can, like, do something that maybe the Capital-D Designer of the thing didn’t anticipate. THAT is not “ADAPT”-ing, that is “INDIVIDUATED F*CKERY”. And the benefit of that is clear: it’s Highly Personal; and, it reveals you as a person who can think LATERALLY.

Andrew Trousdale is a researcher and designer. His initiatives and projects bridge positive psychology, human-computer interaction, and the creative arts.

Ultimately I’m less interested in Bush Tower and Gilbert’s impression of Bush Tower than am in this sketch. [Gilbert] used a blunt line – probably just a soft pencil – and made little effort to capture detail of the building, but as soon as I saw the sketch I knew which building it was, as clearly as if he had taken a photograph. I’m impressed by this in part because I can’t do it. I can make an engineering diagram – a load-path sketch, for example – just fine and I can draft in CAD. My handwriting has deteriorated because I’ve almost entirely switched from writing to typing, but my sketch line-work is okay. But I can’t draw any better than the average random person on the street, so his ability to so readily capture the essence of a building floors me.

To start very generally, taste is a mode. It’s a manner of interpretation, expression, or action. Things don’t feel tasteful, they demonstrate taste. Someone’s home can be decorated tastefully. Someone can dress tastefully. The vibe cannot be tasteful. The experience cannot be tasteful.

I’m not a “[full-stack] developer”, regardless of what my last job title says.

I’m not even a front-end developer, thanks to the JavaScript–industrial complex.

I’m a front-of-the-front-end developer, but that’s too long.

So, I’m a web designer. And I also specialise in accessibility, design systems, and design.

...The current landscape of front-end development presents challenges for web designers like me. As I navigate through the complexities of our industry, I will continue to advocate for the importance of expertise in these undervalued areas.

The founding Macintosh team had a lot of pride in what they were building. They each had their names etched into the chassis of the Mac to prove it.

The build culture of today is commonly summed up as, “move fast, break things, ship often, fix later.” Conversely, thanks to Apple, people now have an expectation of high quality and thoughtful design from the products they choose to use. This cross-roads of build culture and audience expectation can make it challenging to feel proud of what you ship and the story you tell the world as you chase a mythical convergence where it all makes sense. In this regard, it’s likely fortunate that names often aren’t attached. But if you did, you just might ship superior products. A more interesting question may be to ask those building a product, “Who wants to put their name on it?”, and actually put their names on it. You might be surprised by what you decide to ship or re-evaluate based on the response to that question.

Situated software isn't a technological strategy so much as an attitude about closeness of fit between software and its group of users, and a refusal to embrace scale, generality or completeness as unqualified virtues. Situated software…is personal from its inception. Teachers on the Run worked this way. Everyone knew that Paul and Keren built it. You could only rate Clay and Marianne and Tom and the other ITP professors. You didn't even know it even existed unless you were on the ITP mailing list. The application's lack of generality or completeness, in other words, communicated something – "We built this for you" – that the impersonal facade of RateMyProfessors.com doesn't have and can't fake.

It has long been understood that striving for originality as an end in itself is the mark of an inferior artist. The personal style of a good artist is never something that has been deliberately cultivated and forced but something that has appeared unsought as inevitably as the personal style of a man's handwriting.

But since artists of note are seen to have a distinct personal style, no artist can hope to make a reputation in a competitive society unless he too can show a distinctive style which easily differentiates his work from that of other artists and draws attention to it. Therefore artists of little capability or uncertain vocation will take great care to make their work look 'different', whereas those with any certainty in them will know that their work cannot help but look different from that of other people any more than signatures can.

It is worth reflecting that the fact of the unmistakable individuality of each man's signature is one foundation of modern commerce everywhere. To establish the individuality of it one need not write it vertically up the page in letters two inches high. And yet there are only twenty six letters, and everyone else uses them too.

There was a time when owning digital space seemed thrilling, and our personal sites motivated us to express ourselves. There are signs of a resurgence, but too few wish to make their digital house a home.

Let me argue that the actual dawn of user interface design first happened when computer designers finally noticed, not just that end users had functioning minds, but that a better understanding of how those minds worked could completely shift the paradigm of interaction.

[John Whitehouse's personal site] is like a home in that it’s a collection of many things which are unified only by the person who collected them. I feel as if someone is giving me a tour of their apartment: I’m looking at the papers on his desk, the notes stuck to his fridge, an album of butterfly photos taken by his brother, and so on. Sure, he probably tidied up before I arrived, and he’s choosing what to show me. But nonetheless, entering the space has given me a rich portrait of its occupant. As far as I could find, John doesn’t have a formal “about” page, but he doesn’t need one: I see him far more clearly through the relationships and activities he’s chosen to share.

...I’m talking about this, of course, because I’d like to use “home” as the operative analogy for my own website.

After Thomas Mann moved to Princeton in 1938, he resumed research on Joseph and His Brothers, and consequently checked out many books on Egypt from the university’s library. When his wife Katia discovered that to borrow a book he had to sign his name on a card kept in a pocket inside the back cover, she cried, “Tommy, you’re cheapening the value of your signature!” She instructed him to get someone else to check books out for him to avoid this catastrophe.

This reminds me that Marc Chagall used to pay for everything — including a tube of toothpaste — by check, because he guessed that at least some shopkeepers, knowing his fame, would keep the check uncashed as a souvenir or to be sold later.

What gives me anxiety is, what if there is a “nodal point” out there for me that I will never come across? What if “the one” is a piece of information that I will never get a chance to give my attention to?

...Before [a conversation Lauren Schwulst and I had with Damon Zucconi], I had this idea that if this is your body, and this is everything that is out in the world, then this collection of nodal points that changed your trajectory is “actually you.” Or at the very least, it’s the sum of those points that represent a unique perspective that is a reflection of you.

The nice part about this idea is thinking about the idea of “you” or your identity being out in the world. That the boundary between “you“ and the things that you love becomes blurry. The not nice thing is that it essentially is the same thing as saying “you are your interests” which feels superficial and reductive.

After this conversation with Damon I started thinking that it’s not the points that are the key part, it’s the line between you and the points. It’s the fact that you recognized the thing that is important, not the thing itself. It’s your radar.

...I like the idea of a person moving through “nodal points” propelled by an innate desire. I also like the idea of foregrounding agency from the perspective of the user or viewer or consumer. People often think about making work as if the person on the other side will have no choice but to enjoy it if the work is “good” enough, but it’s nice to think about the practice of viewing or consuming as an art form in itself. That understanding and honing your own perspective and how you see the world can be as active as making work is. I’m starting to see that understanding one’s own personal radar can take a lifetime.

Where I stand now is, if this is your body and these are all the nodal points in your life, “you” are “here.” Your radar is you. Not the things you focus on, but the orientation, the internal ruleset, your magnetism towards things, the natural intuition that you’ve had your whole life. The “desire lines” are you.

“You” are “here.”

Sometimes when I'm out,
I see people from behind
and, for a moment,
I think it is you.

One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne. The two great followers of Shakespeare, Webster and Tourneur, in their mature work do not borrow from him; he is too close to them to be of use to them in this way.

This weekend’s project is to build a transaction explorer for the Centralized Coin experiment. Something like a blockchain explorer, but without the crypto overhead.

Each node in the system is represented by a hash. Because humans are terrible at reading and quickly identifying large numbers (other than by their first or last few digits), a visual representation is needed.

There are many solutions out there: WordPress and GitHub identicons, robohash, monsterID etc..

I wanted one that still looks abstract (not as opinionated as monsters or robots), and that plays nice in a rounded avatar UI component.

This is what I ended up with.

JAMES TAYLOR-FOSTER

EDITOR & WRITER of essays & reviews
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGNER,
MAKER of exhibitions

A week ago, I was in Gothenberg, Nebraska and went to the local historical museum. I asked the volunteers there what was the most unusual, interesting, and important exhibit they had. One of them, Barbara Fisher, thought for a moment, then said, "We have a unique collection of barbed wire fence downstairs, each strand of which is specific to the ranch or tract where it was used." She must have read my mind and heart, for that is just the sort of thing that would captivate me.

...From the way the barbs were wrapped around and woven through the horizontal strands, the ranchers could tell at a glance if the land and animals enclosed within belonged to them — I call them "signature barbs" — sort of like a premodern QR code.

Getting pigeon-holed as one particular thing often made me uncomfortable because I didn’t feel seen. My skill set is much broader and being called “just” anything felt constricting. Shifting my focus publicly reflected my different personal interests while ensuring an expanding broader audience (and maybe bring some people along for the ride, too).

...I’ve always enjoyed being more of a generalist while having a deep understanding of a number of topics—something I referred to as being U shaped instead of T shaped.

Apprenticeships are a path to a thick skilfulness in a craft and a real solve for the problems of training and helping the next generation of young workers become productive members of the workforce, but they are also more than this.

The reason that in early modern Europe an apprentice was called a freeman or journeyman at the end of their tenure was that they were qualified to be a 'free' citizen or to ‘journey’ out into the world. They were prepared to live and work in a city without restriction. The apprenticeship had liberated them not just economically but socially.

...Like the army or the monastery apprenticeships are a sacrifice. The apprentice sacrifices many of the best years of their youth and the multiplicity of career options that they could see before them to undergo a specific course of training. Yet, just like the army or the monastery apprenticeship also represents a gift of freedom. At the end of their tenure the apprentice has been given an identity and a chance to navigate society as they see fit.

In our noble drives to democratize access to the liberal arts and our cultural valourization of the dropout entrepreneur we have inadvertently looked down on the creative capacity, economic windfall, and social liberation that can come from apprenticeships. As we seek as individuals and as a society to find new avenues for building capability we would be wise to rediscover this form.

So, if you ask me, I’d like the internet to be a place, where people love to stay and play.

But with the same passion to leave for a comeback.

The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes what she experienced as "being as a thing." The philosopher Michael Polanyi calls it "focal awareness" and recurs to the act of hammering a nail:

When we bring down the hammer we do not feel that its handle has struck our palm but that its head has struck the nail.

We have become the things on which we are working.

In value capture, we outsource the process of deliberating on our values, and that outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits of personal deliberation. When we tailor our values to ourselves, we can fine-tune them to fit our own particular psychology and place in the world. However, in value capture, it's as if we're buying our values off the rack.

I am tired of the premise that creation means productivity––especially in the laborious sense...Creation has become mangled with labor in a world that demands man to monetize all of their hobbies and pursuits. In return, it seems empty, almost sad, really––to be the designer spending weekends again on the screen.

To tell you what I like to do in the weekends, I like to do the sad thing...The ‘good’ people tell you to detach your life from your workspace, but this summer, I think I’ve just realized how much I adore what I have the luxury of working on everyday.

In the weekend, I make. I make not because it’s the only thing I have ever known, but because it’s the most certain way forward.

Idiolect is an individual's unique use of language, including speech. This unique usage encompasses vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation.

An idiolect is the variety of language unique to an individual. This differs from a dialect, a common set of linguistic characteristics shared among a group of people.

After asking about the origin of online handles, I heard back from a number of folks and loved the stories.

It’s fascinating to see an online name like “Apple Annie”, read the origin story, and see this wonderful, multi-faceted human being with a rich history behind the seemingly-random string of characters on screen.

It makes the internet more human and I love it.

What's really challenging for me working on something on an idea level for close to 8 years, it's really hard to not look at yourself. The decision-making process includes a conversation with myself: sometimes I'm going to side with 2015 version of Nick, sometimes the 2017 Nick isn't the right guy for this, etc... So much of the process of making the movie has changed the movie. I really just tried to make the movie I wanted to make when I was 22. When I serviced that, it worked really well.

You've been here before.
You've seen it all,
But your conscience won't recall.
And your eyes are barely wide enough
To recognize what your heart keeps giving up.

And someday it might win
If your mind's giving in
Just try to lose yourself
Or do your best till then

“I am the utterance of my name.”

— Thunder, Perfect Mind, The Nag Hammadi Library

Terroir is a French term used to describe the environmental factors that affect a crop's phenotype, including unique environment contexts, farming practices and a crop's specific growth habitat. Collectively, these contextual characteristics are said to have a character; terroir also refers to this character.

A man was sent to fix a problem with one of our doors. When I encountered him he was enlarging a hole in the door with a grinder so the lock would latch. I looked at the door and noted that that door was not latching because the screws holding the hinges to the door-frame had corroded and the door had dropped. I pointed this out to him, and suggested that he replace the screws in the hinges instead. He looked at me with incomprehension and said, “Look, I’m a lock guy. I’m not a door guy.”

...when you identify so strongly with one particular technology or one tech stack you inherently limit your ability to frame technical problems from alternative angles. You risk becoming fixated on problem solving instead of problem framing.

The difference between problem solving and problem framing is one of intellectual curiosity and attitude. Problem framing often requires a willingness and ability to transcend disciplinary boundaries, to grapple with things that are incongruous or incompatible or simply outside your skillset. A problem cannot be solved—or at least solved well—if it has not first been fully understood, examined, and framed well. And this means developing skill in asking questions. But it’s hard to be curious and ask good questions when you automatically self-identify as “lock folk,” approaching every possible problem as a lock-shaped problem.

I’m working on a personal site refresh, oh so slowly. Part of the process has been considering what slash pages I have or want.

Robb Knight has a great list of ideas over at slashpages.net.

But there’s one I’ve had for a decade, that I think others might consider adding: /why.

It’s an opportunity to say what you care about, what direction you’re heading, and how you hope to exist in the world. A minifesto on the purpose of your site, or your work.

I started thinking about all the other important “nodal points” (I don’t know what else to call this) of people, places, books, albums, websites, etc. that all played a part in shaping who I am as a person and what I think is important. These points are a combination of seeking things out myself and getting a recommendation that felt like it was actually for me. A mixture of both passive and active knowledge acquisition.

ultimately, it's the totality of those “nodal points” that indicate one’s own unique perspective. It doesn’t matter if you specifically sought out the nodal point or not, it’s the recognition that counts. When you encounter a piece of life-changing information (no matter how large the change part is), you are simultaneously discovering and creating “yourself,” becoming incrementally more complete. Your perspective (where your gaze is directed) is made up of a meandering line through these points. Learning (or maybe some precursor to learning) is a lot about developing the intuition to recognize when something you find in the world is going to be a nodal point for you.

The sunflower was the symbol of the day. In my opening remarks, I reflected on its meaning: In the language of flowers, sunflowers represent loyalty and adoration; they turn their heads to face the sun. It is also the national flower of Ukraine, and with its yellow petals and dark center, it is reminiscent of an eclipse, symbolizing both the end and the beginning of an era.

As I entered the film school, I realized something that had never occurred to me about sunflowers: they are heavy. I had been thinking about sunflowers metaphorically, and neglected them as literal, physical flowers. It was an ironic moment; in my conversations with the speakers, I had asked them to talk in first-person. I didn't want concepts or abstractions: I wanted figurative paintings of their lived experience.

...I wonder if sunflowers feel lonely; they might not even notice each other standing in a field of flowers. They are too busy trying to see and be seen by the sun. Chasing the light, not unlike how we chase visibility, failing to recognize those around us, and those absent. This publication is both for those who I met at the film school and those who weren't there, because you are also part of the network. Naive Yearly is not just one thing: one offline event, one group of people. It's also the newsletter, and the community around it, and these pieces, and anyone who engages with them. It spreads and erodes. Just like the internet, which is also multiple: productive, extractive, colonial, monolithic, capitalistic, but it is also full of poetry, wonder and care.

I'm happy it happened, and that the adapted talks are published here on Are.na. It is the site that opened my eyes to the wildflower fields outside of the walled gardens and reconnected me with hundreds of people with a similar love for the web.

That’s the primary difference between an axiom like “Curiosity Killed The Cat” and an axiom like “You Are Not Your User. ” The former rings true in common experience. It’s test-able, like striking a tuning fork or dangling a bit of yarn in front of a kitten. The latter is just some stuff that somebody said.

Sometimes, axiomatic sayings like “You Are Not Your User” no longer have a who that’s saying them. They cease being an actual instruction, and instead serve as a kind of identity, to identify the person who’s repeating the axiom as One Of Us.

The technical term for when an axiom devolves into an ID card is shibboleth: a custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important.

Bottom line: eyeliner as an act of ritual opens us up to a layered exploration of themes related to identity, empowerment, symbolism, self-care, artistic expression, and community. It encourages a deeper understanding of this pigment's profound impact on an individual's sense of self and connection to the broader world. Like ink, eyeliner delivers so many messages, so applying it with education, awareness and intentionality (and even a little prayer to the beauty gods) is crucial – at least to my mind!

When introducing myself, I am always clear that, most of the time, I am either busy, or trying to be busy. Everything to me is work, everything that makes me proud of myself is work, everything in my future will, hopefully, be more work. The entire concept of retiring to me is madness. I never want to stop working.

This is often mistaken as an unhealthy obsession with work, which is not entirely true. I am not torturing myself every day for 10 hours just so I can prove myself, I’m doing exactly what I want to do.

In the 1960s, the designer Robert Propst worked with the Herman Miller company to produce “The Action Office”, a stylish system of open-plan office furniture that allowed workers to sit, stand, move around and configure the space as they wished.

Propst then watched in horror as his ideas were corrupted into cheap modular dividers, and then to cubicle farms or, as Propst described them, “barren, rathole places”. Managers had squeezed the style and the space out of the action office, but above all they had squeezed the ability of workers to make choices about the place where they spent much of their waking lives.

...It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home, because it is designed and equipped with work in mind. Few people can afford the space for a well-designed, well-specified home office. Many are reduced to perching on a bed or coffee table. And yet at home, nobody will rearrange the posters on your wall, and nobody will sneer about your “dog pictures, or whatever”. That seems trivial, but it is not.

Certain things are only visible at certain frame rates. At certain times. In certain rooms. You found me, and I found myself. We became us. We became white foam when Cronos attacked his father. An airborne seed. A plastic bag. A parachute. A capsule. A file. A metaphor. A vocabulary. A thread. An environment. A contamination. A mantra we repeat to ourselves like the evening prayer I recited with my mother before sleep. A reminder of days, lunar cycles and Earth’s orbit around the sun. A practice expanding what the web is and can be. A web. A living web. All in plural.

My favorite aspect of websites is their duality: they’re both subject and object at once. In other words, a website creator becomes both author and architect simultaneously. There are endless possibilities as to what a website could be. What kind of room is a website? Or is a website more like a house? A boat? A cloud? A garden? A puddle? Whatever it is, there’s potential for a self-reflexive feedback loop: when you put energy into a website, in turn the website helps form your own identity.

Human society is almost entirely about people clawing their way to a position where they can be The Guy and do The Thing....and, once there, hastily fill in with canned fodder and expedient sketches. The actual substance is mere afterthought.

While I can't distill this point any further, I can cite a favorite pithy observation for the umpteenth time:

Most singers become singers because they want to be singers, not because they want to sing.

Politicians don't give The Speech out of a desire to inspire and lead. It's the antithesis: they become politicians because they want to be the guy giving The Speech. If they were devoted to acting authentically and sincerely, rather than peering at themselves on their mental movie screen, they'd speak in order to say things, rather than vice versa. It's flabbergastingly rare that people give speeches to earnestly say things, even though that's the only way to draw a visceral response. If you're the least bit earnest - if you care about the doing and not just the posing, you might find yourself offering something fresh and spontaneous; something optimized for that unique moment. You may even change the nature of The Speech for all who come after (once it's stale, having been imitated to death and fully merged into society's unconscious).

[Rachel Tashjian writes in Real Fashion For the Era of Fake Trends],

“Mostly it seems that people are doing things humans have done for most of the past century—relaxing, working hard, having martinis, not having martinis—but now we cannot resist the urge to package them into something that feels more meaningful than mere consumer choices.”

In the atomized landscape of contemporary culture, to merely express a personal observation, disconnected from any broader significance, is to risk the cardinal sin of irrelevance. The microtrend is thus a vehicle for making something matter, however illusory, And it’s not just our audience we must convince but ourselves—that we’re not just shouting into the void. Mireille Silcoff argued recently that online aesthetics and microtrends provide a source of ersatz community, filling the vacuum created by the decline of physically grounded youth subcultures. That may be a stretch, but the practice does seem oriented toward meeting a deeper need.

...Rather than being part of a mass culture that we can either participate in or rebel against, like the punks of yore, our online selves are unique data profiles that are aggregated or disaggregated as different contexts require. Being part of a hive mind has its drawbacks, but isolation is not one of them.

A capsule wardrobe is a thoughtfully curated collection of clothing that emphasises quality over quantity. It's about streamlining your wardrobe to a selection of versatile pieces that you truly enjoy and wear regularly. The idea isn’t to limit your options, but to create a more intentional and cohesive wardrobe that reflects your personal style and lifestyle needs. Each item in a capsule wardrobe is chosen for its functionality, comfort, and the ability to mix and match, making getting dressed not just simpler, but a genuine pleasure. It’s about breaking free from the endless cycle of fast and on-trend fashion and embracing a more sustainable, personalised approach to what we wear every day.

Globalization has brought rapid economic and social change and made these societies far more diverse, creating demands for recognition on the part of groups that were once invisible to mainstream society. These demands have led to a backlash among other groups, which are feeling a loss of status and a sense of displacement. Democratic societies are fracturing into segments based on ever-narrower identities, threatening the possibility of deliberation and collective action by society as a whole. This is a road that leads only to state breakdown and, ultimately, failure. Unless such liberal democracies can work their way back to more universal understandings of human dignity, they will doom themselves—and the world—to continuing conflict.

aboutideasnow.com exists to help you find your people.

1000s of personal websites exist on the internet, outside of social media — created by creators, thinkers, and doers of all sorts.

We index the /about, /ideas, and /now pages of these independent sites to give you a handy way of searching through them.

To have a personal website is, presently, an act of rebellion. It is a statement. You are saying: I want to define my experience on the web. I'll let you in on an open secret: Big tech companies aren't the only ones who get to decide how we share ideas on the web. The web is yours. You can put up a website where you share whatever it is that you want to share with others.

A writing tip for myself in the future, if I may (and I do): delete every use of “…for me…,” “in my opinion,” “some might disagree,” “I think,” etc. etc. These snippets are a bad habit and make your writing fragile, lacking any conviction, with one eye always over your shoulder. After a while these self-doubting platitudes become road bumps that get in the way of describing the thing that you love.

I was talking with someone not too long ago and they described how they had sent something of mine to a friend who immediately brushed it off because it wasn’t in accordance with usability standards (too colorful and weird). This got me thinking about that topic again…

It happens a lot with my work, and I think it captures a really interesting dynamic when we talk about how usability has become a moral high ground issue.

I often get told that I’m ableist because my work is too colorful, with too much animation, too much happening… and it’s not “toned down” to be usable for the widest range of people.

It’s usually arguments about disability from people who are not disabled themselves. This I think is interesting because I create out of my own perspectives often informed by my own disabilities, my own life experiences, and the things important to me… all the things that make me who I am.

Most websites copy conventions. As a result, everything ends up with similar trending colours, sans serif fonts, responsive grids and placeholder texts. It is a seamless user experience. I rarely struggle to locate what I’m looking for: the about page, contact information, and everything else is easy to find, and without much thought, I can proceed with my day.

The convenience comes at a cost. Not only is it boring when everything looks like an e-commerce template, but I also struggle to differentiate the sites from each other. As the sites assimilate, they become indistinguishable and interchangeable. No wonder they rely on search engine optimization and digital ads to get visitors. I remember them as a convention and forget them as individual sites.

Therefore, I love landing on websites where I don’t immediately understand what is happening. Especially when it is clear that the chaos is made with care and intention. Today, I’m bringing an interview with a person who makes such sites. Kim Kleinert’s work radiates strong visions, and a devotion to websites’ material and cultural histories. Enjoy.

Put together with odd bits of the useless Clarice, a survivors’ Clarice was taking shape, all huts and hovels, festering sewers, rabbit cages. And yet, almost nothing was lost of Clarice’s former splendor; it was all there, merely arranged in a different order, no less appropriate to the inhabitants’ needs than it had been before.

I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, the beloved tale becomes a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives. A book may cease to speak to us as we grow older, and our feeling for it will fade. Or we may suddenly, as our lives shape and hopefully increase our understanding, be able to appreciate a book we dismissed earlier; we may suddenly be able to hear its music, to be enraptured by its song.

...more concerned with process than with product, with the actual construction of a self than with self-expression.

The main problem, I think, is that no one knows what "Verified" means.

If I were in charge (which I'm not) there would be various types of ticks.

🤖 is a bot
🆔 proved their legal identity
🏭 is run by a brand
⚖ is run by a government department
👮 Official law enforcement
😎 Celebrity

And so on.

These loose notes are one possible description of our city. A city that, as in Constantin Cavafy's poem The City, is and always will be the same, in the same city again.

Someone who thinks about their place in the world in terms of the structural violence inflicted on them as they move through it is thinking of themselves, among other things, in structural terms, which is to say, again among other things, not as subjects. This gutting of our human subjecthood is currently being stoked and exacerbated, and integrated into a causal loop with, the financial incentives of the tech companies. People are now speaking in a way that  results directly from the recent moneyballing of all of human existence.

All cities can be described as a dialogue between homogeneity and exception, and each strikes a particular balance that is at the core of its character.

"We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed."

— Frank Bidart, Borges and I

When the Masai of Kenya were forced to relocate, they took with them the names of hills, rivers, and plains, and fitted them to the topography of their new domicile.

The same desire is reflected in the countless European place names in the United States, as the borrowed names had the power to project a sense of familiarity in a strange and unfamiliar land.

Je suis l'espace où je suis.

This is a great line. But nowhere can it be better appreciated than in a corner.

This deeper meaning of a word isn’t confined to what we think of as a dictionary definition. Rather it flows out and fills all the space available to it. Although a basic sense does affect the dynamics of a word, it has no power over its essence. Like the captain of a ship, it can control the crew’s actions, but not their minds. Each word has an aspect of meaning which lies deeper than any of its senses, and it is fundamentally on this meaning that all the senses depend.

The most common response to the question of symbolism was nothing in the city at all, but rather the sight of the New York City skyline across the river. Much of the characteristic feeling for Jersey City seemed to be that it was a place on the edge of something else.

"As far as I'm concerned, a folk art is when you take a utilitarian object, something you use every day, and you give it overlays of your own personality, what it is you feel and so forth. You enhance it with your life. And a folk art in the current period of time would more appropriately be in the area of something like a motorcycle. I mean, a motorcycle can be a lot more than just a machine that runs along; it can be a whole description of a personality and an aesthetic."

It is really rather remarkable that, while anyone can tell whether a thing is a pocket-knife because, presumably, anyone can recognize the principle of arrangement which constitutes the similarity between all pocket knives, no one can visually abstract that arrangement. We recognize it when we 'see' it embodies, we can describe it disembodies, but we cannot visualize it disembodied.

If you saw it, standing in its midst, it would be a different city; Irene is a name for a city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes.

Though the autobiography “is” the author in a sense in which his other works are not, it can never be the whole of the author. It is still a formal expression and bound by the limitations of all material form, so that though it is a true revelation it is only a partial revelation: it incorporates only so much of the mind as matter is capable of containing.

Perhaps even the very house which I burned to the ground contained such examples, even though it would obviously not contain them any longer, no longer being a house.
Well, it is still a house.
Even if there is not remarkably much left of it, I am still prone to think of it as a house when I pass it in taking my walks.
There is the house I burned to the ground, I might think. Or, soon I will be coming to the house that I burned to the ground.

You cannot divide me into independent fragments of existence.

— The Last Panda, 1993

One has to keep in mind how much the technology of doing something defines the activity itself.