There’s a Japanese proverb that goes 一期一会 (Ichigo ichi-e), which literally translates to “one time, one meeting.” But in practice, it’s used to capture how every particular moment and gathering only exists once in a lifetime. Striking up a conversation with a stranger on a park bench, making eye contact with someone on the bus, even hanging out with friends in the park on a random afternoon, are all once-in-a-lifetime events.

In 2026, people are going offline as much as possible—I think, in large part, to reclaim this feeling of preciousness around life. They’re chaining their phones to their walls, starting movements to touch grass, and creating entire product lines around reducing phone usage. In the face of a hostile internet, abstinence has become the mainstream accepted response. We crave the spontaneity we know to be in the physical world.

I don’t blame them. The Internet looks quite grim these days. Dead internet theory, stating that the internet is being overtaken and, eventually, will only be inhabited by bots, is entering mainstream discourse as AI social accounts multiply and compete for what flavor of slop comes after Italian brainrot. People are arguing with fake people, and creators have to clarify that they didn’t use AI to make the work they share. Culture commentators are writing about the death of the open internet as people retreat into dark forests, private spaces like group chats that are hidden from the web.

The Internet has lost its innocence, and logging on feels like fighting for survival.

But every once in a while, we still encounter something meaningful that makes it all worth it. Something heartwarming, genuine, inspiring, or joyful that justifies all the hours scrolling and a lifetime chained to our devices. Earnestness shines through even in “content” manufactured for spread.

If dead internet theory posits that the internet will eventually become only bots, alive internet theory proclaims we will never let the open internet die. We will always find a way to look for each other, to answer a call for help, to share a laugh and an argument right after one another. If there’s one trait of the human race that every apocalypse movie agrees on, it’s our will to survive.

We still have hope for the Internet because deep down, we still believe in each other.

The Internet uniquely brings people together who would have never met in the real world on a global scale. We can connect with others over niche interests while being exposed to a thousand other worldviews. At its best, the Internet cultivates our unique differences and allows them to coexist. Rather than a monoculture, we form a multi-faceted, collective network, interconnected but not forced to assimilate. This pluriverse of cultures breeds other differences, hybrids, and niches to connect over.

I actually rediscovered Ichigo ichi-e on my TikTok feed, in a spontaneous meeting via the algorithm several years ago. From what I can remember, the video featured a creator talking about a random encounter with an old man in Tokyo, how, in under 8 minutes, they shared the different problems their countries faced and uncovered this tangible sense of shared humanity.

There are two reasons this has stayed with me for so long.

First, it’s a reminder that spontaneity in digital space is still very much possible and can lead to the kinds of encounters that I wouldn’t have the chance to experience through my physical body.

Second, it’s a testament to how deeply we can impact each other through such simple means, and perhaps, the primitive nature of the methods frees us to break past our abstract notions of society to reach a deeper emotional level.

We still live on the Internet, and as long as we do, we can still bump into each other and have these life-changing encounters. But it’s been overdeveloped and undergoverned. Like cities that have prioritized cars over people, visiting the Internet now entails controlled apps and search engines, designed for extraction. There’s nowhere to rest because the benches are covered in spikes. All we can do is sink into the feed and run along the scrollbar until our eyes bleed.

We are all so online, yet being online feels so solitary. Social media is designed for content consumption, brand distribution, and prestige broadcasting, not the warm, funny, and weird moments that happen when humans simply exist together.

We’ve been conditioned to think the Internet can’t be changed, but all our current interfaces—infinite feeds, follower counts, black-box algorithms—are features created by social media platforms to optimize their metrics. Just as they were made, they can also be transformed.

Like guerrilla public improvement projects put benches in public spaces, repopulate foliage in neglected intersections, or transform dumping sites into neighborhood gathering spots, we can also retrofit and reshape our digital space.

So what would an Internet that actually encourages these encounters feel like?

Where can we sit together on the internet? How do we discover a new neighborhood, shelter under a bodega awning during a summer shower, sit quietly at a cafe and work among the chatter of strangers?

Maybe it starts with breaking down the capital-I Internet into several, much-less intimidating tiny internets where we can experiment with new forms of coexisting and relating to one another online.

Rather than a single feed or the same interface copy-and-pasted under new management and brand colors, we might find how people have imagined new ways of living online. Maybe there are no profiles and the feed is a random constellation of images for every minute of the day. Perhaps you have to say hi to five new people before you can write your status. Or you have to go hunting for every new piece of content, pixel by pixel across the screen.

Maybe strangers spontaneously travel through URL rabbit holes together, collectively deciding which way to go next. Meanwhile, others can sit together on the sidelines and watch them bustle.

In my neighborhood internet, I’m a regular at several local spots. I stop by to see the new community chatter, bring a gift or two, and forage for some inspiration from the archives that people have brought back. Some days I travel to other neighborhoods, even new countries, and experience how the culture changes. How do they share their updates? What’s their way of greeting each other? How do they gather inspiration?

We can run into each other

As I run around the web, I spontaneously encounter others in the same places, online together at the same time. I can wave at them, share a warm conversation, play cursor tag, and shake the web page to call others to join us. We share a brief moment of intimacy to honor fate bringing us together.

We can watch each other

Like going to a busy city park and watching the immensity of life unfold, I can take things slow and watch people in their digital pursuits. I can take the scenic path as we travel between links, notice people on their respective commutes and adventures, and get lost in a new place.

We can be remembered

When I visit a website, dig around the links, and leave a note for the owner, the traces of my presence don’t disappear after I leave. Our actions leave a felt mark. This digital patina adds an extra texture to websites, hinting at who has passed through, how frequently they come, and the adventures that have unfolded here.

We can be recognized

In real life, we’re recognized for our faces, names, and styles. In the digital world, we should be recognizable if we meet again, whether it’s the way we move our cursors, the colors we choose, or the marks we make.

I’ve been experimenting with creating internet neighborhoods of my own, to make poems with strangers, turn the lights off to say good night, collect every color in existence, and grab a drink at the cursor bar after a long day scrolling.

I want everyone to be able to create their own Internet gathering spaces, so I made playhtml, an open-source library for designing communal internet experiences by enhancing web elements with real-time, persistent interactivity. Take it for a spin, and if you need help, remember that I’m just across the web.

Somewhere right now, two strangers’ cursors are touching. Someone is breaking ground on a new piece of the internet for their personal website. Hundreds more are visiting tiny spaces and games to share their feelings with their online family.

The Internet was never promised to be open, free, or modifiable. Born in the U.S. military and courted by several private companies, it could have easily been seized by a single entity. Instead, many brave people fought to keep it open to everyone, collectively stewarded by many, and owned by no one.

We can shape these internets together, piece by piece. We can make our own public parks, cafes, bodegas, waterfalls, and mountains. We can take care of them, not as users, but as stewards maintaining a home for generations to come.

These internets won’t be an escape from the real world. We’ll go offline to touch grass, hang out with friends, and then come back online to find friends and strangers a world away, meeting for a brief moment. One time, one meeting. 一期一会.

In 1991, Mark Weiser wrote “the most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”

Weiser was CTO at Xerox Parc, the infamous research lab that gave birth to many of the modern computing inventions like the desktop, the mouse, the GUI, among many many more. In this essay, he presented “ubiquitous computing,” a vision of technology with computers embedded into all of our daily objects rather than stuck in powerful desktops. A core part of the idea was idea of pads, a small handheld, “scrap computer,” which should be treated like scrap paper.1

This idea of “scrap computers” stuck with me, and I found myself reflecting what makes something disposable. What makes disposable software? How do you practice disposable making?

I like the term because it sounds like an insult. It dares you to engage with something rough on the edges and easily dismissed. But it also gives you permission to follow your gut because there’s no pressure to show something good.

My natural instinct is to explore via quantity: making a lot of stuff around a theme, fumbling my way to something of meaning. I’m not built to polish one final artifact. I keep fighting my natural instinct because polish is what gets rewarded, but what if I leaned into what I’m good at?

On my birthday in 2021, I started a challenge to write 100 mini-essays by the end of the year. It began as a gambit to myself—can I even make 100 things if I commit to it? The start was slow and hard as all starts are. I gnawed and railed against the commitment, forcing myself to sit down and setting timers to make sure I didn’t spend too long on any individual piece. Then, after a few times, a surprising ease settles in. It’s still hard every once in a while when I get stuck, but overall, it’s smooth, almost natural. Some pieces were certainly meh if not bad. Others felt like striking gold but only digging so far to see a glimpse of it above the dirt, like a golden iceberg rising out of the ground. Most of all, the process helped me understand the kind of writer I was.

In the end, I wrote 50,000+ words by the end of 2021, about the size of an average non-fiction book. (this is the first time I’ve compared it to a book and wow, it really feels shocking to make that realization).

This kind of daily making isn’t foreign to art making or even software art making. It’s a common constraint in drawing classes to do timed drawings, one-minute, five-minute, and so on. Zach Lieberman, an established code artist, recently opened a show showcasing 10 years of practicing daily sketches.

These things are all disposable—cheap, easily replaceable or take limited time but still very much valuable. They are intentional and taken in aggregate, meaningful and impressive.

Even things that are simple and “dumb” on the surface, become poetic when you commit to them long enough. I’ve been obsessed with finding and following the most insane examples of the “day x of y” videos on social media. For example, kicking a rock until it’s a sphere for hundreds of days, finding the crunchiest leaf, spinning loaves of bread, dropping a hydroflask, even fermenting kimchi at a Dave & Busters (h/t Danielle).2

There’s a freedom in the simple constraints. Your mind learns what can it be on autopilot for and starts discover creative angles in the repetition.

With the rise of LLMs and “vibe coding,” more and more essays and software are disposable in a different way. They have little to no lasting value and many are designed to “trick you” to capture your attention. They are empty.

It feels like walking into an abandoned mall: all the bones and none of the life.

These things are both disposable, but one is scrap—quick & intuitive but intentional—and the other is trash—mindlessly created en-masse.

What separates meaningful disposable work from empty work?

It’s not time invested or amount of flourish or even the end impact of it.

The value comes from the story, the intention, the lore behind the practice. The world around the work is what gives it soul. The meaning comes from the process and the commitment.

It’s the same thing that separates all the tech words that we’ve lost (community, agency, taste) from the real thing.

You know it when you see it. What’s real feels intimate, honest, true.

I’m thinking about all the daily practices I’ve tried in the past: creating experiments for playhtml, posting videos talking to the camera, & doing something physical with my hands.

I stopped doing this as much in public because I’ve become more self-conscious about what I share as my following has grown. I feel pressure to make my content worth it for people to consume and worry about attracting haters. I keep trying to remind myself that making people feel something is better than making them feel nothing, and receiving strong responses is what it means to make meaningful art.

I’d like to return to these humble, primitive roots, to share works-in-progress, experiments that become obsolete, and potential failures.

Today’s media economy also rewards continuous output. Attention decays fast. The momentum of continuously putting things out carries an unstoppable quality. Scrap works have a certain lightness to them that allows you to play, and the continual practice (and virtuous cycle of improvement) makes it feel like it produces perpetual energy.

Some artists would like to be inscrutable, but I’ve never understood that perspective. I’m reminding myself that my work is an attempt to connect with others—to feel deeply understood through my creations. I want the things I make to feel like one big accumulation of the same ideas.

I’ve been reading Brian Eno’s diary, A Year of Swollen Appendices, and at the beginning of the year, he recalls an old saying, “Old ideas don’t go away - new ones just get added.” Three years into exploring my own ideas full-time, I find it to be true. These days I’m still working on making a more lived-in, alive internet (in a new evolution of a project I started four years ago), inventing more playful ways to weird our ubiquitous devices, and discovering the joys of new ways of seeing, through materials, crafts, and structures.

I can’t wait to make again tomorrow.

In the spirit of disposable making, I’m going to be turning this section of my newsletter back into its original spirit of lab notes. It should be regular, easy (not so edited), and most of all, honest. Hope they make you feel more welcome to chime in :)

Updates

1. I’m making Internet portraits out of my cursor movements, keypresses, scrolls, etc. I’m anonymously collecting this data from others to create a collective portrait, and I’d be honored to have your data contribute. Eventually, the hope is for this to turn the entire internet into a shared, living social space that changes with our actual use and presence on websites. Sign up on wewere.online

   SIGN UP TO TRY!

2. I just released an easter egg on my website that shows people when I’m home and launches a live chat. I’d like to host an online studio visit at some point in the next couple of weeks. If you’re interested, just reply and I’ll tell you the details! I’ll also post on my socials about this at some point

3. I have a couple of shows coming up! On May 2nd-July in Miami some of my cursor trail work will be shown at What’s My Line and I’ll be debuting an embodied cousin of the cursor work at All Street Gallery for Recalculating Route.

what i’m paying attention to
or a short poem made from my recent are.na blocks

chopsticks makers, NASA artist-in-residence spelling with the earth, crickets in public toilets (h/t riley), keyboard sculpture, bespoke tv show video games for social media, artists that do it for the love of the game, the depths of cursed technology, it’s selfish to be an artist but if you do it, believe in something.

(I’m experimenting with this new form—perhaps another daily disposable making practice… pls let me know if you enjoy, but i enjoyed just doing this in 5 mins so i think i will keep doing it..)

This dispatch was sent to 2274 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and becoming a patron (or for those without Github, subscribing on Substack) for the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie artist (and access to the community & works-in-progress).

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Thank you to the 30 people who supported my independent work with a sponsorship last month, and a warm welcome to Mara, Tyrone, and Kendall.

What follows is a condensed breakdown of all the observations I had (of which there are a lot because China just operates so differently compared to every other country I’ve been to). I’m splitting them up into 3 sections: physical culture, digital culture, and craft/creative culture.

This is part three: creative & social culture.

“My livelihood is not your hobby,” said the Chinese ceramics master to our friend seeking to apprentice.

We were in 景德鎮 (Jingdezhen), the birthplace of porcelain. Down a street where the air was thick with dust, storefronts featured plates, cups, and vases of every size. Even some of the public trash cans and street laps were made of porcelain.

Our local tour guide (a friend who had moved there recently), pointed out the smaller stores hosting individual masters. One created molds, another painted beautiful figures, a third carved out intricate designs. Each chose a different thing to master. Rather than approaching the practice holistically, the industry operated best when you were just a piece of a larger ecosystem.

I didn’t understand the strong reaction at the time, but I started to piece together later. Asking to apprentice was a very normal American approach, but here, it violated a sacred norm. We hadn’t earned the right to ask; in fact, we had just shown our hand as clueless Americans.

In a factory in Shenzhen, I watched workers shepherd thousands of electronics and plastics through the assembly line, touching objects that would go on to be a part of the lives of millions of people every week.

The scale is baffling to try to comprehend, as was the theme of the experience in cities.

Before I visited, I thought factories would feel different from crafts like pottery and art, but I found them surprisingly similar. There’s more specialized processes, skills, and imperfections involved in the latter, but the industry treats them as the same. And despite the number of machines involved in the former, both wouldn’t survive without the massive amounts of manual human labor involved.

I think about the difference between the products I find here that feel more human-made (a cup thrown on a wheel) compared vs more machine-made (a plate made from a mold). There’s so many things I see online that I used to dismiss as cheap mass-produced objects, but I was realizing that many of them might actually be made mostly by hand.

There are “masters” in the factories just as there are in Jingdezhen. You must dance their game to earn their respect, and thus, their capacity for making your creation a reality for millions.

Over the course of a 2-hour drive out of Shenzhen, across a huge highway across an open sea, I watched massive skyscrapers shrink slightly and age dramatically. We had arrived in a Tier 2 city.

We walked into a hotel lobby which connected to a cavernous, mostly-abandoned mall. In the middle, a giant, taped off escalator flowed down into an empty bottom floor.

Upstairs, we met a stocky man who served us tea and fruits before he showed us the operation room. It was a normal office room but instead of monitors, hundreds of phones were strung up in staggering rows, all playing TikTok Lives. This “phone farm” sold new TikTok accounts on a sliding scale for the number of followers. These days they were experimenting with AI-generated content to grow new accounts. One test group of phones posted a diverse cast of AI American soldiers talking about home from a military base, others focused on AI Jesus content, and some tried variations of AI women in various outfits.

We talked about Intentions and history of the strategy of the business, and it became clear that there was no specific political strategy other than making a good business. They weren’t beholden to AI content (they were also experimenting with daily Tarot card readings and skyline timelapses), but AI content generation was the new cheap and efficient tool for them to try new things to fuel better growth.^[1]

There was no malice, just a hunger for arbitrage.

One successful Chinese businessman remarked how competition is so fierce that “[product] innovation is a matter of survival.”

In Western society, ideas are everything. We idolize and promote Idea Guys who want to change the world and protect those inventions with copyright law.

In China, ideas are worthless; execution is the only thing that matters. The one who survives is the winner.

In Apple in China^[2], Patrick Mcgee writes about a canon event in Apple shifting manufacturing to China when a Chinese supplier (Foxconn) won Apple’s favor by showing off a completely working iPod they had reverse-engineered without any assistance. There’s even a special term to describe this copying culture, Shanzai (山寨).^[3]

If your idea is out there in the world, it can be reproduced.

In China, density of talent and availability of hands makes physical reality feel almost as moldable as clay. You get the sense that that anything you can imagine can be made.

Culture, on the other hand, feels immovable. To gain power, you have to play by ancient norms with new modern rules.

Gaining respect involves demonstrating positional awareness—knowing where you stand in the environment: socially, politically, culturally, etc.

Finding arbitrage is one way to show that you understand the meta. So people start businesses, devote their lives to a craft, and have no time or respect for those who can’t show that they, too, understand how the world works.

The strong resistance to changing minds was surprising. Changing people’s minds feels like a natural given in Western culture. All my work deals with changing the status quo around computers and the internet, and so many of my peers and mentors are invested in changing culture. There may be arbitrage in the combination of these two...

I kept thinking of ocean waves, how peaceful and even simple they look from afar, and how ruthless they can be if you underestimate them. Like water, modern Chinese culture can be deceiving, and it expands, filling every crevice that it can. Any opportunity will be seized, any arbitrage will be leveraged. It’s not personal; it’s just in its nature.

This was my final dispatch from my trip in China! It took me a while to finish, but I’m still reflecting on many of these experiences and lessons.. I’d love to hear thoughts if you have had experiences or any other connections it makes you think of! Back to my regularly scheduled programming next - with a fun announcement coming in the next week :)

This dispatch was sent to 2274 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and becoming a patron (or for those without Github, subscribing on Substack) for the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie artist (and access to the community & works-in-progress).

Thank you to the 30 people who supported my independent work with a sponsorship last month, and a warm welcome to Mara, Tyrone, and Kendall.

What follows is a condensed breakdown of all the observations I had (of which there are a lot because China just operates so differently compared to every other country I’ve been to). I’m splitting them up into 3 sections: physical culture, digital culture, and craft/creative culture.

This is part two: digital culture.

I had landed in China powerless. Nothing on my phone worked, and in modern China, nothing happens without the graces of your phone.

Over the next few days, I slowly reassembled my basic adult functions, one app at a time. Calling a car required Didi, navigating to places—Amap, researching restaurants and venues—Dianping.

The next thing I had to acclimate to were the QR codes. They’re everywhere and the barrier to getting anything1. And if you thought you don’t need a new app, unfortunately, you’re wrong.

These codes encode specific in-app urls which require you to download one of the main central Chinese apps, 微信 (WeChat) or 支付宝 (Alipay). Viewing them with the in-app scanner leads you to a “mini-program“ (kind of like a self-contained app store) to order from.

At the many Chinese-brand smartphone stores like Huawei that are never seen in the U.S. (because they are classified as a national security threat), I tried and often failed to access a normal “browser.” This makes complete design sense given that almost all Internet usage in China comes from mobile apps and, by extension, these mini-apps.

China’s Internet adoption has been primarily mobile from its onset. Since 2010, Western outlets were already reporting on the dramatic rise of mobile Internet access in China. By 2015, websites had all but disappeared from mainstream use in favor of these mini-programs or 轻应用 (literally translates to “light apps”).2

These early light apps functioned as single-purpose interactive flyers, celebrating corporate milestones, advertising movies, and sharing data visualizations. The era of surfing the web was skipped in favor of tapping your phone.

These days, the mini-apps are bigger, more complicated, and can become entire multi-billion dollar businesses, as in the case of a matching game called 羊了個羊 (Sheep a Sheep), serve as marketing portals for pop-ups like the LV boat in the middle of Shanghai, and more commonly, as the ordering interface for any food store.

Most in-person interactions are delegated to the app, not that anyone has time to talk—popular chain shops are often slammed by a steady stream of delivery drivers and passerby. I once saw a stack of over 100 cups at a boba shop covered in an avalanche of order receipts. When ordering you can even see how popular each dish is (how many monthly orders and where they stack against each other), so you can get recommendations directly from the data.

In fact, it’s rare to go in-person to get anything at all. Every store I talked with, from pottery to interior design to jewelry, said that over 2/3 (if not higher) of their sales are online. Instead, consumers purchase via the feed of livestreamers pawning off goods. While a core responsibility of store employees, there’s an army of independent streamers who attend vintage fairs and art markets to buy goods for their audience in return for a commission.

It all started to make sense when I discovered that websites in China are built on a completely different, insular substrate of infrastructure. Mini-apps are made of custom forks of HTML, proprietary ones for each major company, each with their own rules and syntax.3 From the outside (and as a foreigner), you can’t even access most of the apps because they are gated behind login screens that require Chinese phone numbers.

Living in China means living in an alternate Internet.

A weird hybrid between traditional mobile apps and websites, these apps feel uniform and impersonal, while streamlining all the core parts of an everyday app. They load fast, even on old hardware, connect automatically to your identity, and integrate directly with your wallet for payments.

When it all works, it’s pretty magical, especially compared to traumatizing account registrations, sketchy credit card fields, and unfamiliar interfaces prone to random errors.

Naturally, this made any encounter with Chinese digital space fascinating. Nowhere else4 can you experience an entirely different Internet. On the trains, I would peer intently over shoulders to see what people did on their phones. Sometimes it’d be so crowded that I’d have several screens inches away from my face. People played games, watched movies, shopped, searched for restaurants, and more—everything I’d probably see in the subway in America—except different interfaces and content.

When I struggled to do something necessary on my phone in-person (getting an online discount, buying a train ticket, etc.), I’d watch a local blaze through tens of menus to the right place as soon as I gave them my phone. They were fluent in the web in a whole new way.

The Internet I’m used to still exists, but you have to cross the border with your VPN. It makes me think of dial-up in the original web, and I wonder if it feels anything like that ritualistic experience of “logging on.”

Regardless of what it looks like, our relationships with the Internet seem to be the same: our phones are extensions of ourselves, we’re trapped in a web we can’t shape, and our attention is currency for dominant platforms.

Personal websites, weird forums, and handmade web spaces can’t be found in these mini-apps. Not that they fare much better on this side of the Internet, but at least I know where to find them.

Unexpectedly, I found myself feeling hope for the Internet (one that’s alive, whimsical, intimate) I care about. If a country can build a different Internet and make it the norm, we can too.

The audacity to have hope for a large, cultural change like this would be completely foreign in China. The Internet can be reinvented and any physical product can be created, but generally, cultural change is perceived as impossible. This was the most surprising thing I encountered during my trip, and I’m excited to dig into this and how it relates to craft in my final piece!

See you then,
Spencer

UPDATES

1. I’ve been making Internet self-portraits using my browsing data and the beta is coming! The eventual goal is to turn the entire Internet into a shared space to facilitate the kinds of spontaneous, ephemeral encounters we experience in real life that makes us feel a part of the community. Sign up here to be on the beta!

2. Things I found on the Internet: I seem to have found a lot of horse-related websites that are very enjoyable lately: gradient.horse, enclose.horse, and this horse doom-scroll preventer.

3. Open Calls: The Are.na team is looking for pitches to their 8th volume of the Are.na Annual on the topic of “score.” The Internet Phone Book, the yellow pages of the Internet, is looking for submissions for Issue 2.

This dispatch was sent to 2030 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and becoming a patron (or for those without Github, subscribing on Substack) for the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie artist (and access to the community & works-in-progress) .

Thank you to the 27 people who supported my independent work with a sponsorship last month.

China is the most capitalist place I have ever been to. It feels so good to be a consumer, especially because prices are so low compared to U.S.. At every restaurant, several servers take care of you, ensuring your tea is never empty and your food comes out instantly. At the malls, employees stand by the door and hold it open for you (even if it can lock into place by itself).

Speaking of the malls, they are the pinnacle of the absurdity of modern Chinese capitalism. A 17-floor climbing wall, a mermaid show in a fish tank, and a hot pot restaurant’s traditional performance for waiting patrons in camping chairs are among the standouts.

Anything that exists is available often at any hour of the day. Want a massage at 11pm? Look up massages on 大众点评 (Dianping) and walk in. Need coffee in between meetings? Order a 美团 (Meituan) to get a scooter to deliver a single-origin pour to your hand as you walk between them.

The morning after going out dancing, I ordered a breakfast feast from bed and it arrived to my door, delivered by a man in an all-yellow outfit and motorcycle helmet by the time I had rolled out, all for much less than I would have paid for a breakfast sandwich in San Francisco.

Because there’s so much technological advances, I assumed that human labor would be automated, too. Instead, I see people everywhere I look—human labor that has exploded to fill the gaps where the automation can’t reach.

So while you can order anything from an app, correcting any mistakes requires human support to call the involved stores to manually adjust. When you book train tickets on trip.com, your request goes to Chinese staff who call the relevant stations to book your ticket. You can find thousands of suppliers online, but the most important business is conducted through WeChat voice messages and over tea next to the factory.

These systems have a massive chain of dependencies that are rigid to a fault, which leaves it up to humans and manual interventions to change anything. In short, it all comes down to “knowing a guy.”

Visiting Shenzhen, I started to understand that creating anything material is not only possible but easy because anything you need can be acquired, affordably and quickly.

I ordered all kinds of materials from Taobao. One of these finds became the basis for a project Kelin and I hacked together called Bumper Phones, in less than 6 hours. The physical good convenience of China combined with the digital good convenience of modern AI-coding tools made creation feel instantaneous. It was the first time the malleability of the physical world felt close to how easy it feels to change the digital. I imagined a universe doubling down on this power, locking into the 996 grind in China, getting delivery for every meal, and creating all the art I’ve wanted to make.

At the factories, I watched thousands of products be born, millions of which will reach people’s homes in the coming weeks and months. The scale of impact that these people have on the world is immense. A said “what I’m doing is nothing in comparison.” We shared a deep existential realization about how much influence you can actually have on people’s lives and each questioned our relationships to scale.

As S and I lay face down getting Dianping massages, we started talking with the masseuses about life in China vs life in America, and one of them remarked 中國太方便了 (”life in China is too convenient”).

China operates in a primitive future: the bleeding edge of technology is incorporated into daily life at unthinkable scale but patched together by an army of human laborers working for meager wages and punishing conditions.1

As much as I enjoyed getting all my material comforts met at any time of day for cheap, I can’t help but wonder if this is how I want to live. There are things that are undeniably good (an affordable and livable society) and things that I’m not sure the cost of but I desperately yearn for in my life (access to any physical material for creative projects). Which things come with the territory, and when is the power worth the sacrifice?

Lately, with each advancement of our machines, I’ve been thinking about this anecdote from Kurt Vonnegut. Convenience is powerful and tempting, especially as a creative who never feels like they have enough time or resources. But I'm not sure we deserve that much power.

I can’t imagine giving up my frictionful everyday human encounters. The inconvenience is the cost we pay to encounter each other, to stumble onto a new discovery, to expand our ways of seeing. These kinds of things can’t be engineered.

Spencer

I have so many thoughts from this trip that it’s hard to condense into just one piece! next time, I’ll talk about the digital culture in China and how it felt to be forced to completely change my digital infrastructure. And then I’ll close reflecting on the culture around and attitude towards craft.

UPDATES

1. In Internet Sculptures news, I released Touchstone, a companion app for customizing your sculptures (learn more). It feels exciting to create physical objects that will last and also enable you to adapt the digital side to grow with you. I also broke down my launch of the Phone Pillow and reflected on everything I did wrong.

2. I’m getting closer to getting some public released for my internet movement extension, which will track your browser actions and turn them into art pieces and eventually turn the entire Internet into a shared space. Sign up here to be on the beta!

This dispatch was sent to 1924 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and becoming a patron (or for those without Github, subscribing on Substack) for the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie artist (and access to the community & works-in-progress) .

Thank you to the 27 people who supported my independent work with a sponsorship last month.

https://spencer.place/posts/inevitable-2026

Here’s a short preview & you’ll find recent updates at the bottom:

What have I learned from this year of existence on this earth? It feels like we’re in a time of extremes. Trump is back; Mamdani is mayor. We’re in an age of unprecedented growth and we’re in a massive bubble on the verge of popping. AI will change the world, and it’s a pyramid scheme. What is real is evolving rapidly. Abandoning language seems like a defensive mechanism. 67 is a universal language that transcends the intellectual superiority of the machine. Simple is better when we are outgunned at every turn. Old becomes real becomes good. Used becomes proof of existence. New things are easier and easier, and our capacity to tend and maintain continues to deteriorate.

This year included many personal milestones, I started the year with my first large institutional commission from Hyundai Artlab, where I made a an art piece that lives on your phone and invites you to play with our devices in new, physical ways (later in the year, I would watch 300+ people do it together inside the Internet Archive, thank you ash & tiat!). Then, I finished up my first large-scale installation of Computing Shrines for NEW INC’s DEMO 2025. After, I pitched a weird and social media piece, subverting Instagram to create collective art, for Alserkal Avenue, made a tribute to the alive internet for the Internet Archive, and brought Computing Shrines to Tokyo Geidai. I designed, prototyped, and productionized the Phone Pillow for my Internet Sculptures store. I taught and led 5 workshops in 3 cities, all towards the purpose of helping people shape software. I found a short enough tagline that feels good: “software you can touch.”…

READ THE REST

OR CLICK HERE !! https://spencer.place/posts/inevitable-2026

RECENT UPDATES

1. I’m back from 1.5 months in Asia and several weeks in China where I experienced a complete cultural shock (even being ethnically Chinese and passably fluent in Mandarin). It truly felt like a “I know nothing” moment, especially in regard to how things are made, how societies are run, and what the Internet is for. Deeper reflections to come in a future post!

2. Paul Moore did a lovely write-up for Its Nice That on the Internet art scene, highlighting the Internet Phone Book, Daniel Murray, and yours truly among others!

3. As part of my desire to create “studies,” I’ve started my first one of the year in turning my Internet detritus (cursor movements, keystrokes, etc.) into art. Eventually, I want to open this up for anyone to install as a browser extension and create a collective self-portrait of the Internet. Reply if you’d be interested in beta testing!

4. I had an amazing time showing my work in Tokyo and running a new workshop, called Worn Memory, where participants created visible alterations to old clothes and embedded a website to store each wearers’ memories of the clothing for the people its passed down to in the future.

—-

This dispatch was sent to 1845 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and becoming a patron (or for those without Github, subscribing on Substack) for the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie artist (and access to the community & works-in-progress) .

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Thank you to the 27 people who supported my independent work with a sponsorship last month.

software you can touch

I’ve long struggled with how to describe myself. If you take a tour through my old posts, you’ll find a weaving evolution of descriptors and terminology. Artist, engineer, designer, internet caretaker, creative technologist, writer, researcher. Nouns—traditional, evocative, and unconventional—come and go and shuffle back and forth.

I’ve cringed at how verbose I’ve had to be in describing myself. If you are a creative person, I’m sure you know the struggle of attempting to answer the dreaded question “so what do you do?” when meeting a new person. You’d think that after almost three years working on my own things that I’d have a good answer to this by now, but I’ve found that the clarity (or perhaps it’s merely confidence) comes in waves. Sometimes the answer comes smoothly, as natural as saying my name. Other times, it begins with a long pause and a stilted answer that makes me yearn for a do-over after.

I met someone recently who told me that they followed me because of this new tagline in my bio: “software you can touch.” So I guess something about it is working!

A tagline is basically a really, really difficult introduction. It entails condensing your introduction down into less than a single sentence. When there’s so little space for words, you start to overthink each meaning. What does it mean to say I’m an artist? What does it mean if I say artist before designer, designer before engineer? What do I really value when I have to choose what comes first?

It’s so easy to forget that words are hard. In fact, they’re probably harder now that making software is so easy. The shorter they are, the harder they become. You have less leeway to make your point, less time to convey a feeling. In many ways, coming up with a tagline is like writing a poem.

So why software you can touch?

I care about making things that live with us in the world and directly touch our lives, meaning I care more about continued impact than viral reach and tangible experiences than theoretical concepts.

How do you create something that lives with you? Being able to touch it is a good first step. It’s not locked behind glass, isn’t impossible to change, and doesn’t require a lot of prework to understand. It invites curiosity, participation, and ultimately, collaboration.

In Physical media: why we just want to feel something, Tiff writes about how touch is about more than just the moment:

This may be a bit of a stretch but bear with me: to touch is also to be seen. To touch is to ground yourself, to reaffirm your existence. An accidental dog ear, stains from sips of tea, shreds from pages torn out of a notebook all gesture towards some form of human presence. Past or present.

In the past, I’ve centered descriptions of my work around technology for community. I still champion communal computing as one of the guiding pillars for what I build. But what does it even mean to talk about community when the very systems that are tearing us apart from each other wave community around as their core values?

@gqDesigner #MartineRose on the word "community" in fashion. See the full video from '#VirgilAbloh: The Codes' at the link in bio.

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A while ago, a mentor asked me “what does community mean to you?” The problem is that the term has been so overused as to become meaningless. Tech companies sling it around to justify their consolidation of power, and it feels a little silly as a rallying cry when there are masked men stealing community members off the streets across the US.

So instead, we get specific. To touch is also to be seen. To be seen is to become two rather than one. Repeat that motion tens, hundreds of times and a community is formed.

Things we can touch cannot be theoretical. Touch is about intimacy, immediacy, a direct person-to-person connection. It is about breaking through the layers of abstraction, of bureaucracy, containers, and wordy defenses. It’s about piercing a line straight from one heart to another.

My work began with web works and have evolved to include physical internet vessels. I am continuously playing with intimacy and tangibility and how they intersect with us and our devices. Ironically, digital works are surprisingly tangible compared to many physical art pieces. They can often play out on our computers and phones, devices that we touch and immerse ourselves in day after day. It feels personal when we use our devices, an inherent closeness to our lives that isn’t present when we experience technology in a clean setting.

When I wrote touching computers to describe creating a clay vessel to hold my personal website—a body for my digital creation, I thought about touching in two ways.

1. I created a physical body for my digital home that I could touch with my hands and

2. I had an emotionally meaningful experience with a website, through this body.

This physical experience had transformed into an emotional one. And it doesn’t stop at emotional connection. When you become intimate with something, it makes it feel like something you can change. A mental connection is developed—an understanding of how the other behaves in relation to you.

Touch develops connections across our fields of perception: physical, emotional, mental. It disarms us to open up new connections that we didn’t know were possible.

And once we can touch software, we can learn to hold it—turn a single moment into a continued relationship—one that we care for, maintain, and nurture.

Over dinner with Leia, we talked about how we feel about the things we’ve made and the struggle of artists to define ourselves. What is the one question or sentence that captures what we care about? We came up with a few questions to apply to projects to help us identify it.

1. Do you love it?

2. Does it feel like you?

We’ve both published this alignment exercise on our websites (mine, L’s). If you do it yourself, let me know!

I don’t know what caused me to land on this new mantra. There’s no doubt that it’ll likely change over the years, if even that long. But for now, this feels like a culmination of the past few years. Three years to find four words. Life sometimes feels like it moves so slowly, doesn’t it?

UPDATES

1. I’m writing this from the plane on my first business trip to Tokyo. I’ll be here for the next two weeks setting up an exhibition and participating in Future Vision Summit. Afterwards I’ll stick around Shanghai and Shenzhen for a few weeks. If you’re around or have recommendations for artful, interesting, or unusual spaces, let me know!

2. Since I wrote about alive internet theory, which is now my most popular post to date, I created a project by the same name for the Internet Archive’s celebration of a trillion webpages archived. check it out at alivetheory.net

3. The Internet Sculptures shop just closed for the year! I launched the first new product, the Phone Pillow, a pillow that puts your phone to sleep, to a resounding success. thank you for all your support and any new orders will ship out next year :)

This dispatch was sent to 1779 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and becoming a patron (or for those without Github, subscribing on Substack) for the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie artist (and access to the community & works-in-progress) .

Thank you to the 27 people who supported my independent work with a sponsorship last month, and a warm welcome to Aadil and Thaddeus.

In the midst of all this uncertainty, many blame AI companies for unleashing the beast. But in the end, those abusing this technology for botting are just playing the game set by the owners of the modern-day internet. Instagram, Reddit, and other major social platforms are built to prioritize audience capture and engagement, not community wellness. The AI is just doing what computers do best—optimizing for a given constraint, and the platforms sell more ads off their virtual backs.

With all this happening, it’s easy to forget there’s still so much life thriving on the open Internet. From rural forums, towns, and fridge walls to community-run encyclopedias and maps, pockets of humanity continue to flourish despite (& perhaps now, in part, in spite) of these existential fears. Messages tossed into the void come back as real friends, collaborators, partners. Strangers meet up spontaneously after shared struggle. Earnestness shines through even in “content” manufactured for spread.

To believe in each other, we must believe in the open Internet.

If dead internet theory posits that the internet will eventually become only bots, alive internet theory proclaims we will never let the open internet die. We will always find a way to look for each other, to answer a call for help, to share a laugh and an argument right after one another. If there’s one trait of the human race that every apocalypse movie agrees on, it’s our will to survive.

But survival doesn’t have to be where we stop. What might happen if we tried to thrive? How can we make the open internet more resilient, vibrant, and collaborative than ever?

When the Internet was first introduced, it felt like a magical place you could visit from the comfort of your home. There was a ritual to enter: checking all the connections, dialing into your service provider, and deciding what website you would start from.

The Internet is still a place, but it’s been overdeveloped and undergoverned. Like cities that have prioritized cars over people, visiting the internet now entails controlled apps and search engines, designed for extraction. There’s nowhere to rest because the benches are covered in spikes. All we can do is sink into the feed and run along the scrollbar until our eyes bleed.

So what would it take to reclaim the Internet as our space?

Maybe it starts with having places where we can go to just hang out?

Not to status signal, scheme a job, or consume content.

Just a place where we can sit for a while, watch the virtual scenery change, and see cursors flutter by.1

There is a virtual place where this has existed for a long time. As a kid, I loved spending time hanging out in video games like Runescape, just watching the pixelated environment and other players pass on the way to new adventures. We already have so much richness available in the existing environment of the internet. Why can’t we claim it as our public space?

Where can we sit together on the internet? Where do we go for a stroll? Where do we find the digital equivalent of the remote hot spring up in the mountains, or that hidden hike to the waterfall? How do we discover a new neighborhood, shelter under a bodega awning during a summer shower, sit quietly at a cafe and work among the chatter of strangers?

We are all so online, yet being online feels so solitary. I can’t feel the people across the feeds from me. Social media is designed for consumption of content, distribution of branding, broadcasting of prestige, not spontaneous encounters or the warm, funny, and weird moments that happen when humans simply exist together.

But what if we had the tools to reshape it? We could make our own public parks, cafes, bodegas, waterfalls, and mountains. We could carve out spaces that we inhabit and maintain, becoming active stewards rather than just users.

This is why I keep finding myself coming back to playhtml. I’ve been able to imagine and create new ways of being with people online, sharing experiences I’ve never had before. I’m in wacky territory now, where the ideas are messing with fundamental assumptions about how websites and the internet work. I’m not sure if that’s what will lead to this vision, but it feels like it’s in the right direction.

This dispatch was sent to 1651 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and becoming a patron (or for those without Github, subscribing on Substack) for the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie artist (and access to the community & works-in-progress) .

Thank you to the 30 people who supported my independent work _with a sponsorship last month.

What does it mean to be a visitor? Can you visit your own home?

Earlier, I filmed myself pretending to be a guest leaving my own house to fill a video narrative. After, I rode the N over to the SFMOMA for the closing weekend of the installation of The Visitors by Ragnar Kjartansson. Everyone who I shared the elevator with was headed to the same place. When I got there, the dark room, filled with 9 looming screens, each focused on a single musician was filled with people, and the sounds of the instruments wove between the bodies and spilled out into the hallway.

Many writers much better than I have written eloquently about the impact of The Visitors, so while I may not be able to add much more, it’s a piece that compels you to try.

If you haven’t been lucky enough to experience it, you can watch this video for a taste, or if you’re in SF, go see it tomorrow (Sunday) for the last day it’s up. The main things to know are that it’s a single take over 9 different cameras where a group of musicians play a song together with less than 3 lines of lyrics. In one, there’s a naked man laying in a bathtub playing a guitar. Another shows a woman playing a cello at the top of a grand staircase. It sounds silly and perhaps boring, but it’s incredible how much variation and depth of detail emerge from this premise over the course of the 1+ hour runtime.

It doesn’t feel like an accident that to view the full experience, you must roam around the room from screen to screen, and to do so, you must move through the other visitors, meeting their eyes as you search for the eyes of the performers. You can’t help but see their faces illuminated in the soft bluish-white glow of the screens. And at some point, the boundary between audience and performer blurs. The song is so simple that it invites you to join in the chorus, humming or singing softly to yourself. Being shot in a single take without edits, everyday sounds come through with the music: the occasional dropped object, sharp breath, and participant chatter. In this mix, I find myself confusing the sounds of the audience with those of the performance, too.

a still from one of the screens during the installation

Like the best films let their actors shine, this piece lets its performers shine. A simple rhythm with simple lyrics, the piece sets a stage for the chorus of different instruments to improvise, dance, and play with those constraints. At times, the musicians are playing as quietly and delicately as they can, whispering the chorus hauntingly, and as soon as you’ve adjusted, they crescendo into a deafening instrumental symphony.

I don’t have a good musical ear, but I find myself trying to pick apart the different instruments in the sounds. It’s helped by the fact that each screen gets its own speaker, so I can wander closer to get a better gauge.

At some point as I’m wandering, I’m surprised by a sudden impulse to cry. I quickly glance away from the eyes of a stranger across the room to hide my sudden emotion.

On the 2nd watch through, I sit in the corner facing the crowd and watch people more than the screens. I see a woman smiling with that rare mix of awe and joy, an older couple hugging each other tightly, a kid jumping on his mom who is laying on the ground listening to the music. I see serious expressions entranced by the music and watch them diffuse into unexpected laughter at some of the more absurd points (Ragnar, the naked bathtub man at one point takes off his towel to wipe up some spilled champagne and puts it back on in one swift motion).

By the end, the song has burrowed its way into your heart. I’m not surprised to catch parts of the melody whistled in the bathroom and at the cafe.

I think what makes the piece so successful is how it plays with paradoxes.

There’s a naked man in a bathtub and an ancient mansion. There’s a striking performance and cigar breaks. Everyone is separated on different screens, yet creating something beautiful together.

In an article in the New Yorker in 2014, Peter Schjeldahl writes:

The Visitors” was entrancingly beautiful and intensely moving. Numerous viewers wept. Why? The reason is politically visionary, in a way: “Alone, together,” Kjartansson says. The work affirms individuality and community at once. It would be awfully nice if life were like that—as it can be, for an occasional spell, under the aegis of art.

As the audience, we mirror the paradoxes as we watch: crying, laughing, contemplating, relaxing. We stare at separate screens while sharing the same space, and in the end, we huddle together to watch the conclusion.

During the end, as they all migrate from their individual screens to congregate in one to celebrate and walk off into the horizon, a little kid (in the audience) yells “bye!!” Some of the adults laugh and join in.

Joy and helplessness. Irreverence and transcendence. Alone, together.

Bye-bye Visitors. I’m looking forward to the next time we meet.

Updates

1. I’ve been working on some exciting new features for playhtml recently and exploring what it would look like to create a game that plays out on the existing internet. I’m looking for some early beta testers for this! reply/message me if you’re interested :)

2. After almost a year of procrastinating on releasing a new product for internetsculptures.com because of all the logistical hurdles. I have finally pushed myself to releasing a small initial drop of the Phone Pillow. I’ll be sending an insider newsletter to subscribers there soon about the progress :)

3. I’m trying out a short-form content series called “Will it internet?” (shout out to Elan for the name and brainstorming!). I just released Episode 1 and would love to hear any thoughts or ideas for what I should try next :)

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This dispatch was sent to 1643 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and becoming a patron (or for those without Github, subscribing on Substack) for the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie artist (and access to the community & works-in-progress) .

Thank you to the 27 people who supported my independent work _with a sponsorship last month.

taken on a spring day at the Skyspace by the de Young

The beauty and effectiveness of the Skyspace lies in curation—a pinhole into the sky set against a backlit white frame turns an everyday sight into something extraordinary. In doing so, it reveals the magician's prestige: how to spot the extraordinary in everything around us. For artists and creatives who have already learned this lesson, it’s easy to apply it in everyday scenarios, to select an interesting part from the whole and focus on it. Before I learned this lesson, I was consumed with capturing the whole and getting everything. When I took photos as a kid, I tried my hardest to fit my entire field of vision—the wider the lens, the more capable I felt. To miss anything felt like I was losing something precious.

Ironically, the opposite is necessary to learn that we should cherish the beauty of little moments. We have to make a part so beautiful that we can’t help but appreciate the whole. When you visit the Skyspace, it gifts you a preciousness that resurfaces every time you look at the sky afterward.

What is the Skyspace for the Internet? How do I create a pinhole to highlight all the little human actions through technology that make me believe in the goodness of people over and over again? How do I show the extraordinary in the swipe of a finger, the tap of a key, the press of a button? How do we start seeing all the people behind those actions, hoping to meet them, believing in them, even, whenever we interact online?

a still from Yi Yi, directed by Edward Yang. A son asks his father about how we can know what each other sees, when we can only see from our own eyes.

When I reflect on personal experiences, I think about the things that have stayed with me long after they happened. I think of Perfect Days and Yi Yi, films that somehow never fail to make me cry no matter how many times I see them for how seen they make me feel. I think about encountering Sarah Sze’s work for the first time, how her sprawling sculptures took my breath away and rewired my brain for how you could think about installation.

Ultimately, what I’m interested in is the ability to widen our aperture, to bring more light in with every look at the world. I’m interested in developing the awareness mid-gaze of what we are perceiving, experimenting with new ways of looking, and planting the seed for that change to spread.

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a screenshot of a typical marketplace in Runescape

I’m trying to think about the first moment that opened my eyes up to the possibility of the internet. Perhaps standing in the crowded square of Runescape with every manner of conversation floating in Comic Sans text above pixelated avatars. Something about the denseness of the text, the low fidelity aesthetic, made me realize that these were actual people. Maybe it was on twitter in 2020 as I found other people who thought like me and were interested in the same weird internet concepts. The first time I read a blog and felt it could have come straight from my brain. I don't know if art can evoke the same feeling as these fleeting, spontaneous lived experiences, but I sure hope to facilitate them in whatever I make.

It's funny that the Runescape example comes up because it houses one of my worst memories of the Internet as well. One day, I met a friendly stranger who offered me a new weapon and proposed we fight some beasts together. The area they had in mind was past the boundary of the Wilderness—an area full of precious loot, along with dangerous monsters and the ability for players to attack each other. I had never been and was scared to death, but it felt like a unique opportunity to try it out. So I put on my best armor and we headed out together. As I crossed the barrier, acknowledging the in-game prompt that described the dangers, I remember thinking: I could lose everything.

And that's exactly what happened. Only a few paces out from the barrier, my new "friend" began attacking me. I froze. I started typing in all caps incoherently, in fear, as I frantically tried to click back towards the entrance. My character fell, and the screen slowly faded to black.

Whenever I remember this experience these days, I wonder what that person is up to now. I wonder how many people they pulled this trick on, what went through their mind as they did their first time. In that moment, I'm sure we were both high on adrenaline, sharing a twisted kind of emotional intimacy.

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a screenshot from Jubilee's Surrounded series that pits one person against 20 people with a different belief system

The popular curation of these kinds of experiences is to represent them as black and white—good and evil. Show these people preying on innocent victims and then create an elaborate scheme to show them a piece of their own medicine. Scamming scammers, highlight reels of dunking on supporters of any establishment figure, and even a catfish version of the Runescape story I shared. There's something incredibly satisfying about these stories. They follow the classic Western template of justice: rewarding good behavior and doling out divine punishment on the bad.

Yet they don't feel like they do anything to change the cycle. In fact, they might add fuel to the fire, turning a small battle into an all-out war.

Recently, I came across a video that shows a different view. In it, a girl shares the voicemail left by a "scammer" who is laughing and blessing her after getting tricked by her voicemail greeting in which she pretends to answer the phone. There's a subversion of the traditional scripts here. The roles of "hero" and "villain" fall away to reveal two people sharing a moment. The narrative becomes messy, real. Perhaps a scammer realizes that he is preying on innocent people. Perhaps we realize that these so-called scammers have families of their own they are trying to support, too. Or nothing changes at all. We are left to wonder with the question, to find the answers ourselves.

I have long described my goal partially as creating “useful art”. What makes something valuable to me is that it deals with how we live, in the real world, in our real lives. I'm not exactly sure how this voicemail example scales into more universal change, but it feels relatable and real. It makes me wonder about how I can reproduce this kind of deviation in my own scam calls. More importantly, just like every time I enter Skyspace, I feel my perception changing in response to it.

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This dispatch was sent to 1634 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and becoming a patron (or for those without Github, subscribing on Substack) for the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie artist (and access to the community & works-in-progress) .

Thank you to the 29 people who supported my independent work _with a sponsorship last month, and a warm welcome to Peter and Chris.

1

It’s funny how fate works sometimes. It seems the most important things never happen as straightforwardly as you intend them to regardless of how well you plan.

I’m 30 minutes from landing back in San Francisco after four weeks in New York. A few weeks ago, a video popped up on my feed showing a politician speaking earnestly with people on the street. All of sudden he seemed to be everywhere with an electrifying energy and a commitment to making New York more affordable for everybody. I became a little obsessed at the momentum he had rallied behind his cause and spent hours deepdiving into how his presence evolved. Yesterday night, I watched him become the Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York City.

Media sources described him as a danger to the city, the establishment shunned him, and yet this young assemblymember with a radical vision, honest disposition, and earnest past seems poised to be the ultimate decisionmaker behind $10 billion in the city that arguably most represents the entire US. His victory has already set off a wave of global responses that mark an upheaval in the political landscape, seeding the hope for unabashedly progressive and young people to run for office.

Pundits and critics have tried to dissect his success already—his unparalleled fieldwork and social media presence, the diverse coalition that came out, the scandals and negative vision of his rival. But there’s so many people whose names we don’t know who have laid the groundwork for a proud democratic socialist and muslim to be in this position.

I’m reminded of Beto’s run in Texas, close to my home, AOC, Andrew Yang and so many more who have laid the groundwork for us to believe in a politics of dreaming big and delivering for everyone. It remains to be seen if Zohran will make it to City Hall and whether he will deliver on his intentions. But I’m rooting for him and all the people who’ve entrusted their dreams to him when politics has so often felt like it has abandoned us.

Orb is an anime that follows a sequence of protagonists over many decades who are only connected by their fateful encounters with heliocentrism when it was still considered blasphemy by the Catholic Church and propagators were hunted and sentenced to death.

It's a surprising story format when so much of today's popular media focuses on creating singular heroes and villains. The characters are relatable and compelling, but they aren't the main focus. The central protagonist is just the idea—a blasphemous and dangerous one that drives people to flip their entire lives, both in service and in opposition to it.

(mild spoilers below)
None of the main protagonists we see manage to bring heliocentrism to life, and most of their main efforts from the proofs to the political pathmaking don't last the test of time. The only trace that lasts is the rumor of a book talking about the idea. A university student overhears the title which stays with him until he writes a commentary about the idea as a professor 20 years later. A student named Copernicus reads this commentary a decade later, and you know the rest.

None of Orb's protagonists are in the history books, but they represent all the people that made the breakthrough possible by setting the foundation decades before. I wonder about all the unknown contributors to most of the magical innovations that we take for granted today—the internet, airplanes, microwaves. I wonder how many of them dreamed about becoming "the one" to break through and how they felt when they didn't quite make it. Would they feel satisfied seeing the future now?

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Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuang-zi and translated from Mandarin by Lin King is a novel about a Japanese novelist, her Taiwanese interpreter, and the book the former dedicates to the latter. The entire book is designed to be the novel that the novelist, Aoyama Chizuko, wrote about her time in Taiwan, and it's only through a series of unlikely events that it is published. In a series of letters at the end of the book, it shows how the publication takes place: Chizuko publishes the original in Japan with a dream of it reaching the interpreter. The novelist's daughter spends her life searching until she finally finds the interpreter in Austin, TX and convinces her to do the first Mandarin Chinese translation. The real author of the book, Shuang-zi, writes about how the new Mandarin Chinese edition is realized in the 21st century, finding snippets of mentions of Chizuko, which leads her to doing special research to creating the book. Finally, the translator, King, writes "a Taiwanese translator, while bringing the book to the ultimate colonial language of English, has struggled to determine how the Japanese colonial government would have pronounced Taiwanese terms and therefore consulted the Japanese translation of a Taiwanese novel that claims to be a Taiwanese translation of a Japanese novel."

Chizuko is a fictional character, but the series of coincidences that led to the book being published feel real. And it's incredible to me how many stories are wrapped up in this "one" story, how efforts to reproduce (translation) lead to the creation of unexpected side-effects, how so many things that appear "flat" have so many layers to unravel. Reality has a surprising amount of detail, and the web of details grows larger every moment.

At the pottery studio the other night, I recognized a face. I don't remember their name because we never really talked, but I remember they were at the same dorm in college. It was a face I recognized from long nights working in the dining hall. I felt a shockwave of surprise, both seeing someone from a past life, almost 7 years ago, and at the fact that I even recognized them despite how long had passed.

The environment was different—a cold, foggy night in San Francisco compared to the warm and humid evenings of Houston—but it felt fitting that we encountered each other again in the same circumstances, working late at night in a shared space.

I didn't say hi because there was nothing to say, but I silently wished them well on the pieces they were glazing and let myself feel comforted by the smallness of the world. I cherish this feeling whenever it shows up because I know it will soon fade. It's intimate and comforting yet bittersweet, like sharing an inside joke with the universe, one in a series of grand bits we commit to in the thing we call life.

I think a lot about coincidences, chance encounters, and fateful moments, how they always seem to feel more intentional than coincidental. Like the things that you feel need to happen do happen in some way or another, given enough time and enough chances.

I find myself circling around this question over and over throughout my life. In 2020, I wrote about dilution, an unsatisfactory metaphor for this feeling of constant osmosis between each other and the world. I found myself searching for it again in interconnected systems and relationships in my word of 2022 and the objects I held onto from a big move. This year I dove into the topic while teaching Gift Interfaces with Elan and found myself obsessed with the coincidences that gifts are built on and celebrate and how some of the greatest gifts are the space those coincidences to happen in the first place (Elan and I meeting and teaching the class even feel a bit like a magical coincidence).

These constellations of coincidences are collaborative works, a partnership between people and the world. Our hopes, dreams, and longings crystallized in fragments of light in other people's timelines. A single point becomes a line becomes a star becomes a leaf becomes a tree becomes a root system that fills the sky. I'm not sure what point I'm at in my various storylines, but I hope I can look up one day and marvel at all the galaxies we've made.

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Updates

1. I'll be sharing a new interactive work with Alserkal Avenue, a Dubai-based arts organization, starting August 15. Check out their Instagram to participate :)

2. I'm among the local artists who received a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission this year to support Computing Shrines. Stay tuned :)

3. I made a video of the magical moment 300+ people at the Internet Archive tossed their phones in response to everyday

4. I ran my first half-marathon at 6:30am on Sunday in SF. It’s the first physical goal I’ve had in a long time, and I’m proud to finally be proud of something that is completely unrelated to my creative practice :)

This dispatch was sent to 1612 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and becoming a patron (or for those without Github, subscribing on Substack) for the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie artist (and access to the community & works-in-progress) .

Thank you to the 27 people who supported my independent work _with a sponsorship last month, and a warm welcome to Jamie, Raymond, and Michael.

In the weeks leading up to it, I shipped a 100lb+ rock from San Francisco, learned to use a CNC on a large corkboard, and created 3 distinctive and expressive tiny social networks.

DEMO2025 is the showcase of the latest work from NEW INC, the New Museum's art and technology incubator. I flew in a week early and spent the weekend prior installing so that everything was ready for the show. It's the largest physical installation I've ever worked: featuring 4 distinct works joined by a single unifying project, Computing Shrines. In parallel, I prepped a 7-minute talk that could give a compelling overview of my creative practice and why it exists.

Afterwards, I couldn't sleep from all the adrenaline coursing through my body, all the conversations running through my head and the ideas branching off from them.

Computing Shrines is a series of site-specific sculptures that co-opt our devices to foster local connection in everyday places. Each shrine connects visitors' phones to a custom communal web interface that facilitates exchange of small intimacies between past and future visitors. Beyond an installation, Computing Shrines is an open protocol for creating public good technology that fosters local connection rather than replacing it. Designed with common materials, open-sourcing the interfaces, and collaborating with local stewards, the project transforms the normally solitary and exclusive act of creating technology into a community improvement project for all to shape.

The installation features three distinct shrines, anchored around Shrine Map, an homage to community bulletin boards featuring a smartphone for each shrine. Two mobile phone booths sit on columns across from each other, inviting visitors to listen and share their worries and hopes with the last and next stranger in Shrine to Voice. Shrine to Earth features a found boulder and rock garden that invites visitors to share photos of rocks they’ve found, which become pieces in a cairn-making mini-game. And in Shrine to Others, a clay tablet nestled beside a seating area invites visitors to notice the people they share the space with and share what they admire about strangers.

In the talk, I described Computing Shrines as a culmination of my practice, and in many ways, it is: the combination of intimate, empowering technology and person-to-person connection & community. But rather than a linear path as we like to interpret stories, it feels more like a perpetual spiral.

All my work provided the foundation for this project, but these projects aren’t mere stepping stones towards this final piece. Instead, I will certainly circle back to them over the years—the different perspectives that lead me to this particular creation. I imagine my work expanding in all directions, like an exploding star rather than climbing a ladder to the top.

Technology that facilitates local connection is important and interesting. But there is still value to purely digital connection, creation, and play. We exist in a web of contradictions—our very existence sometimes feels like one. We are not so simple as to be contained by a single right answer. Instead, I'm seeking answers in plurality, complexity, and the infinite possibilities that the world and other people offer us every day.

It feels weird to show my work in this context—a big production team, curators, photographers, and art handlers. There's an elevated sense of importance, which can be helpful to encourage people to deeply engage (as well as celebrate thework). But there's an artificial feeling that I can't shake—in that this is not the form that I imagine people interacting with my work.

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I want these Shrines to be living out in the world amongst our daily lives. I want them to be nestled in subway stations, neighborhood parks, alleyways and mailboxes, cafes, and sidewalk plant beds. I want them to be a pleasant surprise you stumble into on your regular stroll. I want them to encourage your curiosity—to stoke the wonder that the world coaxes out of you every waking moment.

Still, even in this environment, I noticed the patterns that I hoped for: visitors sneaking away to private corners to listen and record a voice message for a future visitor; people bringing rock offerings and creating their own cairns atop Shrine to Earth; others sitting, lying, and kneeling by Shrine to Others to gaze at the people around them, returning to their phones to record what they notice.

I wander around and try to hear people's honest reactions. A few have trouble accessing the website. Others light up about how cool it is. Universally, I observe curiosity and a desire to learn more. When I share the background and hope behind the idea, I see their faces change as they "get it" and start applying the framework in their own histories and homes. They imagine shrines on airplanes, beside conference seats, at local cafes, set into random street walls, hanging from a street-level window—a vision of technology situated to physical contexts and that empowers us to learn about, and thus, form trust with, those around us.

I watch as the possibilities expand and multiply, and they slowly grow the conviction to host one of their own, to take technology into their own hands and shape it in a way that can engage with people at an unexpectedly meaningful level.

I'm looking for others to grow this project with me next! Message or email me (spencer@spencer.place) if you're interested in hosting a Shrine in your own neighborhood or work together on one for your organization. I'd love for these to be a way for local businesses to host art experiences that also facilitate connection within their communities.

Seeing all the energy around the protests in the U.S. against the indiscriminate and brutal detainments by ICE, I'm reminded of the ends for which I do my work. This kind of gathering, solidarity, and collective demand & fight for change is what I believe technology offers potential to empower. We already see it in clever creations that facilitate the organizing of these kinds of events, secure communication during, and systems to disrupt institutional control. People are using their diverse social media audiences to bring attention to these issues and host gatherings in solidarity even when they can't attend physically.

This level of commitment doesn't appear instantly. People aren't convinced of a cause or their need to participate overnight. These movements, for a world where everyone can live a dignified life, or, in short, a better world for all, happen slowly over decades and even centuries. With every generation, we move the needle further on our notions of equality and liberty and get closer to this fleeting idea of truth.

And importantly, I believe these movements can't flourish solely through these serious, radical actions like protests, facts, and resistance. These are all essential factors, but we need a foundation where we are willing to stand up for our neighbors, to risk ourselves for a greater cause. I believe this foundation forms through lightness—joy, play, boredom. We must say hi to each other at the coffee shop, lend out groceries and tools to our neighbors, and play and joke with each other before we can form the trust to fight together.

Creating space for joy and play is as radical as creating space for protest and solidarity. In fact, they might circle each other in one single spiral. At least, that's what my hypothesis is.

My talk focused on this paradox of perpetual energy that I seek through all my work. It reminded me of the title of this newsletter: spencer's paradoxes. I've always felt drawn to holding contradictions in balance as a means to get closer to some deeper truth. I like playing with ideas, experimenting with provocations, designing things that cause people to say “what if?” a thousand times over. A question mark is the seed of change, so let's plant some more questions in each other's hearts and go looking for the answers together.

Recent Updates

• optional support I've decided to enable optional paid subscriptions for this newsletter! I already run an optional sponsorship program with Github, but I've gotten feedback from people having to make an account to support me. If you're an existing sponsor (or you have Github and would like to support there), don't worry—you'll be automatically associated with a free "paid" subscription on here for any bonus behind-the-scenes work I publish. Have ideas for what would be fun to offer to supporters while keeping most of my content free? I'd love to hear.

• workshops in New York I'm hosting two "Touching Computers" workshops this week to make interactive NFC objects: one will be creating them out of meaningful objects we own with Munus Shih and the other will be my first event designed for children and their parents working with clay with Irena Wang and her son Luka.

• Show closes June 22nd Starting around 4pm I'll be in the space to host walkthroughs and a small celebration. come if you're around! You can also watch the talk I gave on Youtube, and learn more about the project on the case study published by APOSSIBLE.

• website update I quite like how this bottom row of my personal website is turning out! The “stats” box with the little colors for people brings me a lot of joy

  

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This dispatch was sent to 1559 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and becoming a patron or subscribing for the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie artist (and access to the community & works-in-progress)

Thank you to the 24 people who supported my independent work with a monthly sponsorship last month: Shaobo, Janvi, Raymond, Jacky, Sunil, Jess, Tim, Sarah, Jon, soft networks, Nikhil, Alejandro, Andy, Caro, Charles, James, Crystal, Dan, Jonah, Rachel, Gleb, Yorke, Brandon, and one anonymous donor.

As an artist, I can understand making something and expecting (or at least hoping for) people to engage deeply with it. You've put so much care and attention into every detail, so why wouldn't it deserve that level of attention?

But the reality is that most people looking at your art have other things on their mind. Many people may not even be there for the art, and even if they are, they can only deeply engage with the few that compel them.

That's why it feels like the best, or most effective art, shocks you into reception. It triggers something deep in you that opens you to a new layer of perception or plants the seed for some change.

When I zoom out to this general feeling, I find that it isn’t limited to traditional art contexts. Several historical movements have championed this approach of "everyday art," including Fluxus and Arte Povera, which often focus on recontextualizing everyday actions in traditional art settings.

I've started to get a feel for the emotional response that I now associate with "art." It can be a sense of wonder and amazement at the creation of something—something that makes you exclaim because it's innovative or overwhelms you with the skill involved in making it. Other times, it's a sense of a widening perspective, like when a camera changes its aperture, letting more light in, shifting its focus. Things that were in the background become clearer—sometimes you notice things that you never saw before and it changes how you look at the world, permanently. And sometimes it's a pure joy that you stumble upon, a delightful surprise that you discover.

Here's the ways I've found to create something that has feeling (and can therefore evoke feeling in others):

First you need to engage someone. In other words, you must convince them you are deserving of their attention. you can do so through:

1. craft: the feeling that something took a lot of skill, time, effort, etc.

   

2. scale/complexity: when something feels larger than life. This can be literal when something is very large, or the opposite, when something is very small but very detailed (and feels massive in scale in the details). This can also come from more abstract places, like when something represents a lot of people or an effort that goes beyond one person.

3. surprise: when something makes you expect one thing but turns out to be something else. When it "tricks" you in a way that is delightful. This can be an unusual combination of form and function, of material and object, or of depth and simplicity.

I've found these feelings in everything from a pigeon on the side of an escalator to famous pieces worth millions of dollars to temporary found sculptures made by friends. I think everything carries the potential for feeling—our job is simply to activate it.

But beyond the initial engagement, it takes more to really engross someone, to keep them coming back. I don't mean this in the way that social media platforms or addictive video games trick you into coming back through dark patterns. I mean things that feel so compelling that you naturally want to come back without any sort of manipulation. Like how I'll do the same walk through Golden Gate Park every week, because there's always something new to notice, a new friend to make, or how you keep wanting to go back to your favorite restaurants, or go back to that same photo over and over and over.

Bill Hayes in Insomniac City talks about how every once in a while, a piece of art (he talks about it in the traditional sense of painting or other art object in museum) will become yours, in a way where it feels like you own it and compels you to continue revisiting to explore its depths. I think there's certainly a kind of magical and spontaneous "matching" that happens with pieces, but you can also design things in a way that invites for this kind of relationship. In my opinion, the best, most effective kinds of art are the ones that stay with you in this way—that impart a feeling onto you that has lasting power.

1. play: things that embrace play and fun have an open-endedness that makes them feel endless. It entices you to keep exploring to discover all the combinations of secrets embedded in this world. Neal's infinite craft, nolen's one million checkboxes,

2. life: something that feels alive, in that it has a life and rhythm and flow of its own also evokes this sense of endlessness through constant evolution. This can manifest through the continuous involvement of new people, some personal meaning (nostalgia) that you nurture with the work, or an ecosystem that continually evolves.

3. use: quite obvious but something that provides daily utility turns out to be something that people will come back to! At its most basic, I think about the Notes app on iPhones—simple, immediate, fast, it gives the sense that it will always work. These tools almost become an extension of our bodies at some point, as they become second-nature to use. I don't have to consciously think about how I will text my friend to coordinate hanging out—I just do it automatically.

I contemplate these qualities on my walk this morning. My mind is in high gear, laser-focused on preparing for a show in June. It's the first time I'm installing several interactive physical works, and I'm worried about how the public will respond to them. I quietly rank my works on the different qualities listed and compare them to the works that inspired me at the shows I went to. Will they engage the public? Will they engross them? What if their hidden worlds don't get discovered?

At a Pioneerworks show, I watch the interactions between children, their parents, and the art. There is a fountain set at floor level with phones suspended in copper pipes and water dripping down the phones to the bottom. I watch a young girl point at it and reach out to touch it. Her mom quickly says "no!" and tells her it's not for touching. They move on, and another young girl approaches. She starts splashing the water, touching the phones, swiping and sliding. To be fair, they do look very enticing, and I empathize with her curiosity. She continues her exploration up to the pipes and tears off one of the pieces. The flow of water breaks. They leave—I tell a docent about the broken piece. The artist reattaches it a few moments later. She seems unfazed by the interruption.

I feel conflicted witnessing these two scenes. On one hand, I don't believe in precious art and I hate how art has become something that you can only see but not feel—how we've been taught that these cultural artifacts must be considered from a distance rather than directly experienced, but I can imagine the rise of indignation in my chest if it was my piece that had been broken. What does a fine art work that functions as a toy look and feel like? What is something that resists destruction, that reveals through direct experience, even to a child, new worlds.

I read an art critic's review of the show, in which they criticize the finish and sculptural quality of the works. They say "this piece feels incomplete, more like a study than a finished work." I wonder if my works will be considered studies. I wonder what's wrong with a study and whether any work is really ever finished.

There are certain qualities of drafts, studies, in-progress work that are inaccessible to the finished work that is often prized by galleries. We are constantly making and remaking ourselves—I think we respond more openly, willingly, enthusiastically to things with a rough edge to them. They have a humbling presence. My neighbor's garage sale has a human quality that invites me to meet them that a sleek vintage shop would not. I slip out a secret hope that my works are interpreted through similar views.

I remind myself how every work of art you make stops being yours once you put it out into the world. I think about this section from an interview with Walead Beshty:

"...An assistant I had while I was teaching at the School of the Art Institute told me that there were a handful of people who had started making folded paper photograms after I gave a talk there. He seemed annoyed, and I think he expected me to be annoyed by it as well, but I found it exciting that someone borrowed something from the work. It meant that there was something to it that was worth borrowing and could be put to someone else’s use. I mean, once you make something and put it into the world, it isn’t really yours anymore. It’s part of a larger conversation, and the best-case scenario would be that it would be expanded upon, applied to other circumstances or thought processes."

If I care about everyday art, perhaps it's imperative that I am not precious about my art, that I treat every work as a study for the next one, that I trust every interaction with a person is an opening for change that lasts.

updates

1. walking on the internet together: Kristoffer and I hosted a wonderful online workshop, trawling spaces on the web.

2. demo 2025: if you’re in new york come to the show I mention starting June 4-22! and after you interact with my piece, email me your thoughts :)

3. everyday @ internet archive: thanks to tiat, the Internet Archive, and ash for making this all happen, I got to ask 300+ people to treat their phones like hot rocks and toss them with each other for a minute. Highlight video to come!

This dispatch was sent to 1438 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and becoming a patron for the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie artist (and access to the community & works-in-progress) .

Thank you to the 24 people who supported my independent work with a monthly sponsorship last month: Shaobo, Janvi, Raymond, Jacky, Sunil, Jess, Tim, Sarah, Jon, soft networks, Nikhil, Alejandro, Andy, Caro, Riley, Charles, James, Crystal, Dan, Jonah, Rachel, Gleb, Yorke, and one anonymous donor.

My daily average is 4 hours, higher than it's been the past. I suppose all my recent practice creating social content1 is taking its toll: it entails both lots of time filming and also lots of time consuming to understand the different storytelling mechanisms people use. It's hard to do so without getting sucked in. Minutes turn into hours and, for some, whole spans of lives are lost to endless scrolling.

A Pew survey in 2011 asked people for one word they would use to describe their smartphones (at that point around 42% of people who owned a cellphone owned a smartphone). As of 2024, Pew has recorded over 90% of people owning a smartphone. While they haven't repeated the question of asking for a single word to describe their phones, we don't need a survey to see that our distaste for our phones as a society is reaching a fever pitch.

States all across the U.S. are implementing Phone-Free policies, screen-time and focus aids that block access to apps are wildly popular on app stores, and viral content (how ironic) about ditching phones and acquiring "dumb" phones are trending2. Many smart people are making alternative devices that package all the useful capabilities of a smartphone into a less distracting and less extractive package. What would the word cloud say now if we asked people?

I'm not surprised how opinion has shifted on our phones. I feel the same exhausting tension even seeing my phone out of the corner of my eye as I write this essay on my computer. I am on my phone too much. I scroll more than feels good. My attention span has definitely suffered.

Our phones: these supercomputers in our pockets, these demons on our shoulders, these portals to entire worlds sitting in our palms. Their rise to ubiquity has confused more than a few people and our existing definitions of technology. Are they computers? Are apps the Internet? Where do we end and the phone begin?

But it's not all bad. Otherwise, we wouldn't keep coming back. I find incredible things on the Internet, through my phone, every day. I am filled with wonder, inspiration, joy, curiosity, and laughter trawling through the various corners of the web. I am filled with these feelings, mostly, by other people sharing pieces of themselves on the internet, finding a way to express themselves in this cyborg language that fills the negative space around our physical lives.

If we live as beings of matter, perhaps our digital lives live as dark matter. People say that the digital doesn't feel tangible, but the digital has embedded itself in most parts of my life—blogs I've read have shaped my way of living, digital avatars I met have become some of my closest friends, and inspirational work I came across formed the seed of what has become my lifelong creative practice.

What about the phone, the object, itself—what about the chunk of metal and glass you carry with you every day?

As a physical subject, the phone takes on a new light. I turn the screen off and examine the round curves and precise studded holes that mark the speakers. I press its tactile buttons, test the varying pressure thresholds, and listen to the distinctive clicks. I tap the screen to wake it up and pay attention to the nature of its light. I consider which parts of the iconography and text might constitute its face and which its body. I consider what name it might want me to call it by. I listen for its breath and heartbeat. Would it feel nice to buzz with a new notification? Does it feel powerful to shine its flashlight? Will it understand fear when the battery drops dangerously low? What kind of drug does getting charged most closely resemble?

These phones are some of our most intimate companions—we have touched them more than most of our loved ones and lovers, likely combined. They have seen us at our lowest and our highest. They capture our meaningful moments and help us reach those who can comfort us when we feel the most alone. They are always there for us when we need to celebrate our latest wins or when we need to numb ourselves to the world through the flood of content.

My resentment of what I do on it and what it makes me feel like seems silly under this frame. Like a longtime friend, sometimes we have difficult fights, but in the end, we're there for each other.

everyday is my latest work that emerged from the height of these tensions. It's a participatory work that lives on your phone and composes scores of gestures, representing people all over the world dancing with their phones to hourly prompts.

I wanted to make something that could play with this strange state of affairs. something that captures a brief flashing moment in time, that might be obsolete at some point soon in the future, as our devices constantly change (and the mobile device APIs that web browsers expose). I learned about so many obscure sources of information you could access from a phone, and how few consensus there was across different phones and browsers on which ones were allowable.

Some devices allow you to get a person's heartbeat (using the fingerprint sensor). Others grant permission for system-level information like your battery levels. A few actively discourage any information access outside of native applications. In the end, the kinds of things we can do with our mobile companions is still dictated entirely by the priorities of a few companies.

I had a lot of fun considering what strange rituals we could conduct with our devices—both using the phone for its physical body rather than what it represents and as the constant companion in our lives. For example, at noon, it asks you to "Catch a ray of sunlight with your phone," and later at 6pm, it asks you to "Treat your device as your dance partner." Phone as mirror, as dance partner, each hour invites you to reimagine these everyday companions as sources of play, exploration, and reflection.

In the end, I wanted each action to be an invitation to connect with someone else, to turn these devices that so often isolate us from the world and each other, into conversation starters—both with the people in the physical spaces around us, watching us do absurd dances to our phones, and those around the world, connected to us in a brief moment of strange dance and movement.

If our phones can be demons, they can be angels, too. Or jesters, magicians, personal trainers. They have just as much agency to reinvent themselves, if we allow them to. Who do you want your phone to be? And who do you want to be when you're with it?

Updates

1. DEMO 2025 I'll be sharing new work for the conclusion of my time in NEW INC at DEMO 2025. Come see my talk on June 4th or the show June 4-22nd if you're in NYC :)

2. Asian Art Museum I'm boothing (for the first time) for the Asian Art Museum's Spring Fair May 2-4 from 10AM to 5:30PM. Come say hi! I'm excited to see Yuan Goang-Ming's new work in the museum too

This dispatch was sent to 1200 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and becoming a patron for the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie artist (and access to the community & works-in-progress) .

Thank you to the 24 people who supported my independent work with a monthly sponsorship last month: Shaobo, Janvi, Raymond, Jacky, Sunil, Jess, Tim, Sarah, Jon, soft networks, Nikhil, Alejandro, Andy, Caro, Riley, Charles, James, Crystal, Dan, Jonah, Rachel, Gleb, Yorke, and one anonymous donor.

Section of English Champion Cottage from the Book of Bread

I’m watching someone hold one of the most surprising books I’ve found recently. “Tasty Taters” is a cookbook for potatoes, shaped like a potato bound with a small spiral ring.

J and I met up earlier today to catch up in front of the large mirror public artwork in Patricia’s Green. We examine our mosaic of reflections in the looming sculpture and flail our limbs to see our mirror images dance and punch each other at absurd angles. As each of my reflections meet and intertwine, I imagine each living in a parallel universe—the multitudes that my life could have become until this moment and from this moment onwards.

We’ve wandered to what appears to be a gathering of popups—a small display of rare books (reasonably priced!) and creative beverages. When we sit down with our drinks, a man compliments my necklace and asks me if I’m a designer. I pause for a moment, then reply “I’m an artist.”

With the territory of being an artist and an independent creator comes both the weight of having dreams as well as the delusion those dreams demand of you.

The reality is that most people won’t make it, that our system barely allows artists and independent creative to survive let alone thrive. The delusion is convincing yourself that you are the exception to the norm. It's the only solution offered for pushing through the broken logic to live each day, a willful blindness to bet all your resources on yourself over and over again.

I’ve walked this line between delusion and reality for most of my past 2+ years working independently. I’ve had to look past odds and go for opportunities that seemed far outside what I could manage. And it worked. I've been able to collaborate with people and organizations that I had dreamed of being in community with. I've been able to share my work internationally and discover how to make tools that people can use in their daily lives.

But my delusion has also pushed me to look past reality. In reality, I have failed to sufficiently share and distribute my work. For the people who do experience my work, there are a lot who are touched and moved—expressing the impact in heartfelt emails and words. But at the same time, the scale is too small to make a living. I have built a small, tight-knit community, but not a business or an audience. In many ways, I've succeeded at what I set out to accomplish, but I've been avoiding the question of how I turn that goal into something actually sustainable in the capitalist world we live in. I don’t have the spread that I need to get the kind of inbound interest to make a living off my art. And my projects, while provoking and compelling, lack of something that makes them appeal to a mainstream audience.

Instead of confronting this problem and trying to figure out solutions to it, I’ve been running away from the discomfort. I’ve protected myself by avoiding engaging deeply with the mechanics of going viral on social media because I want to reject the system we exist in where artists and independent creatives are forced to distribute their work through these platforms. I've also protected myself from the embarrassment of failure having to say I tried to go viral and couldn't figure it out.

How do you find the right balance between delusion and reality? On one hand are people like Eric Barone who hole themselves up in their room for several years and create a breakout success like Stardew Valley. On the other hand, there are countless others who have tried similar paths only to fail to ever have their story be seen. The thought crossed my mind the other day—how do you know when to stop? How do you know when it isn't working?

I feel a deep fear rise up in my body even writing these words down. I don't want to face the possibility of failure. The idea of it repels me like an intense allergic reaction. I watched a video that said that your fear is the strongest signal for pointing you towards what needs to change. Perhaps the climax of my fear is the signal for being on the boundary between my delusion and my reality? Perhaps now's the best time to make a decision on how I want to begin from here.

Sometimes I wonder if I have enough delusion in me to make it as an artist.

I think a core tension I feel towards going viral is a fear of power. I've been reading The Power Broker, the Pulitzer-winning account of Robert Moses' domination of New York City, and it tells an epic story of how a young idealist (within whom I saw lots of similarities to myself in the ambitious dreams of public improvements, minus the patronizing savior attitude) changes themselves to embrace power for the sake of his dreams, only to lose sight of his original purpose. By compromising his values to achieve his goals, he lost the way to achieve his goals and began creating public works for the sake of their achievement rather than their end impact on people.

In the context of our current economic system, independent creatives face a similar dilemma. All the pressure conspires to force you into playing by the rules of rat race that pits creators against each other in an all-out brawl: go viral and gain an audience, get a breakout art show or press coverage, or secure an exclusive collaboration with a well-known brand to put you on the map. The options are always positioned as a zero-sum game. Your numbers go up only if you are taking attention from another. You get a show only by beating out the others pining for the same gallery space. You get the resources and funding to give an honest try at your dream by beating out all the other proposals for the few available grants. If you want to change the system, it feels like you have to first play by the rules to gain the access, influence, and power in order to change it.

Is there a different path? Can you inch towards a sustainable living working to realize your dreams while advocating for and pushing towards a world where we, as a society, can dedicate many of our members to creating cool, novel, thought-provoking things? Can you create spaces that are radically inviting to community events and pop-ups as well as financially stable? Can you create a large social media following while breaking the parasocial norms of these relationships and providing material value exchanges between members?

I'm not sure, but I'm tired of wondering in hypotheticals and avoiding facing the dilemma head-on. It seems like the only way to find out is to confront my fear and engage with the system, studying it like a live ecosystem, and slowly, surely discover how to play the race on my own terms, my own way.

Updates

1. If you’d like to follow me on my new social journey, I’ve been doing a mini-challenge of talking to the camera for 30 days on TikTok (reminiscent of my challenge to write 100 mini-essays in 2021). When I become more confident, I’ll be trying to tell better stories about my work and projects in short videos on Instagram as well. Are you an avid video watcher or creator? Do you have advice or ideas for what I should try? Let me know in a reply or comment! (Thanks to Nolen and Morry for chatting with me about this already)

2. My work was published in Digital Frontier, and I talked about my practice with Sam for Inventory-ing. It’s a strange feeling to see large pictures of things you made with your hands show up in a beautiful print magazine. It reminds me of the inherent power of beautiful physical objects and the feeling I strive for in my object work.

This dispatch was sent to 1335 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and becoming a patron for the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie artist (and access to the community & works-in-progress) .

Thank you to the 24 people who supported my independent work with a monthly sponsorship last month: Shaobo, Janvi, Raymond, Jacky, Sunil, Jess, Tim, Sarah, Jon, soft networks, Nikhil, Alejandro, Andy, Caro, Riley, Charles, James, Crystal, Dan, Jonah, Rachel, Gleb, Yorke, and one anonymous donor.

the underside of a large leaf at the Conservatory of Flowers

It's been quiet in my writing brain the past few weeks. I've been busy making, figuring out how to juggle a several different moving pieces at once while keeping my mind quiet and my hands steady. I don't do well with frenetic energy—I find it jumbles up momentum, scatters it into pieces that you find yourself looking for in a daze in between switches. I feel a bit like the hummingbirds I sometimes see outside the window of my office, fluttering for a moment in front of one branch and darting to another. Are they present for every moment? Do they remember when they revisit branches? I wonder if they have any advice to give to me.

Driving back from coworking in the mission today, I experienced an exceptionally above-average amount of anger. One man honked at me intermittently for the 5-10 seconds I waited for someone to cross the street to turn. Then, as I stopped to pick up a stool from the side of the road, a woman started screaming at me to get out of her driveway—honking, cursing, and threatening to tow, all the while. L notes all the unresolved rage that manifests on the road. People swerving between lanes, trying to save several extra seconds or even a minute or two getting to where they're trying to go. Where does it all come from and where does it all go?

It makes me angry. Angry, of course, at being yelled at unjustifiably (to my perspective), but more encompassing, angry at the entire situation, the cycle, the pointlessness of it all. More than angry, it makes me sad: this burden that so many carry with them and pass onto unsuspecting others, perpetuating a cycle of mischanneled rage and illwill. The fact that some swerving and honking in a car is one of the few places where they feel enough agency to process their emotions.

I wonder why I feel so affected by this as I finish my ride home. I think it's the opposite parallel of how comforted I feel when I experience or witness surprisingly warm encounters among people—whether strangers forming an instant connection over something silly or the little everyday acts of care, from a smile on the street to a nice word at the cafe. I feel so affected because these cycles of misdirected rage and fear and vengeance feel like the antithesis of everything I stand for and everything I work towards with my practice.

Last week, I saw the launch of this app, branding itself as "Uber for guns." The post author is known for creating extremely viral social apps that quickly become acquired (mostly for their data and other scraps as the virality fades). They consult as a "consumer, social, and growth expert" and their calls start at $2800/hr.

https://x.com/nikitabier/status/1891685562412675284

My first reaction was "we live in a dystopia." This is a prime example of a system that accelerates and perpetuates everything that made me so sad and angry in my driving experience. The marketing is slick and leverages all the latest trending social devices to go viral. Their hero content features a couple of influencers sharing their experience calling "Protectors" to pick them up from LAX and drive them around for a day of sightseeing. It hits the right balance of absurd casual that makes for a viral video formula, featuring tall men in suits and earpieces escorting them picturesque LA spots in Cadillacs. Their social media pages feature professional portraits featuring assured, powerful men with sharp jawlines and straight backs in matching suits. Clicking in reveals a video where they talk to the camera about their past military and law enforcement experience, with a rotating slideshow of heroic images from their experiences. Each is captioned "<NAME> is a Protector." On their lapels, you see small red pins featuring the company's logo. Red: for power, or maybe for the blood that they are prepared to shed in defense. They have several other videos commenting on the United Healthcare CEO killing, showing how things could have been different if only they had been around.

The messaging capitalizes on fear, sharpens it into a spearhead to drive people to enter their hyper-optimized onboarding flow. Their UX is equal parts fun and streamlined, designed to maximize things that would be a hit on social while eliminating distractions. For example, you can swipe through a token Security Service-looking Protector in different outfits to customize how they come dressed. The dystopia is not climate change or nuclear war—it's when summoning guns into everyday society becomes as fun as playing a video game.

Taking all this in, I try to think about how to describe the intensity of my emotion. Disbelief. Rage. Disgust. The app proliferates with the rise of crime. The app addresses our fear through suppression, by putting more guns out onto our streets, creating a wealth gap for who deserves safety, creating a cool aura around being someone who can feel untouchable. To put as many systems in place where we live in a world free from fear, and free from the connection found in each other, too.

They promise something they can't give: safety from all the turmoil in the world. Like all the large platforms of technology, it seizes a death grip on one of our most vulnerable emotions and presents a neatly packaged solution at a reasonable market price. Their solution appears to address all the issues, but the trick, the prestige, is that it solves symptoms while perpetuating the system that produces the problem. After all, if they eliminated their problem, where would their business go?

The worst part is that it feels like everything is designed to be controversial. They know being provocative yields engagement, and engagement yields the kind of curve you need to show venture capital investors. The people deriding it (myself included) are just accelerating their efforts. All of it fills me with a rage that I don't know what to do with.

a rotating flower arrangement we keep on the windowsill next to our kitchen sink

So what to do with this rage?

Every once in a while, I zoom out at the state of the world and feel bewildered by how we live in this state. So many people stuck working bullshit jobs that they hate, so many people lacking basic necessities while billions of dollars go towards inconsequential or actively harmful ends, so much hate and exploitation when life already offers so much love and bounty.

I don't know the answer—I just have my working answer that allows me to continue on.

I think about circles expanding outwards. Most immediately, taking care of yourself, doing something that fulfills you, giving yourself enough rest. And slowly expanding outwards, contributing to your community, making small differences in the days of those around you. And using all those experiences to think about how our systems should change, how they could work for us rather than against us. What kind of world do we want to live in? What kinds of behaviors should be encouraged? Who do you want kids to look up to growing up?

For me, it means committing to my health as just as important as my creative practice and my community. It means cultivating the handmade, personal, loving internet and computing that I see every day when I watch people use their devices. It means making things dedicated to that love and things that make it easier for us to create spaces and technology that feels like this, overflowing with the humanity inherent to all artificial creations. It means appreciating art that I love, telling people when their works touch me, supporting independent creators giving their own answer to the question. It means smiling at the people I walk by, supporting peers in my community, showing up for friends, stopping at the neighbor's house to chat about their garage sale and help them move something heavy up the stairs. It means treating every day as a new chance to give another answer, to do my part in actualizing the kind of world I hope for in my dreams.

This dispatch was sent to 1282 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and becoming a patron for the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie artist (and access to the community & works-in-progress) .

Thank you to the 24 people who supported my independent work with a monthly sponsorship last month: Shaobo, Janvi, Raymond, Jacky, Sunil, Jess, Tim, Sarah, Jon, soft networks, Nikhil, Alejandro, Andy, Caro, Riley, Charles, James, Crystal, Dan, Jonah, Rachel, Gleb, Yorke, and one anonymous donor.

I’ve finally finished my year reflection. You can read it over on my website: https://spencer.place/posts/normal-2025

Subscribe now

updates

• Gather is officially out in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store! I finally caved to Apple and changed my donation model to use in-app purchases for them 🤦 Share with a friend! And if you enjoy it, please do leave a review.

• New year new restock of the Fortune Webstones. I’m experimenting with molds for the pillows and finalizing the app to set them up. I’m also actively looking to stock with/in museum/design stores, so let me know if you have any suggestions or contacts you can hook me up with :)

• nothing on my computer, a 24-hour live stream of my computer, debuted in December for DO NO-THING. It was really fun and interesting to work with my desktop as a medium for art without any website or coding work at all. It almost felt like I was cheating because it was so fun to poke at the interfaces given and try to make something interesting out of them. This is the kind of pure creative joy that I love when I find for the first time!

• There’s many more exciting things in the works that I hope to share soon! Despite all the ups and downs and existential uncertainties, I feel so grateful for being able to do this work—my choosing of what is interesting, wacky, fun and important—with so much freedom. You, the person reading, sharing, and engaging with my thinking, are a huge part of how it’s all been possible, so thank you from the bottom of my heart.

• Invite me to be your Creative-in-Residence: At the same time, I’ve actually been thinking that I have too much agency these days. When I have to context-switch between several things that all require high-level creative direction and strategic decision making, I can feel my brain tearing itself apart. So I’ve started to explore what it would look like to emulate a more seasonal working style, taking after Robin’s olive oil season and other historical seasonal work. To start, I’d like to spend one season (say 2-3 months of the year) working for / embedding in a studio or company doing work that simultaneously resonates with a lot of the motivations or ends of my work but in a way that is also very different from the way I work or what ends up being produced. Prime examples that I’d be interested in exploring this with are MSCHF, Bluesky, Olafur Eliasson’s studio, and the Internet Archive. How I’d integrate is flexible depending on the host, but I imagine it’d be somewhere between a very capable intern and a creative-in-residence: directly helping push forward existing projects while proposing and producing small collaborative artifacts. If you have leads for the examples I mentioned or other suggestions for potential hosts or ways to approach this successfully, let me know

This dispatch was sent to 1252 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and becoming a patron for the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie artist (and access to the community & works-in-progress) .

Thank you to the 24 people who supported my independent work with a monthly sponsorship last month: Shaobo, Janvi, Raymond, Jacky, Sunil, Jess, Tim, Sarah, Jon, soft networks, Nikhil, Alejandro, Andy, Caro, Riley, Charles, James, Crystal, Dan, Jonah, Rachel, Gleb, Yorke, and one anonymous donor.

You'll receive my traditional end-of-year-reflection & look-forward in the next couple weeks. Wishing you love, luck, and the liberty to accomplish what you yearn for in 2025.
—Spencer

fallen Gingko leaves in water at the Japanese tea garden

I write to you from a tea shop with ample desk space. Cars of all shapes roll in and out of the Asian plaza in Chinatown. This place has fond memories for me—it's where I spent a lot of time in college whenever we took breaks from studying in search of a good meal and snacks. I'm in Houston for the next few days for the holidays. On the plane home, I carried a tote bag with handmade ceramic gifts wrapped in a hodgepodge of spare shirts and sweaters. That was the most sustained care and attention I had given any object lately—making sure it stayed upright going through the security scanner, guarding it between my legs on the plane and gingerly swinging it out of narrow passageways. In the end, the goods made it back mostly intact for me to re-wrap them in more fitting seasonal paper.

One of my favorite things to read during this time of year is the gift guides that various people with very distinctive tastes will deviate from their regularly scheduled programming to release. Sometimes, reviews of products feel more intimate than personal writing, revealing specific everyday preferences and habits of the authors that would never come up in a traditional essay. Robin's guides always feature a nice variety of high-quality perishables and hand-crafted everyday objects that you can treasure for a lifetime. Laurel's shares friends' reflections on gift-giving interspersed with one-of-a-kind objects sure to give you a new way of seeing the world.

I'm setting my ambitions high by using those two as my models, but I think that's the level of care that gift-giving deserves. I've traditionally been quite bad at giving gifts. If I didn't know for sure what someone wanted, I would get stuck in a mental dilemma: part of me felt an obligation to give something and another part didn't want to give something that they would rarely (if ever) use or appreciate. After witnessing some wonderful gifts that friends have given and through years of trial and error, I've realized how sacred and intimate gifting is and that it's a skill that you can actually work on.

Gift-giving requires a careful attention to how people spend their days and their perspective on the world. Understanding what to gift someone also means you understand them more as a person, forming the foundation for a better relationship. It's also an incredible feeling when you see the gift you've given display proudly in their home or used over and over again in their daily lives. When you give a good gift, it's almost like you're giving a piece of yourself away, an object (or memory!) that represents the careful attention and care of your bond.

I'm reminded of Leia Chang's what identities do you choose to wear? that I saw at their Artist Showcase at Gray Area. The piece features handcrafted rings to fit their fingers, composed of a meaningful raw material encased in resin. Wearing the ring automatically activates the wearer's relationship with that material for that day. When you give a gift that can be interacted with or used, you're presented with the opportunity to create a similar kind of object for someone, a small reminder of you in their daily lives.

For receiving gifts, I've found that you can make it easier for others to give you something that you will definitely enjoy and use. Taylor (of taylor.town) recommends making a public /wish page (or just regular old public wishlists for those without websites). I've started doing this in an are.na channel that I add to whenever I see something that I want but don't need from my phone. If you already collect certain kinds of things, you can simply publicize that to those who care about you, and they can always give you something that will fit in your collection (may I suggest perhaps by using Gather)

On one hand, you might think that acts of service are better than piling onto our society's collective obsession over materialism. On the other hand, objects are precious and grow their own faces, the deeper a bond you form with them. Gifting someone an object that grows to have this kind of relationship with the recipient can be a transformative offering.

the everyday

• these colorful earplugs that I wear almost every night when I sleep. These have the perfect balance of comfort and sound isolation that are great for a light sleeper. thank you to S for recommending these

• a tiny scale which I use every morning for weighing out my coffee beans for my daily Aeropress. It's cheap and accurate, which makes it useful for other weight-sensitive projects like mixing epoxy for kintsugi. thank you to someone on the /r/coffee subreddit for recommending these.

• MOGICS bagel universal power strip a tiny universal power strip that also has the benefit of looking like a bagel. thank you to Sb for bringing this on a trip and demonstrating its qualities so well that I immediately ordered one.

• a good functional bag. This is going to be a personal choice, but I recommend looking in thrift shops for ones with unique styles, lots of pockets, or interesting color combinations. Don't waste your money on a tote with a single graphic and a single big pocket. If it's going to be something you carry around often, find one with some personality. I really, really love this green-orange FILA tote I thrifted in Kyoto for $4

  

• these hot water bottles give a great cheap luxury experience if you live in a cold home. My new home in the sunset is much much colder than my old place in the mission, and we try to avoid running the heater too much because the gas bill gets crazy.

the personal

• a found flower arrangement. go for a walk around your favorite parks and pick a few flowers and leaves that catch your eye. When you get home, assemble them in a small vase or glass until it looks right or tie their stems together. Bring to your intended recipient.

• a letter to tell them about a moment that made you think of them, or why you're grateful for them, or what you admire about them. ideally composed on some piece of ephemera that is meaningful to both of you.

• a digital postcard. the same as above but composed digitally, sent over whatever platform used most in the relationship, perhaps resurfacing an old message that you still hold onto. See Laurel’s instructions for doing this well.

• a color that resonates with their aura or maybe a vibe you want to wish for them in the new year—perhaps one you find on clock.spencer.place

the beautiful

• Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle—a gorgeous book. I often stopped to try as hard as I could to absorb passages into my very being. I'm probably due for a re-read (thank you to J for the recommendation). I recommend going to your local bookstore to pick up a copy :)

• Making of Prince of Persia—I gifted my copy to A a few years back, but I still think about this book and Jordan's story. It's one of my biggest inspirations for my indie lifestyle—his journey of creating and working on all aspects of a game from a dream and all the ups and downs that come with living (and trying to make a living from) a creative life.

• a table that refracts light: I suppose this is only good if you live in a sunny place with direct sunlight, but watching the light reflections in my room over the passing day (and how it changes over the passing seasons) is one of my favorite activities.

the trendy

• a clear casio watch. this is a fitting entry given that I received mine as a gift from A over a year ago now. I've also encountered several others with the exact same watch and it's always a nice bonding moment. I never wore a watch daily until I got this one, and it just works with every outfit and is so easy to slip on.

• Professor E. I have long searched for Taiwanese fashion brands that I resonate with in perhaps a subconscious effort to honor my heritage. I found a combination of daring experimentation and attention to quality in Professor E. My visit to Taipei in April yielded my first pieces, and I've been stunned by the details from the inside detailing and seams all the way down to the packaging.

  

• an old silver ring. I've started to thrift old silver rings when I go traveling. The material properties of these precious metals are still a wonder to me—how our natural oils keep them shiny and how they can be restored through lots of damage. These make a perfect re-gifting present, too.

the experiential

• an experimental perfume sample. I have to be honest, I keep going back and forth about whether I'm "just not a fragrance person," but I find the world of fragrance fascinating in all the creativity and passion that goes into it. I’ve finally found a few scents I enjoy, and I particularly like the experience of tuning how well my nose can discern specific aspects. Give something you think matches their character or something that will surprise them. I've been enjoying ones from P.Seven from Taipei and To Summer from China.

• a kintsugi kit was my first introduction to the world of ceramics, and it was oddly satisfying to mend pieces I had dropped (even as my kintsugi was done very poorly by my standards). I'd recommend a set that does it the traditional way, like the one linked.

What are the most meaningful gifts you've ever given or received? What are your go-to gift mediums? I'd especially love to hear these days as the first day of class for Gift Interfaces, taught by Elan and I, begins in a couple weeks! Feel free to reply with your story or leave your story as a comment.

This dispatch was sent to 1202 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and becoming a patron for the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting an indie artist (and access to the community & works-in-progress) .

Thank you to the 24 people who supported my independent work with a monthly sponsorship last month: Shaobo, Janvi, Raymond, Jacky, Sunil, Jess, Tim, Sarah, Jon, soft networks, Nikhil, Alejandro, Andy, Caro, Riley, Charles, James, Crystal, Dan, Jonah, Rachel, Gleb, Yorke, and one anonymous donor.

I feel a deep nostalgia for objects and places. I'm obsessed with all the history they hold, especially when their lifetimes may be several times our own. We encounter so many things in our daily lives that have seen much more than we have. Whenever I visit a place with history, I try to picture scenes that happened so long ago in the same place. If I listen closely, I can feel their energy communicating with me.

Maybe that's why I'm obsessed with finding faces in objects. I have a whole Are.na collection dedicated to them (curated with Gather of course).

It's definitely a romantic notion. It takes a certain faith and a certain hope to look for meaning beyond the current reality. You have to be a dreamer, to be open to letting your imagination lead you into precarious positions, teetering1 between the real and imaginary.

My latest project, Field Companions is an ode to this romantic feeling. It's a dedication to the desire to hoard, to hold onto the memory of our objects, to listen to the earth.

Field Companions are a collection of everyday objects that I've transformed into interactive sculptures, imbued with the agency to share their stories. Found stones from meaningful locations have had centers carved out and replaced with a portal to a 1-min audio memory from the moment they were found. Tapping your phone to this "soul" initiates an interactive web experience that captures a mini time capsule of its history.

(A limited first collection of 25 from 5 different locations is available on Metalabel as they graciously invited me to be an artist for their FW2024 collection.)

This idea is an extension of my initial exploration of embedding NFCs with site-specific websites into objects to create computers you can touch. I wanted to see how I could apply the same concept to things that already exist. But embedding computational capabilities into things that already exist is just a small drop compared to if manufacturing changes to start embedding everyday things with computation.

What do our lives look like when this is taken to the extreme and becomes the norm, when every barcode and label is suddenly a computer chip? And is this the kind of world that we even want?

We seem to be at or near a threshold point with this kind of everyday technology entering popular culture. Since COVID, contactless payments have grown exponentially, doubling twice from 2019-2023. I've never seen so much public awareness around people customizing NFCs for use in their daily lives. TikToks showing tutorials and life hacks using NFCs to automate your life have millions of views.

IYK is a company that makes its own branded NFC chips loaded with mini-apps for specific purposes (like saving memories or sending a video message). I like the concept of these mini experiences, but I can't say I don't feel some wariness given they're backed by a16z's crypto arm.

Nintendo has also been sneaking NFC technology into the hands of kids through their amiibo, interactive figurines that can connect to their video game consoles. These little toys can unlock characters, equipment, and even custom data. I love the social behavior that this platform enables: I can share my favorite game assets with my friends by bringing over my amiibo.

Computation is seeping into our surroundings. More and more objects around us are becoming enchanted. But while the technology is becoming more available, the experience is still rough at the edges and can be unpredictable. Sometimes scanning tags involves a juggling act of moving your phone around until it hits the sweet spot.

Still, we seem to crave this physical intimacy with our technology. It seems to stem from the interpersonal tension with our phones—these all-powerful devices that seem to steal our time and energy even as they enable so much of our daily functionality. These physical-digital experiences are a path for redemption for our devices. They offer surprise and whimsy, a joy that we forgot we could have.

Even though the experience feels new and cutting edge, the feeling we get from it feels nostalgic, reminiscent of an old internet (or at least our experience with it when we were younger), when going on the internet meant playing a dumb game or reading a poorly designed site rather than wading through optimized flows and corporate-speak-pretending-to-be-hip copy.

The other day on Bluesky (follow me I'm optimistically transitioning from Twitter to it), I asked about devices that inspire joy in a home. Suzanne recommended Cube World to me, and I was blown away by the demos2. R also sent me this video of Pixel Chix, made by the same company, which seems to be mostly the same thing but marketed to girls and more intense Tamagotchi-like gameplay. For a Kernel Magazine launch event, Jacky and I had ideated a communal mobile Gashapon that required putting two phones together and pulling an on-screen handle down at the same time to trigger an exchange of digital files from your device (unfortunately Web NFC is still in experimental mode and we couldn't actually make it).

image credit Reddit

The combinatorial possibilities that these toys hint at make me think of the magic of things like Conway's Game of Life: simple interface mechanics that enable a seemingly limitless set of interactions. This limitless possibility is what makes the real world so exciting. Every day you can discover something new from a particular reflection at a time of day to what makes little wind cyclones form and the kinds of patterns that form when rain races across a windshield. What if our digital worlds could offer this too?

Rather than captors of our attention, I hope our phones feel like portals to this possibility one day. Where you could discover a game someone made by offering your phone at your favorite park bench, or retrieve someone's last played playlist in the window seat on the bus, or receive a compliment while grabbing a coffee from your local cafe. I dream of a day when our devices feel like facilitators in forming in-person communities: where the limitless possibility of our physical worlds meets the infinite expanse of our digital worlds. I dream of a day where the internet feels real, human because of each other.

Updates & Asks

• I teased a "patron/sponsor" benefit of a bi-weekly raw audio dump & discussion thread of the latest of my thinking and research for my sponsors, and i'm going to do a free test run this weekend! I'm thinking about either combining this with Substack's paid tier (for non-Github users) or just centralizing it all to something like Patreon(?) If you have thoughts on this, please let me know (like if you would support but Github is too big of a barrier). As a reminder, all my writing is and will always be free and public, and my sponsors enable me to do that and the rest of my independent work.

• I am experimenting more with AT Protocol and Bluesky! I'm in the process of making something to explore the links being posted in real-time

• I'll be part of an experimental 24-hour livestream / net performance that thing.tube is hosting! It'll be streaming December 29 from 12:00 a.m. to 11:59 p.m. EST. Put it on in a corner while you celebrate the holiday season with your family?

• S & I's new office / workshop is coming together... I'm looking for essential tools that you find yourself reaching for again and again in your work space. What do you recommend?

This dispatch was sent to 1189 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and sponsoring me if you have the means.

Thank you to the 25 people who supported my independent work with a monthly sponsorship last month: Shaobo, Janvi, Raymond, Jacky, Sunil, Jess, Tim, Sarah, Jon, soft networks, Nikhil, Alejandro, Andy, Caro, Riley, Charles, Greg, James, Crystal, Dan, Jonah, Rachel, Gleb, Yorke, and one anonymous donor.

'Space², Providence, Rhode Island, 1975-1978’, Francesca Woodman, 1975-8 | Tate taken from this Are.na block by Hiroaki Yamane

Motion creates new resting states. I think of the Big Bang and turning a snow globe upside down. A state of flux makes space for transitioning into a new state of being.

Saturday night, before I flew out, I took a field trip from where I was staying in Brooklyn up to Times Square at 11PM. I watched people come and go from the subway car, revelers on their way to Halloween celebrations, late-night commuters headed home, and those, seemingly searching for an answer to a question they haven't asked, staring off into the distance, earbuds shutting off the world.

I emerged from the station and made my way towards the beacon of light emanating from the square. The area feels like the equivalent of an urban midnight sun. Rather than natural light, the trash-filled streets radiate with the blue glow of millions of pixels and flashing animation.

Times Square is not designed for free motion. It is, instead, optimized for maximal brand engagement. From the massive screens that barrel between 15-second ads to the storefronts with flashing window displays, everything screams "Look at me!!" with an urgent fervor. Barricades are set up around the public art sculptures and stanchions designate waiting areas to get your moment of fame recorded on the big screens. It's weird. Everything around you is moving at a blinding pace, but you aren't allowed to move. Maybe that's the illusion that the space wants you to believe—to think that your freedom comes from the brands and spaces that tease you with flight.

At 11:57pm, exactly 3 minutes before midnight, a vintage black-and-white countdown slowly took over every screen. For the next three minutes, each screen shimmered with a soft blur, ebbing and flowing between a range of muted colors and sharpness. Amorphous blobs danced with shadows and textured curves twinkled. The square grew dark as the screens, which previously screamed with color and animation at maximum brightness, transformed into the soft glow of a home laptop in the dark—more like a paper lamp than an artificial sun. It felt like a digital eclipse—casting the world into darkness for a few brief moments.

~11:58PM during the performance in the middle of Times Square

Around me, people snapped pictures while exclaiming "what the fuck is happening right now?" (much like I imagine people who first see a solar eclipse react). At the end of the three minutes, the screens promptly returned to their regular reel of ads, and some said "that was it?"

That was it. And that pause and break from the normal is all that artist Olafur Eliasson intended with his piece, Lifeworld. In an artist talk the night before, he talked about his desire for spaces that allow for uncertainty and doubt so that people are invited to co-produce the space. Having been in lots of technologist circles that that center agency as the goal of critical technologies, it was surprising to encounter an internationally-recognized artist claim and champion collective agency so prominently in their work.

My own work is deeply interwoven with collective agency. I think the goal of my creative practice is to figure out how to enable grassroots collective agency at scale through both cultural changes and infrastructure changes (both making people aware of what that agency feels like and why they deserve it and creating the tools and foundations to actually realize that agency).

I was curious how effective Olafur's approach would be as a fine-arts approach. The entire premise for this art project is dependent on a twisted set of circumstances. After all, his work is critiquing the very premise of Times Square and the industries that power it, yet the Times Square Art Commission is officially sponsoring this work. It reminds me of Terry Allen's Corporate Head statue, created outside an EY office in Los Angeles1.

image credit Public Art Archive

I wished they had been able to negotiate longer than 3 minutes with Times Square because there wasn't enough time to experience the piece and people's reactions, but that bewildered moment—that "what the fuck" I heard—is a powerful start for any work.

One day while riding the subway I shared a profound moment with a tourist couple's baby. He was standing on the edge of the seat near where I was holding the railing, and suddenly, we met eyes for a deep gaze. From then on, we kept staring at each other. He tried to communicate (in French, so unsuccessfully), so we only had our eyes and hands to talk to each other with. Despite our brief exchange, part of me feels like I know them now.

I spontaneously began an experiment for the rest of the week. While riding public transit, I studied the eyes of strangers around me and tried to avoid looking away if they met my eyes. This was... terrifying, to be frank. As someone who is always afraid of making others uncomfortable, I had to fight every urge to look away. And in return, I found the soul of New York—watching eyes of people of all ages, sizes, colors.

It was a simple experiment, but it felt significant because I gave myself permission to play with strangers in a small and harmless way. Play has mostly been eliminated from our public spaces, and we're afraid of each other. I want to try more experiments that are consequentially harmless but still dance at this boundary of connection (reply with any ideas!).

There are ways to create collective agency in small practices such as these, too. Simple, small trends are the first step in popular culture, actively rewiring our collective consciousness.

Motion and pauses. The interplay between them is what leads to change. Agency often comes in sudden step changes rather than linear increases. Whenever I travel, I find myself caught in a whirlwind of plans and faces and inspiration. I feel overstimulated in the best ways. And then when I return to my home, I hermit and pause and reflect. I whirlwind my mind's snow globe, pause the falling snow, and consider their trajectories.

The throughline of the works I'm documenting here is interventions. Works that interrupt and subvert our everyday expectations to prod us into considering their place in our lives. Practices that break the mundane continuity of commonplace moments and offer us connection in the most unexpected of places. Pregnant pauses that trigger a flurry of life changes.

Are you moving or are you paused?

Recent Updates

• TEACHING I'm co-teaching an online class in January for the School for Poetic Computation (SFPC)! it’s called Gift Interfaces and explores how you can incorporate reciprocity in traditional product design to create experiences people care about and of course, we’ll practice different kinds of gifts for our loved ones & communities. There’s a ton of great offerings every season (ive taken two before!). Applications close this weekend!

• OBJECTS I released a batch of holiday edition fortune webstones, featuring the ability to leave a gift message for the recipient, and the shop has a new logo by my friend Song You

  

• EXPERIMENT I'm going to try out an experiment for my sponsors where I do a weekly/bi-weekly 10-15 min walk & talk sharing in-progress work and what's on my mind. Also considering a Discord for supporters :) If you're a sponsor, get in touch so I can add you (github doesn't give me everyone's email..) and if you aren't, is this something you'd find valuable?

  • Also trying to figure out a better platform to handle this.. I’d ideally like to use substack’s audio feature.. but then i guess I would have to add a paid tier rather than using github? advice/preferences/thoughts?

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Thank you to the 26 people who supported my independent work with a monthly sponsorship last month: Shaobo, Janvi, Jasmine, Raymond, Jacky, Sunil, Jess, Tim, Sarah, Jon, soft networks, Nikhil, Alejandro, Andy, Caro, Riley, Charles, Greg, James, Crystal, Dan, Jonah, Rachel, Gleb, Yorke, and one anonymous donor.