Hello,
Where we are, Summer is definitely on its way. We can literally hear lawns being mowed.
We’re listening to this song called Dream by Ryuichi Sakamoto which you can listen to as well as you read this letter.
How are you? Where are you?
Channel Walkthrough with Spencer Chang
On Sunday, June 9, please join us for a Channel Walkthrough with Spencer Chang, who will take us through Gather, an offline-first mobile app for archiving, maintaining, and curating collections, with support for syncing your collections to Are.na channels.
This year, we’re experimenting with doing the Channel Walkthroughs a little differently. Whereas we used to ask four participants to share four unrelated channels, now we’ll focus on a single channel and the person, people, or group behind it. We’re thinking this will offer some nice cohesion, and allow us to spend more time with the channel, ask questions, etc.
We’re extremely excited to start it off with Spencer:
What: Are.na Walkthrough with Spencer Chang
When: Sunday, June 9 at 3pm PST / 6pm EST
Where: Zoom
RSVP here for the link
Are.na Editorial
Yesterday, we published a piece by Sharon Neema on all the attention of tenderness and all the tenderness of attention.
Originally part of an audio piece that we broadcast with Montez Press Radio back in February, this writing traces back the etymological roots of the word “attention” to the Latin ad tendere, or “to stretch toward.” Sharon writes, “To stretch persistently towards careful attention and stubborn tenderness can be laborious but it is also necessary work.”
This month, we also published two special pieces from the Are.na Annual 2024 online:
ENTRANCE by David Reinfurt, on displacement, the ebbs and flows of Ludlow St (between Hester and Grand) in NYC, and the traces that remain when one thing replaces another.
Pattern Recognition: a conversation with Laurel Schwulst and Tracy Ma, on following patterns, ripping seams, creating copies, and sewing your own clothes.
Spatial Are.na
We were honored to see a new API project emerge from Raphael Salaja, called Spatial Are.na, which maps connections of blocks and channels.
In Raphael’s own words, “By mapping the connections between images in a 3D space, we can see how they are related to each other more intuitively. This allows us to explore our collections in a new light and discover new connections between the images we have collected.”
Are.na Elsewhere
We recommend reading Celine Nguyen’s incredibly thoughtful, thorough piece about “research as leisure activity” (Karly Wildenhaus), which features Are.na.
We loved this interview with POLINSSKI about the poetic web, which kindly shouted out Are.na.
And many thanks to Jarrett Fuller for his nice mention of Are.na in an interview with Caitlin Dewey about the flattening of online aesthetics.
Roadmap
As always, you can check out our roadmap page which goes into the features we're building, our long-term goals, and our current numbers.
There are so many places you can spend your attention, and we’re touched that you spent it reading this letter.
Hope you’re all taking care.
Are.na team