Hi,

Welcome to the first issue of the Are.na Community Newspaper, which will for now be distributed via this Editorial newsletter. Once a month, in between publishing the longer essays and interviews you’re accustomed to recieving, this newsletter will turn into a community newspaper made up of shorter pieces focused on the Are.na community. We’ve been thinking about them like human-interest stories — regular sections will include featured channels, member spotlights, Are.na Classifieds, upcoming events and meetups, as well as company and community news items.

This is an evolving experiment; the goal is to surface what’s happening on Are.na and help further connections on and off the platform. If you have something to share, feel free to reply directly to this email or connect to one of our Are.na Community Newspaper channels.

— Meg Miller

Member Spotlight: Genevieve Devine and Talia Markowitz of Isolde

What is Isolde and how did it come about?

Isolde is a project space on 8th Street in Greenwich Village. It’s also Talia’s apartment. After she moved in, she approached Genevieve because she wanted to do something with the space beyond just living there. We’d both been feeling ready for a project. It took us a couple months of conversation to figure out what we wanted it to look like. We spent hours in coffee shops and one night at TJ Byrnes going back and forth to come up with a concept that felt resonant to both of us.

We were trying to avoid calling it an apartment gallery at first because that doesn’t get at the full breadth of what we’d like to take place there. Over the next few months, we’ll have a group show, a music performance, a murder mystery party, and solo shows by Alex Westfall and Ariel West. It’s also an extension of friendship — ours, and those we have with many of the artists we’re working with. We both prefer working collaboratively and are most interested in how having a shared project can deepen or alter a relationship. 

Our programming will focus on emerging artists. Especially those that work with less “traditional” mediums or between them. We love an experiment. We love a research-based practice. We love work that feels earnest without taking itself too seriously.

The emphasis on emergence feels important to us: so much of the infrastructure and opportunities for up-and-coming artists end up going to people who are a little farther along in their careers or in the development of their practices. Of course we do believe an artist can be “emerging” at any age. 

Tell me about the inaugural group show.

It’s called Isolde, Isolde. We’ve got six artists showing a mix of sculpture, installation, site-specific, and video work: Praise Fuller, Christopher Gambino, Tristan Higginbotham, Bennett Koziak, Weihui Lu, and Helene von Schirach. 

We’ve been thinking about what it means to have an art show in a domestic space, about dubious artifacts, like those in the collections of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and about the way a story changes as it’s shared or reinterpreted. We’re always thinking about records and the purpose they serve. The work in this show has a residual quality, or is engaging with residue in some way.

We’ve also started an ongoing cabinet “shop” for small objects and publications by our friends. So far we have the most recent Are.na Annual vol 7: “Pool”; Ecoslay: an Anthology; pewter acorn sets by Claudia Corujo; and some cyanotype works on canvas made by Praise.

Later this month while the show is still up, our friend Isabella Bustanoby, aka pierre, will be doing a performance of music from her most recent album, Faux Ghost, with a string quartet opening act.

Who did your website?

We both tooled around with it and I (Genevieve) came up with the final design. I’m a complete website novice, so Talia’s friend Andy is working on coding some additional elements for us.

How have you been using Are.na for the project space?

Obsessively. It’s one of our favorite research tools. We made a channel for the group show and sent it out to the artists we were interested in working with. We’ve continued to add to it as the show has come together.

We’re also working with Ariel West on a collaborative channel for her upcoming show, which is going to take the form of a fabulative archive of petrodesire. That’s her word for the fantasy of a future achieved through oil: speed, convenience, and the compression of time and space. 

We plan to build a research channel for each show we work on. It could also be nice to make channels with documentation of the shows after they open.

Between us, we have a handful of ongoing channels. We made a channel to collect inspiration for our website. The rest are private, but we’re using the platform to organize our general research on artists and ideas for future programming. It’s nice to build a repository of shared references, creating a kind of shorthand we can refer back to.**

Featured Channel: Are.na iPhone Screenshot Widgets

Early this year we released Are.na’s new iOS app, whose development was led by Yihui Hu, and with it an Are.na home screen widget. The rumor is that we have Christina to thank for pushing Yihui to prioritize it. We’re very glad she did, because the widget (terrible word) is a game changer. So much, in fact, that Justin Liang made an open channel for sharing good widget screenshots, and it’s been bringing us a lot of joy. 

When we reached out, Justin said that he began noticing serendipitous moments with the widget, like one random text block appearing as a perfect complement to another random block, and made the channel to document these moments and see if others had them as well. “The Are.na widget made my phone feel like a fortune cookie. Because of it, there was always a chance of serendipity when unlocking my Home Screen, which became something I looked forward to,” Justin told us. 

“One unintended side effect of the channel was that I got to see screenshots of many people’s home screens. It felt a bit like I was peering into their lives, both in seeing how they organized their home screens and which Are.na blocks represented them.”

Add your widget screenshots to Justin’s channel here.

Are.na Classifieds

** Laurel is offering an Are.na Pairing Service to connect people on Are.na based on compatible interests and a special je ne sais quoi. Pairing could be for friendship, romance, creative partnership, and/or even simply a nice conversation. Anyone interested can fill out a form, answering some questions and providing some context as to why they're interested in pairing, by April 1st. After this, she’ll make pairings over email. $20.

** Leslie is seeking opinionated “ideas people” to jam with; will be a couple hours of extended chatter (of any flavor and tone; celebrations and complaints equally welcome) about our respective Are.na practices and culminate in some sort of... “together thing,” either testing out a multiplayer Are.na experiment or a lightweight web extension that we can share as a souvenir (e.g. this). Can gather over Signal, Discord/Whereby (if small group), asynchronous Are.na, or some other modality. Please drop a block at Are.nauts (https://www.are.na/leslie-liu/are-nauts) if interested, thank you.

** Daniela is seeking to be less defined by what she knows and more defined by what she wants to learn. Here is a list of topics she is curious about. If you have anything to offer her, email teachdani@protonmail.com.

** Kristoffer and Elliott are taking submissions for the next issue of the Internet Phone Book. Submit your website here → 

If you’d like to advertise something you’re looking for or something you’re offering — a service, help in building out an open channel, a missed connection, etc. — add your Are.na Classifieds ad to the Are.na Classifieds channel.

Upcoming Events

Are.na meetup in San Francisco 

Today, Thursday March 5, at 6pm pst, fi ꩜ and tiat.place are holding an Are.na meetup in San Francisco. They say, “bring a phone or computer, an open heart, a curious mind, and a friend <3 we’ll be making are.na channels together and doing an informal share at the end :)”  RSVP here, where you’ll also find the address. Looks so fun. 

Folder Party Party at Index in New York 

On Sunday, March 8, from 1-4pm est, Lizz Thabet is hosting a workshop and crafting event for social website-making at Index’s Greenpoint location. Lizz says, “Together, we'll curate folders on our computers to share with each other and turn them into spatial websites full of rearrangeable furniture and decor.” No specific coding experience required, but you'll want to be comfortable downloading tools for running Node.js (JavaScript) on your computer and executing commands in a terminal.

Tech Support at Plot in Los Angeles 

On Tuesday, March 10, from 7-9pm pst our friends at Plot in LA are offering tech support. They say “bring tangled sites, buggy tools, stalled ideas and general inquiries for a dedicated help desk moment.” Take them up on it.

Company & Community News

Are.na Annual Vol. 8

Perhaps you heard, submissions for this year’s Are.na Annual are now open. This will be the eighth volume of our yearly printed anthology. The theme is “score,” as in to secure an advantage; to gain points in a game; to keep record or account; a cut, notch, or groove; a group of twenty; a musical composition; a grudge. The deadline is April 20 at 11:59pm est. More info is here. 

Triple Canopy Publication Intensive

Applications are open for Triple Canopy’s excellent publication intensive, a two-week program dedicated to the history and contemporary practice of publication. Tuition is free and they also offer food and commuting stipends as well as a limited number of travel grants. It’s a great program, highly recommend. 

inprogress.works

Connie has made inprogress.works, a lightweight accountability community for your side projects. We like this notion grounding the project: “doing anything consistently for a year is bound to spark change.”

**

Find more community news in our Community News channel and please feel free to add to it. You might also add meetups to the Are.na Meetups channel and relevant events to Kristoffer’s great Poetic Web Calendar channel, the source of several of the above events. 

Look out for the next issue of the Are.na Community Newspaper in your inboxes next month.

Fortunately,

The Are.na Team