Last month it was weird-spring, now it’s spring-spring. We’re located in a place where that means bright colors abound.

We’re writing this to you from outside. There’s a dog sniffing around.

We’re listening to ambient birdsong and thinking about the presence of plants. What have you been thinking about? What are you listening to?

Are.na Frame

As you may have seen, last month we partnered with Kiran Scott de Martinville to release Are.na Frame, an open-source e-ink display that uses our API to rotate through the contents of an Are.na channel. It’s essentially a hardware version of the Are.na widget — a lightweight way of giving a set of information some physicality.

We put a limited edition of the frames, hand-assembled by Kiran, in the Are.na Gift Shop and they sold out in a matter of hours. Luckily, Kiran also put together some instructions so you can assemble one yourself.

It was cool to see so many people as enthusiastic about this project as we were when Kiran brought it to us last year. Kiran has a really nice way of thinking about hardware that is open-sourced, extendable, repairable, and customizable, which he talks more about in our interview with him on Are.na Editorial.

Product and API updates: custom metadata and typescript SDK

Ok, if you’re not technical, you’re really going to have to bear with us on this section. There’s been a lot of movement on the API front.

If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that we recently released the v3 of our API. If you’re just joining us (welcome), the API is an interface that developers of all types can use to build custom applications, interfaces, visualizers, experiments, etc, using data and functionality from Are.na.

The latest improvement to our API is the ability to set custom key/value metadata to blocks, channels, and connections (the specific instance and position of a block within a channel). That sounds abstract, and it is, but what it means is actually very cool: you can now use blocks, channels and connections as a place to store data.

“Like what?” you ask. To start, basic taxonomical data. Think: price, color, longitude, latitude, time, outfit, company, emotion, size, etc. But also think about abstract things, like say you’ve made a site builder using Are.na…say you want certain blocks to be full-screen…see where we’re going with this?

As a kind of contrived example, Damon put together a demo that basically replicates a swimlane-style interface, but using Are.na channels as the source. Wild right? This demo (and a few other examples, like a portfolio site and a fully-fledged Are.na clone) are open-source and available on GitHub.

If you’re interested in this API functionality, or if you’re already building something using it, reach out and let us know. We’re really excited about what people are building with it. Also, please check out the new developer section on Are.na, there’s a ton of documentation and tools for you to play around with.

Lastly, on the API front, we’ve got a brand new Typescript SDK to make building fully-fledged applications with Are.na even easier.

In addition to API updates, we’ve made many minor fixes and updates to the web and mobile clients. One notable one is that you can now generate links to invite people to be collaborators on channels. Imagine you have a channel you want to invite a ton of people to collaborate on. Instead of inviting them one by one, just enable an invite link and send it to all of them.

API Meetup

Speaking of the API, we have to give a very warm shoutout to the folks who came to our API meetup a few weeks ago at Index Space in Chinatown. We ate pizza, we talked about the custom metadata updates, and some friends showed off their API projects: Maxwell Neely-Cohen’s Correspondence Chess Viewer, turtlekiosk’s in-progress native Android app, and Michael Guidetti’s Are.na Multiplexer.

Should we do more of these? Let us know?

Events

If you’re in New York, we hope you’ll join us on June 10 for “From Earth to Sky: Metaphors of the Internet,” a collaborative presentation we’ve organized with our friends at Triple Canopy. The event will take place in Triple Canopy’s offices in New York and will feature talks by Becca Abbe, Ingrid Burrington, Lai Yi Ohlsen, and Ruby Justice Thelot. RSVP here.

When:

Wednesday, June 10

Doors at 6:30 p.m., event at 7 p.m.

Where:

264 Canal Street, 3W

New York, NY 10013

What:

The terminology used to describe the internet relies on figurative language that ties it to the physical world: Servers live on farms, music and movies arrive via streams, and a lifetime of data floats, allegedly weightless, in the cloud. While these figures of speech suggest a bucolic digital terrain, they often obscure the actual physical infrastructures and material resources that undergird the web, as well as the complex social and economic dynamics that determine how people interact on and access the internet.

For “From Earth to Sky,” a collaborative presentation by Triple Canopy and Are.na, the technologists, artists, and writers Becca Abbe, Ingrid Burrington, Lai Yi Ohlsen, and Ruby Justice Thelot will interrogate the metaphorical language surrounding the internet and investigate what these metaphors reveal about the historical, political, and cultural contexts in which they became popular. From the cloud to the dark forest, they will explore the symbolic landscapes produced by the internet’s metaphors through four short presentations and a panel discussion.

In other event news, we’re currently deep in the process of planning a workshop in New York with artist Sara Magenheimer for mid-July. Look out for more about this event very soon, it’s going to be a special one.

Community News

Jessie Char made a custom baby registry using the Are.na API. Such a good idea for avoiding using all of the data-collecting baby platforms, and unlike other registries you can add items from anywhere. Gift ideas come from this channel and here it is on Github.

Our friends at USB Club are joining forces with our friends at garden3d. Yatu and Norm have penned a new Records of Thought entry that outlines their thoughts on how hardware and community intersect.

We love this interview between Cory Arcangel and Maya Man about Maya’s work. We also love the mention of Maya’s Capital City Mall channel.

Ultralight School is running the writing and publishing class Sense to Sense again this summer. Applications open today.

Elliott Cost added the ability to archive special.fish posts into Are.na. Also, if you haven’t tried out starstar.website yet, you should!

And just a reminder that we source this section from our Community News channel, so if you have any news to share don’t hesitate to put it in there.

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.

with you,

The Are.na Team