Chenoe Hart - Newsletter #1
Hello readers,
Welcome to the first issue of Chenoe’s Newsletter! I am excited to have all of you on board here for my ongoing journeys.
The big news I have to share now is that the essay I produced during my Summer of Protocols Fellowship with the Ethereum Foundation, Addressable Space, is now live online. The essay discusses how abstract information attached to different physical spaces – naming conventions like the address of your house, the name of a business, or the number of what floor in a building you are on – constitute a geographically arbitrary map of the built environment which can become the subject of manipulation and distortion.
Tomorrow (Wednesday the 31st of this month) at 10AM PST/1PM EST, I am giving a public talk about my work, streamed live on the Summer of Protocols website. The video will also be archived on their YouTube page afterwards.
An additional serialized appendix to my Addressable Space work will be released over the next several months, in the form of a series of visualized case studies illustrating different facets of spatial addressability in relation to past, present and some hypothesized future buildings. I'll look forward to sharing its roll-out in future newsletters.
If you’re curious, the work from other researchers in my Summer of Protocols cohort which is being shared on the program website offers unique perspectives on a variety of different topics. It was a valuable experience for me last summer to be exposed to diverse interdisciplinary perspectives from different people in the program, and I am looking forward to seeing all of their work get shared with the world. SoP's overall body of research is seeking to establish a new way of thinking about the world — seeing it through a lens centering what otherwise might be invisible exchanges and interactions like that of shaking someone's hand, or like the members of an international consortium agreeing to all use a standard computer USB port in the same shape and size — which reminded me in some ways of the thought processes involved in my own discipline of architecture in terms of how both approaches involve learning to see the world in novel and unfamiliar new ways.
Thinking about my next steps in general, right now is a good time for me to be starting a newsletter. At the same time that we are starting off a new year, I am also in a period of new transitions; since I finished the internship period requirement to become an architect last year, I'm now making writing my main current area of focus. That means that you can look forward to seeing more new work to read from me this year, which I will announce in future issues of this newsletter as it is published.
I also intend to keep the future of my more direct architectural career path moving forward: I'm planning to start taking the architectural licensing exams some time this year, and I will continue investigating ways of further engaging with architecture's academic world. (For people who haven't heard yet, in October of last year I had the opportunity to present some ideas developed out of my SoP work at the 2023 ACADIA "Habits of the Anthropocene" conference in Denver; I will share in a future issue when its proceedings become available online.) I also want to further explore how my interests relate to media theory as an academic discipline. I'd be interested in meeting with people who have insights about getting more involved with the academic side of architecture, people with perspectives on media theory, and also with other professional writers if you are (or know someone who is) interested in sharing your perspective.
On a longer time horizon I also have ideas which I think could become books, and I intend to look more into the process of achieving that future goal as I make progress with expanding my body of work as a writer overall.
There's always a lot to say in the first installment of a new publication. As a note about how I want to approach this newsletter in general, I don’t want to contribute too much to the constant flood of emails which I think we all receive in our inboxes every day. As a result I am planning to limit how often I send out this newsletter to a few emails every year. That may mean it’s sent out at irregular times, but each time I send it out I should have plenty of new ideas to share. Hopefully it will be a good way of staying in touch.
I would be happy to hear if you happen to have any questions, thoughts or perspectives to share. You can reach me at (spelling my email out in case this newsletter gets archived online somewhere where bots could pick it up): Chenoehart (at) gmail (dot) com
I'm looking forward to sharing new ideas with you this year!
Chenoe