I spent June in New York with the goal of using it as a “mini-residency” period, but of course ended up being distracted by events, friends, and—shockingly—sports. (Lucky me to be there during the Knicks win, but honestly the World Cup has taken over my life. I am watching a game as I write this.) It’s been a buzzy and busy month, but as this new one starts I find myself thinking more about duration and slowness.

⋆˚꩜｡ you can also skip to:

• Tending the Webpage Workshop

• Panel Talk at Processing Community Day Taiwan

In early June, I went to Dia Beacon with friends to see Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999. I loved re-encountering pieces from some artists who’ve inspired me the most (Sol Lewitt, On Kawara, Agnes Martin), ones who work in scores and produce series of work using their own designed logics. But Tehching Hsieh is someone whose work I’ve only seen in slides during college, and I was struck by the scale of it—not the scale in size, but in duration and discipline.

The exhibition design was meticulous, chronological, and showed how Hsieh himself was intensely meticulous in his performances and documentation of them. It was apparent how his life and art blended together and—spoiler alert—even showed how he reclaimed both back from public consumption and institutional framing. Highly recommend going to experience this if you can.

In the periphery:

• In my research for a project I encountered Diagrams of Thought on Are.na. I love the weird little variations of how people have diagrammed ways of thinking—it’s non-linear, it’s long-winded, it’s circular, it spirals, it goes nowhere. A good rabbit hole to go down.

• I keep coming across writing about attention lately: we read Danielle Dutton’s A Picture Held Us Captive for a class, and I also just started Disordered Attention by Claire Bishop. If you’ve read or are reading either of these, let’s discuss!

And now a couple updates on what SHIFT CMD’s been up to in June:

Tending the Webpage @ Index Greenpoint

I ran my first paid workshop at Index this month! The workshop focused on tending as a practice for experiencing the web, using gardens as a metaphor to let us think about temporality and actions of care/neglect that we might take to approach the web.

We asked questions like: What if a website wasn’t readymade? What if you had to give it attention and care in order for it to grow?

It was exciting to see the ambition each participant had about the kinds of behavior they wanted to make—cross-pollinating flowers, ripening a website, growing weeds over time that you’d have to clean and maintain. Thanks to Daphne Hsu for TA-ing!

If you run a space or org and think a version of this would resonate with your community, please reach out to let me know.

Panel talk for New Neighbors @ Processing Community Day Taiwan

Thank you Munus Shih + the SpOnAct team for inviting me to join this panel with amazing artists and creative coders (Patt Vira, Elizabeth Kezia Widjaja, Nhân Phan, and Spencer Chang)! New Neighbors focused on facilitating local/global exchanges between Taiwanese practitioners and our Southeast Asian neighbors. Each panelist shared our approach to coding as a medium and what it means to learn from our neighbors as part of the “global South.”

I used this talk to reflect on and express how to feel optimistic about technology again. I’m tired of technosolutionism, and even “techno-optimism” as a term has the same coloring—what would it mean to reclaim optimism about technology? I used examples of my work and of a DIY/AI workshop ran by Vera van der Burg and Ploi Flynn of AIxDesign to describe what I believe is needed to counter the speed and problem-solving instincts of technosolutionism: slow spaces for peer learning, deliberate misuse or scaling down of tools, and openness to experimentation and failure.

You can catch the recording here.