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“Minimal, maximal, without characters, made of sensations, or of emptiness, mute, aesthetic, close to abstraction. You will discover toxic undergrowth, extinguished suburbs, melancholic sci-fi stories, fake magazine covers, modern love relationships, and visions of the near future.” — Lagon Revue No. 3: GOUFFRE …

A few weeks ago, fellow Are.na user Sam Hart posed the question in the Are.na Personals channel, “What might ‘librarianship’ mean for a platform like Are.na?” Embedded within this question is the inverse—what might a platform like Are.na mean for librarianship? …

Rachel Rosenfelt is a co-publisher of The New Inquiry, the creative director for Verso Books, associate director of the department of Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism at The New School, and a 2017-2018 member of NEW INC. She founded The New Inquiry in 2009, along with friends Mary Borkowski and …

Strictly speaking, Are.na is a framework for drawing connections between pieces of information. Thanks to the people that use and support us, it has become a richly layered and complex space for meaning-making, collaboration, and organizing thought. …

About a year and a half ago, a friend on Are.na suggested my channel Wild Animals vs. Manmade Materials would be better without the pets. …

The 2001 film Josie and the Pussycats starts with a plane crash. Boy band Du Jour, having found subliminal messages inserted into their recordings by their label, Mega Records, confront their manager who discards the group by crashing their private jet, parachuting to safety in the suburb of Riverdale. After …

A Collection of Channels is a series highlighting channels we’re paying attention to on Are.na. Are.na Libraries focus on channels that act as resources for self-education, collecting readings, public databases and researching techniques. …

Brandon Wilner and Willy Smart met in 2012 in New Harmony, Indiana, where they were both attending the Summer Forum residency. It was there that their first discussions of running a label that would release only “fake” music began. Over the years, it would go on to take a few …

A Collection of Channels is a series highlighting channels we’re paying attention to on Are.na. Participatory channels are open for anyone to add to, creating an experimental environment that encourages play. …

“Digital poems are not necessarily ‘poems’ written by ‘poets;’ they are found in ads, conceptual art, interactive displays, performative projects, games, or apps. Poetic tools include algorithms, browsers, social media, and data… Digital poetry will be perceived as living, because it is living.” — David Jhave Johnston …

Are.na Influences is a series in which we discuss some of the ideas that continue to provide inspiration to us while building this platform together. In this post, Will Freudenheim revisits three twentieth century thinkers who imagined computing technologies as a way to expand and explore the interconnectedness of human …

A black-stroked, white-filled table sits centered on the light-gray background of a browser window. Below the table in a slightly darker gray: two bevelled, rectangular buttons bearing the words “Back” and “Next.” Upon clicking the latter, sentence fragments, letters, lists, names, nouns, and numbers populate the table. All of the …

I only became acquainted with Taeyoon Choi a few months ago, but after I heard his name once I began seeing it everywhere. In 2013, Choi co-founded the School for Poetic Computation (SFPC) with a group of three other artists and teachers. At the time of its launch, SFPC got …

Gossip is a historically maligned form of communication, frequently cast as idle, feminized chatter in contrast to the masculine public sphere. But gossip’s bad reputation speaks to its power. Through its rapid spread and the instability of its content, gossip, as public secret, calls into question established social hierarchies and …

These days, it’s commonplace to hear complaints about what the Internet is doing to our brains. Without naming names, “I hate insert social media platform here” is a phrase that I hear on a regular basis. I’m sure you experience more or less the same thing. As to why we …

A Collection of Channels is a series highlighting channels we’re paying attention to on Are.na. …

Erik Wysocan and Benjamin Tiven are both artists and publishers in their own right. When they met at the start of 2015, they immediately began formulating an idea for a platform that supports the kinds of digital art publications they both participate in. That idea has since become Library Stack, …

In January, around the time of the Women’s March on Washington, my pilates studio wrote an Audre Lorde quote on the chalkboard near the door: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” At first it made me feel a kinship …

If you haven’t heard of Areaware, it’s still very possible you’ve come across their work—the design objects they produce are found everywhere from museum stores and local boutiques to the pages of the New York Times. Each of their seasonal catalogs is full of original works from small studios and …

A Collection of Channels is a series highlighting channels we’re paying attention to on Are.na. Interface focuses on channels related to the place at which independent and often unrelated systems meet and act on or communicate with each other. …

There is an unsung correlation between the perpetuity of upkeep and society’s reliance on it. The work that never ends is the work that keeps households, communities, the whole world economy afloat. The continuity of menial housework, the circuitousness of tidying up a city that will inevitably get dirty again, …

The first time I talked to HAWRAF was in an interview in the days right after the election when things were a blur. Like all conversations during that time, ours started with some variation of “Everything feels doomed,” but we didn’t dwell on it much beyond that. Carly Ayres, Andrew …

In almost every interview that exists online with Margaret Lee, the one thing that undoubtedly gets brought up is the number of different jobs she holds. A widely exhibited artist in her own right, with past shows at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and MoMA PS1, among many others, …

One of my first memories of being online is also one of my first memories of laughing. …

Are.na Influences is a series in which we discuss some of the ideas that continue to provide inspiration to us while building this platform together. In this post I’m going to introduce David Bohm’s philosophy of dialogue, a methodology for examining and refining thought in a group setting. …

Thomas Traum is a visual artist and designer who works primarily in motion graphics and 3D illustration at his studio Traum Inc. Thomas grew up in Germany before studying New Media at Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL) in Switzerland. After school, he moved to London, where he still lives. …

Parallel to the 2016 United States election ran a conflict that mainstream media largely overlooked, until it surfaced in the form of criticism of the Pepe meme and its association with the increasingly brazen and visible “alt-right.” However, this was only a glimpse into the “Great Meme War”—organized on Reddit …

Kat Su is a designer for Calvin Klein Underwear where she works mainly in women’s sleepwear, as well as with various other special projects. Most of her Are.na channels are evolving mood boards that she keeps to research new designs and collections; since her process for accumulating and categorizing images …

This post is the first in a series highlighting channels we’re paying attention to on Are.na. A Whole New World focuses on channels related to geography, spatial studies and mapping. …

This post is the first in a series of extrapolations on what inspires and influences us at Are.na. Check out our Are.na Influences channel. …

In the 60’s and 70’s, many people had utopian ideas about what personal networked computers could do for culture and education. Ted Nelson, a lead technologist and philosopher of the era wrote, “Knowledge, understanding and freedom can all be advanced by the promotion and deployment of computer display consoles (with …

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