Are.na Blog

What if software wasn’t designed to capture attention, but instead to promote presence?

Fifty years after Vermont's billboard ban, Facebook’s ad strategies prove a threat to American democracy. How did we get here?

In the summer of 1968, Vermont was about to publish a statewide billboard ban, courtesy of environmentalist and eccentric Republican Theodor Riehle.

Dedicated to an object that’s ubiquitous yet already nostalgic, the conference held equal space for history, futurity, and somewhere-else’s.

Designing for better channels of intimacy is as important for privacy protection as security protocols

We're committing to being supported entirely by the community we serve.

How a self-organized summer school is reorienting design education

Lessons from our workshop with The Creative Independent on building a healthy relationship with the web

In the 1970s, an analysis of Earth’s finite resources coincided with hundreds of thousands of Americans going off-grid. As we begin to see the limits to online growth, what’s the digital equivalent?

An unchronological search for the soul through time.

A walk through Are.na reveals the tangled assemblages connecting human and non-human life

And how labor often gets left out of the discussion around nostalgia for the old web.

Announcing the new version of Are.na groups

From survival guides to string stories to quipu, every knot is a set of instructions crystallized.

Collecting, archiving, and printing a body of research for this week's multi-site exhibition on video culture in NYC.

Cory Arcangel on pragmatic Norwegian music festivals, our "always on" economy, and EDM stars as the ultimate just-in-time, carbon-guzzling cog.

An interview with Andrew Beccone on the generative potential of libraries and facilitation as art.

An introduction to our book with The Creative Independent

A collection of notable years, frozen in digital amber

A collection of channels on systems of notation in performance and visual art

Shiraz Gallab argues that tokenism is determined from an external condition, and it’s time we shift our gaze to the tokenizer rather than the token.

Nate Pyper on the parade as an 'other' space of sociality, perpetually in motion

A guest Are.na podcast, brought directly to your ears by artist Jeffrey Alan Scudder and the refugee organization and techno rock band GP&PLS

A collection of channels on the origins of digital pictograms

DISPATCH Learning In and Out of School A collection of resources on learning, pedagogy, and cooperative education.

Woodcuts, tribal imagery, suns, curvy figures, aroma swirls, and earth tones: Evan Collins defines the look of the 90s

A collection of channels feeling out our relationships with non-human beings

On the ground at the second Internet Archive summit for preserving the open web

A collection of screenshots from Instagram Stories documenting the interiors of people's homes.

The founder of the Internet Archive surveys the metaphors and images artists have used to understand the Internet and its short history.

Expanding on Benedetto's talk at SYPartners on archival practice and knowledge management.

Ways of seeing belong not just to individuals but to fields and subcultures. The best way to understand the state of a discipline can be to pay attention to what...

The Creative Independent's Willa Köerner writes about how to thoughtfully and responsibly illuminate private knowledge-building in a public space

On putting together their annual cooking competition house party in Queens, NY

At Xerox PARC in the 1990s, poet Judy Malloy and researcher Cathy Marshall began a collaborative hypertext project through correspondence

Artworks exploring the nexus of queerness, the body, and technology

Refresh is a home gallery run by Natalia Panzer in Sunset Park, Brooklyn

Journalist and musician Claire L. Evans shares the stories of unsung women who shaped the development of the web

Graham Johnson revisits the 3x5 note card, which played a crucial role in documenting, indexing, and linking information in the twentieth century

How to know a place as large as L.A. County, five thousand square miles and population eleven million, if not through triangulation?

A conversation with Elliott Cost and Laurel Schwulst on Radner's digital "green pages" for artist websites

Tracking the weird and wild worlds of modern loneliness, affective politics, and digitally mediated sentimentality

Rounding up a list of browser extensions that present visions of a better Internet and world.

The commonplace book is a notebook style with roots in the Enlightenment, where thinkers could log the best quotes and insights from their readings.

Editor and sociologist Jenny L. Davis joins us for the third installment of our roundtable on the state of the web.

Are.na is changing what an online community can be, and we want you to be a part of the process

Keaton Venture and Mike Spreter of Film Fun talk movies and pop culture.

This week's collection rounds up channels that build around a unifying visual aesthetic or 'vibe.'

We kick off our new roundtable on the state of the web by talking to Drew Austin, blogger at Ribbonfarm and Kneeling Bus.

This week's collection rounds up channels with distinct visions for the future.

Researcher and designer Kei Kreutler talks satellite observation, augmented reality, and her new project Patternist.

Recapping the Cybernetics Conference, held November 15-18 at Prime Produce, NYC.

Let’s use the agency we have to build an Internet that better serves us all.

Visible Speech is an alphabet designed by Alexander Melville Bell, one of several 19th C attempts to produce a universal language.

Paul Soulellis talks archival practices, artist publications, and his current studio Counterpractice.

This week's collection focuses on movement, gesture, and the body, from art practices to competitive sports.

We're pleased to announce the recipients of our inaugural Are.na Grants program, a new initiative to support research, writing, and creative projects developed on Are.na.

Sara Cwynar is a Canadian artist living in Brooklyn who previously worked as a designer for The New York Times Magazine.

If you’re looking for horror, the real world is scary enough.

What might a platform like Are.na mean for librarianship?

Experimental comics are works that acknowledge the traditional framework of comics but, rather than adhere to it, tend to tilt, twist, and warp it into other things.

Rachel Rosenfelt is a co-publisher of The New Inquiry, the creative director for Verso Books, and a 2017-2018 member of NEW INC.

We're pleased to announce the Are.na Grants program, a new initiative to support research, writing, and creative projects developed on Are.na.

On the policing of pets, the intersection of parallel lines, and artists as sentinel species.

Two nights after the September 11 attacks, Gavin Brown’s West 15th Street art-bar Passerby re-opened to the public.

This week's collection focuses on public databases, resources for self-education, and research techniques.

Wilner and Smart discuss the subjectivity of authenticity and fakeness, and the efforts of their label Fake Music to preserve artificiality.

Participatory channels are open for anyone to add to, creating an experimental environment that encourages play.

Tools shape the way we behave. We point, swipe, skim, type, click, send. How can we reconsider the actions we perform in our daily interfaces?

Revisiting three twentieth-century thinkers who imagined computing technologies as a way to expand and explore the interconnectedness of human knowledge.

Permutation in the work of Samuel Beckett and Robert Grenier.

Taeyoon Choi talks the School for Poetic Computation, diversity in tech, and what it means for a practice to be poetic.

Gossip is a historically maligned form of communication, frequently cast as idle, feminized chatter in contrast to the masculine public sphere. Might that reputation speak to its power?

We're making a space on the Internet where we can think clearly and collaborate openly with others on shared interests.

The mediating aesthetics of Google apps, from Street View to Image Search.

Founders Wysocan and Tiven talk through how Library Stack is creating a space for alternative publishing.

More and more, companies are capitalizing on post-election liberal guilt—using the current political climate as a means to increase monetary gains.

Lisa Smith of Areaware makes the case for thoughtful product design.

Channels related to the place at which independent and often unrelated systems meet and act on or communicate with each other.

‘Manifesto for Maintenance Art’ was and is a feminist rallying call, a proclamation of the necessity of domestic labor to the same society that sees it as worthless.

Artists from the studio HAWRAF interview each other about transparency and inclusion.

Artist Margaret Lee talks about the origins and mission statement of the Chinatown activist group Art Against Displacement.

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

Introducing 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 is studio Traum Inc.

Memes are credited with an increasingly important role as political propaganda, solidifying in-group identity and disseminating ideas in forms that are disarming in their unexpectedness or humor.

Kat Su, designer at Calvin Klein Underwear, talks about her research and design process

Channels related to geography, spatial studies, and mapping.

This post is the first in a series of extrapolations on what inspired and influences us at Are.na.

In the 60's and 70's, many people had utopian ideas about what personal networked computers could do for culture and education. Not all of them turned out.

In the Summer of 2013, a few close friends and work colleagues in Austin got together one weekend and decided to start a tiny art school called Sunday School.