An Interview with Jisu Lee on the Seoul-based Space Birdcall

The first I’d heard of Birdcall was about a year ago, when images of an Are.na meetup in Seoul started popping up on my Are.na feed. We (my Are.na colleagues and I) are always excited to see these types of meetups taking place — it’s very cool to us that people organize these events autonomously, all over the world, to gather with others locally who are using the platform. This one in Seoul felt kind of next-level: The organizer, Jisu Lee, asked people to send a star emoji to get an invite. Once invited, participants were asked to bring a star-shaped object to the event, where they were used as models for hand drawing a series of stars. The stars were then paired up to make 100 Are.na logos. These were later made into a poster. 

After getting wind of the meetup, I started seeing more and more about Birdcall and Jisu online. Even from afar, it’s easy to keep up with Birdcall through its website, which documents what’s going on in the space, even going so far as to replicate Birdcall’s library shelves in the form of an elaborate, color-coded spreadsheet. Jisu made these digital shelves as a participant in a workshop called White Spreadsheet, in which people learned how to make websites from Google Sheets. This is indicative of both Birdcall’s programming, which usually has to do with learning how to handcode websites, and its peer-led approach, where the participants in one context are often the teachers in the next.

This dedication toward sharing knowledge and continued learning is why my conversation with Jisu — held over video call — is the first in a series for Are.na called Learning in Public. The series comprises interviews with small organizations concerned with setting up an infrastructure for others to participate and learn within. Look out for the next ones in the coming months. 

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Meg Miller: I  recently learned, while watching your Sharing Screen session, that when you were deciding on a name for Birdcall, you were looking for a verb that you could keep in mind while running the space. The verb you landed on was “invite.” Can you talk about how “invite” led you to “birdcall,” and how these words help characterize the space?

Jisu Lee: About five years before I was thinking of having a space — or maybe even from the beginning of my 20s — I started collecting birdcalls. I like how they are organically made and how many materials can be used as a birdcall. I like how they make the sound of the bird. I really like this specific birdcall manufacturer called QBC. Are you familiar with this?

Meg: No, that looks cool.

Jisu: It’s a French man who makes birdcalls by hand. He has a lot of collections and he even demonstrates how to play it on YouTube.

Like this: 

So I was already collecting birdcalls, and I had some in my collection on my bookshelf. When I was looking for a studio, I didn’t want it to be just for my private use. I wanted to make a kind of semi-public, semi-private place, and I wanted to share the space and the resources that I had. In that way, I had to have some sort of prompt for gathering people. I didn’t want the prompt to be too strict or loud or anything, I wanted it to be calm. I wanted to name it less as a business, but more in an intimate or friendly way. I was focusing on the verb “invite,” as you mentioned. I thought that this object fit the most.

Meg: While you were talking I was thinking that birdcalls are an invitation, but they are also a specific call to a specific recipient who will hear it and understand it. So it’s a good name for a space that speaks to a very particular crowd with particular interests, an almost self-selecting group. When did you get the space? How old is Birdcall?

Jisu: I got it in 2022, but I named it in 2023, so it’s two years old.

Meg: I like how in the About section of the Birdcall website there are several different versions of descriptions for what Birdcall is. There’s the functional version, the poetic version, the ChatGPT version, etc. This versioning really resonated with me as a kind of resistance to sum up what you’re doing in a digestible statement. At Are.na, we recognize the need for an accessible explanation of what Are.na is — to borrow from birdcall, we’d like Are.na to feel inviting. But we often have to resist just pointing people to a channel called “how do you describe Are.na at a party” where you get a bunch of different really beautiful, funny, out-there, and adept descriptions of Are.na from the people who use it. 

Is it the same for you? Do you find yourself needing a more expansive description of Birdcall, or does it change depending on who you’re talking to? Is it just difficult to explain, easier to experience?

Jisu: It is really hard to describe what kind of space this is. And also, it’s not only a physical space, it’s also a community. I want people to define it themselves instead of me introducing and presenting what it is. But I always want to interact with the people who are coming here and who are experiencing it. 

Meg: Laurel [Schwulst] told me that you once described Birdcall to her as a kindergarten for adults. I was also getting the impression watching from afar that Birdcall has a lot to do with learning together or learning in public. I’m finding that some of my favorite projects are projects like this where you’re creating the infrastructure for other people to inhabit, and in this case, to learn together and participate in. 

Jisu: After I was out of school, I always wanted a space that I could learn in because I really like learning and even teaching, but I never liked school when I was young. I wanted a learning space somewhere, but I couldn't find one that suited me. So I just wanted to make an environment and system where I can keep learning and keep teaching, and where someone can be the teacher and the learner at the same time. The position adjusts in different situations. I feel like Birdcall is more of an ecosystem of learning. Even when you come here as a visitor, you can become a host or you can do a self-initiated project within Birdcall. I just provide the space and time, or the friends [laughs], or even money. You can earn money by hosting an event here and charging for it. 

Meg: Could you give some examples of what sort of thing is hosted at Birdcall?

Jisu: This is the Birdcall kiosk:

You can see all the programs. For example, White Spreadsheet is one of the first workshops that we organized. Suzin Kwon had a very beautiful spreadsheet website, which I saw online. So I just talked to her and asked if she was willing to do a workshop with her work. I think it’s important that the person already has an original project but can expand it as a participatory workshop. I don’t want a person to develop a work specifically for the workshop; they need to already have a relationship with the tool and the work. So everything starts from the original project.

Sometimes when participants come to these workshops, I try to find people’s interests, characteristics, and strengths. It’s like birdwatching. 

I find people online a lot. This one is a website that I like from a few years ago. Young Jo has uploaded coffee every single day, for seven years on his own server. I emailed him to ask where he is based and see if we could meet. And then he became a host for a coding workshop. 

Meg: One thing that I’m struck by, both on the Birdcall website and on your personal website — websitesite.xyz, which I’ve heard you call “a site for websites” — is this meticulous documentation. Everything is recorded and indexed and logged. For me it’s amazing because I live very far from Seoul but I still have access to what goes on in the space and, to a degree, what goes on in your head, or in your personal coding practice. Is that the intention for you, to create a record digitally so people can access it? Or is there a more personal reason for this impulse to archive and log?

Jisu: Before I started running Birdcall I already had websitesite, which has a dual presence with my own life. So I was already used to having an online presence and an offline presence, and I usually categorize and edit my offline life on the website. So it’s already kind of natural to me to give them both the same weight. I just expanded it to Birdcall when I opened the space. 

I also have Are.na channels for specific categories or a specific time or a specific trip or project, and that’s like having a drawer for everything. So I’m very used to it. That’s just my nature. 

Meg: Does Birdcall use Are.na mostly for documenting the workshops and events? 

Jisu: We use it like a public drive. I call it our community memory. I always share references in an Are.na channel, and I use the channels as a drive or a cloud, then often embed them into the Birdcall website. 

Not everyone who participates in Birdcall workshops has a website, and they really like having a link that’s related to them, so I always give a gift to them with these channels. Like, “oh, here’s your online archive.”

Meg: They get to leave with a channel as a gift bag [laughs]. You held an Arena meetup at Birdcall in fall 2024. You all made 100 handmade Are.na logos that you then logged in a channel. Can you tell me about the event? How did it go?

Jisu: I wanted to have an Are.na meetup because I introduce Are.na a lot during the workshops that we have. People are always curious about what it is and how to use it. There are also always a few Are.na fans too, so I wanted to gather them and have a small activity that resulted in a publication. We asked people to bring an object that’s star-shaped. At the event we passed out these little index cards and asked everyone to draw one star. Then we paired them together to make the Are.na logo. Wait, I’ll show you something. 

We made a poster with it. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but we made this:

Meg: Oh wow, so nice.

Jisu: We printed them and gave them to the people who participated. People have been asking when the next one’s coming, but I don’t have an idea for a small activity yet. So whenever I have an idea I’ll host another one. 

I am currently doing an Are.na tutorial through Birdcall and it’s so popular [laughs]. People were asking a lot about Are.na, so I started to do the tutorial. The Are.na glossary with terms like “channel” and “blocks” aren’t as familiar to people. 

Meg: I also wanted to ask you about how you started making websites. I love that people can sort of follow along chronologically on your own website as you learn more about coding. 

Jisu: People have been asking me “why did you start to code?” I now have a website that functions as an answering machine and answers this question.

It’s in Korean but I’ll translate it to English. So basically, I found Elliott Cost’s Blur app in 2019, which makes your camera have a blurry filter. You could make this effect with the tracing paper over your normal phone camera, or you could just smudge the lens with your fingerprint. 

Meg: Or chapstick. 

Jisu: But instead, Elliott made a whole app to do this one thing, and that just blew my mind. I never thought that technology could be that simple. I messaged him and asked him what I should learn to make these kinds of things, and he kindly said “how about you learn HTML?” 

So I decided to learn it, and I went to an evil tutor educational computer language center. The tutor talked about how much money you can earn after learning to code and how you can go work at a tech company. I didn’t want that, I just wanted to do something like the Blur app. So I said goodbye, and then went to a publication launch event that Min Guhong hosted. Later Min opened up a workshop called New Order, and I was one of his first students. That was 2020. 

Meg: How was Min’s class different from the evil tutor at the educational computer language center?

Jisu: He approaches computer language like writing, in a very literary way. It’s all about what you write in HTML, not how it looks on the browser or how you structure it. So it was more like an editing workshop than a code writing workshop. He taught me how to write code in a semantic way and keep it simple. It doesn’t have to have a meaningless animation or navigation for no reason. It can be just like a document that you put on the web. 

Meg: Is there anything else you want to say about Birdcall?

Jisu: I just want to give appreciation to the Are.na team because Are.na is so open and participatory. It’s also offline-online, and it’s very interdisciplinary. The Birdcall community memory I built on Are.na is helping me practically, in running the space. I feel like I have been referencing it a lot while running the space, so thank you.