Sharing Screen

Laurel Schwulst: Ultralight School

Photograph by Ana Šantl

Dear reader,

What are your earliest computer memories? I was born in 1987, and the first computer I clearly remember was my dad’s work computer. He was early to get a personal computer for home. It was a stationary computer. I recall the stack of floppy disks lying around. Maybe seven desks alone to install Civilization I. I must have been around 6-7 years old when I started using it to play games when visiting him.

Computers quickly entered my life. My mom also got a PC early, and by the time my elementary school got computers in the library and started hosting classes on “how to use a computer,” I already knew most keyboard shortcuts to operate the computer without using the mouse (to much annoyance for our teacher, who insisted that we would click our way through files, formatting, and font types to make a text bold).

By the end of elementary school, most of my friends had computers in their rooms. When we were not out playing football or building dents in the nearby forests, we were playing computer games. Sometimes, we would go to an Internet café, but most of the time, we would sit around the same screen and discuss what move to make next. The computer was personal, but it was also a social activity and something we shared.

Recently, I spoke about these childhood experiences with Matt Prebeg, and we decided it would be lovely to recreate this communal feeling of sharing screen. Matt is a curious designer with an interest in ecology and the internet. We share a fascination for ruderal species, those plants that colonize disturbed land, for example, after a wildfire or extractive agriculture, so we decided to launch an online mini-series where we share the screen with some of the people who cultivate and nurture these wildflowers on the Internet.

We call the series for Sharing Screen. You can think of it as an Internet home tour, a web version of MTV Cribs and Architectural Digest’s Open Doors. Tomorrow, May 26, we host the first episode in which we talk with all my favorite designers' favorite designer, Laurel Schwulst.

With care,
Kristoffer

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟

Laurel Schwulst: Ultralight School

Photograph by Jason Fulford

Laurel Schwulst is an artist, designer, and educator currently living in New York City.

What is Ultralight School?

Ultralight School is beginning this summer 2025. It’s a new educational umbrella project. To begin, we have three unique classes, whose applications are now open (applications due May 30th.) The classes are: 1) TWA: Total Work of Art (about shapeshifting one concept into digital, physical, and temporal forms), 2) Sense to Sense (about multisensorial translation), and 3) Walking the Internet (walking tours of NYC's internet infrastructure). We welcome you to apply!

Why did you start it?

For the past year, I’ve been having many ideas in the form of classes, workshops, symposiums, summits, or other educational and knowledge-sharing forms of gathering. (You should see my whiteboard!) In these visions, sometimes I’m the one teaching, co-teaching, or facilitating, whereas other times I’m the one more behind the scenes, orchestrating these things coming together. I figured it was time to start my own school as a vehicle to realize these visions.

Who or what inspired you?

I’m inspired by contemporary and historic learning environments and institutions. First of all, Ultralight School (2025) is a natural evolution of my previous Fruitful School (2020-24), which I started with my friend John. I’m inspired by the interdisciplinary and visionary Black Mountain College, The Bauhaus, Montessori, and Ivan Illich’s idea of Learning Webs. I’m also inspired by Jisu Lee’s Birdcall, a research center in Seoul.

Visit https://ultralight.school/ or Laurel’s personal website. I also recommend you to follow Laurel on Instagram and Are.na.

𓅰 𓅬 𓅭 𓅮 𓅯

Field Notes

1.
Sharing Screen with Laurel Schwulst. I’d love to see you tomorrow when we step into the Internet landscape of Laurel. Without Laurel, I doubt there would ever have been Naive Yearly, the Internet Phone Book, and all the other projects I’m doing to explore what the Internet is and can be.

2.
https://ourshiver.site/. What a website! It is hosted on a local solar-powered server, designed to reflect the location where it is situated, and contains lovely essays about the Internet and technology. Bravo.

3.
»It's like we're kind of coming to the end of doom scrolling, or really we might be coming to the end of scrolling in general, all this amorphous buffet of what you can zone out on – that's ending.«

— Chris Reppucci in A Conversation with Emily’s Astrologer

4.
Calls for Participation: Okay Space (Due 31/5), Lullaby Machine second issue (Due 10/6), Everyoneisagirl (Due 15/6), form + foliage (Due 15/6), Error 406 (Due, 17/6), and Peckham Digital (Due 30/6).

5.
Poetic Web Calendar: Sharing Screen with Laurel Schwulst (online, 26/5), International Conference on Live Coding (Barcelona, 27-31/5), Internet Phone Book Talk (hybrid, 1/6), Demo Day (NYC, 4/6), Materials (London, 7/6), and Cursor Launch Party (Copenhagen, 13/6).

𖡼.𖤣𖥧𖡼.𖤣𖥧

Wayside Flowers

• Thinking About You

• The Internet Pizza

• Path to Philosophy

• Birds

• Internet Roadtrip

• Dog Omen

• Pun Pages

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