URL Poetry Club
URL Poetry Club
Cloudlord.Management, Spencer Chang, Mathurah Ravigulan and other flowers
Dear reader
I read Blue August in the first week of September. It is Deborah Levy’s latest book. I could not imagine a better companion during the transition from summer to fall. Sunflowers appeared twice in the book. And halfway through the book, on page 143, at a brasserie in Paris, there is a conversation about technology.
The word technology is in cursive. It feels foreign and malpositioned. Who wants to talk about computer programs that can narrate in the real voice of a famous person when many of us struggle to answer who we are? Who will we become? And how did the date go?
I thought of Elliott Cost’s reading at Naive Yearly. After a poetic play with sound, HTML, and motion, Elliott asks what comes after websites. He wondered if he would ever stop making and publishing sites on the web. And how he wants to spend the days of his life?
I don’t have answers to any of these questions. I also don’t plan to paint my hair blue as the protagonist in Blue August. But like her hands refused to perform the nodes of male maestros, I’ll keep writing from the quiet, odd and poetic web for as long as the composition favours conformity.
Last week, I promised to return with a new website. It is a mix between concrete and found poetry. It is a play on naming, meaning and discovery. It is a collection of five poems I wrote using domain names of websites. The site is online at www.urlpoetry.club.
With care
Kristoffer
Wayside flowers
URL Poetry Club is written in URL.
Sideways is my new favourite visual search site.
When The Computer Became A Poet is asking for your camera permission.
Field notes
Software made for one. It sounds extravagant, but why is it different from making a French omelette with avocado for breakfast? In this post, Spencer Chang, the caretaker of the tiny internet, outlines a handful of the apps he made for himself. The “I Love Living” note is adorable.
A pattern I notice is that most of them are designed to archive some continuous ritual or practice. They all rely on varying custom solutions for storing and representing data. — Spencer Chang
How do you share half-baked thoughts with a subset of your friends? The type of ideas that would benefit from attentive feedback but are not yet ready to be published widely. What medium do you use? And how does it reach your friends? These are questions raised by Mathurah Ravigulan in a lovely short Google Docs. I’d love to see more of these moldable notes.
I want to have a cool way to notify that friend that they received a special thought gift from me. Something that feels nostalgic and interactive, like the old days when we got email for the first time from your friends in the 5th grade when you made your first email inbox. — Mathurah Ravigulan
I enjoyed hosting a stage at The Conference, a two-day gathering in Sweden engaging with questions shaping our societies. All of the talks are available online. You’ll find familiar speaker names like Sasha Constanza-Chock and Monika Bielskyte among lesser-known voices. For the context of this newsletter, I recommend you start with Neef Rehman’s talk about Machine Forgetting.
What does time look like for machines? Do machines understand time the way humans perceive it? And what happens when we rely on machines that have their own view of the world and on us? — The Conference
Collections
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