Particularly things you can help me with:
1. A communal town on the internet. It is public except for a few pages, focused on collaborative generation of common goods by my friends and loved ones. Inspired by tiddlytown, but most spaces are general resources and goods. Together, we might maintain a little barn where you can get adoptables (circa 2000s web), a gift shop, a bulletin board, and a house that you can teepee.
In it, first, a library that is a collection of commonplace books: recipe books, photo books, journals (maybe some personal) etc. with several authors, inconsistently published (whenever we feel like it). My friends and I aggregating knowledge through context-specific blogs in the form of a library you can read.
2. WW(W) or Website Website (Website) is the title for my studio and research practice around websites. Aside from being the space for my writing and experiments about website, I want to foster community around it – perhaps through a mailing list or forum.
Experiments that I do here will be collaborative in nature.
- The first prompt I’ll release is a website where every page is a room that can stand by itself. The index is a big grid of rooms, laid out like a blueprint/floor plan. Each page is named like a location in space. There might be several levels, or it might be in one giant blueprint. You might enter a dining room where you engage in a Javascript popup conversation with a waiter who does not know what water is. In another room, you will find a bug that is shaking. What is the point of this? I’m not sure, but there might be one. This is a bit similar to the communal town, so I might combine the two.
- In relation to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports… what would Music for Browsing look like? An ambient album released only through Chrome/Firefox extension made for browsing the internet.
- A series of interviews about people’s websites. We have lots of artist and musician interviews. Why not interviews about someone and the websites they’ve made?
- A series of website tours.
3. With Kalo, an email delivery service with pigeons and fish. More coming soon.
4. A physical ambient radio (I touch on ambient radio later) with Maybe that you can lug around. Instead of music, it broadcasts ambient sounds from other people who have the radio. Maybe they’re at a cafe, at the beach, at the park, in class, in their bedroom, or their dog is barking really loud. You can add friends’ radio stations and create Clubhouse/Twitter Spaces like “call stations” where you can just pop in and out of each other’s space, like a casual Discord call.
It would need some form of noise cancellation and trigger to start working, I guess.
5. I want to design a new audio player (and maybe cheap field recorder). I’m imagining something that can take a USB C flash drive (or whatever DJs carry around), no media other than audio. Great scrubbing, some sort of playlist feature, EQ adjustments, way to flag audio, maybe a way to record audio. I’m interested in doing this as a challenge at designing not only interfaces, but hardware with unique mechanics. If we design speculative systems, why not also design the bodies that contain them?
6. Publication on alternate computing & networking histories and internet culture outside of the US. An archive and journal.
I suppose this would talk a lot about memes, but I’m interesting in crafting a local history of the internet. I think an interesting archive that could accompany this is the hyperlocal websites that existed back in the 2000s (or now!), like the site for a small business, local non-profit, or the blogs of people who lived at that time and wrote about the life around them. When I think of this, I think of all the lives that were lived in the internet cafes I frequented: the unique networks, relationships, and spaces that digital networking offered us. Weird subcultures, etiquette, and practices that emerged in specific spaces. A glossary, memorial, and tribute of some sort; a recounting of personal narratives.
7. Close.events: a seasonal selection of software, writing, games, interactive fiction websites, etc. about digital intimacy.
I made a website for it that is now vastly outdated.
8. Maybe is a press that I am building out (especially once I have things in my apartment again). Specifically the Ambient Release focused on ‘conscious listening’ and ’embodiment’.
- An ambient radio station. Shows are mundane conversations, commutes, coffee shop chatter, parks, etc. — the sounds of friends and the people around us. I ran a test for this.
- An ambient cafe. A picnic and nice cafe drinks focused on listening to the environment around us.
- An ambient listening party. Gathering at a strange spot to listen to the natural environment. We might even stream it.
- An ambient dinner party. A sensory dining experience (but I hate the stuff where your senses are actually deprived) where we have nice scented take-home menus. I DJ an ambient mix throughout.
- A collection of amateur field recordings.
- A workshop about how to field record.
- A workshop about listening.
- A mystery cassette exchange.
- To the maybe.press philosophy, any other series of engagements/prompts/art that might rise from this.
9. A rave.
10. To revive Girls.ph, ideally in newsletter form and the loose IG stories we were doing. I think there is value in documenting what my friends and I had loved as communities seem to gather around us — it’s creating a space for ourselves in the world. Only good things have arisen from being vocal about what mattered to us. It naturally draws the right people in.
11. Finish my ambient EP.
12. Lots of talks with Developh.
13. My paracosm wiki has been an on-off effort for the past decade and I want to publish it and create frameworks around them. It currently lives on a private TiddlyWiki instance, but I want to share it someday.
14. I’m working on compiling entries from this blog and others in an artist’s book. I’ve been loosely working on it for months but probably won’t be serious about it until someone really motivates me to do it or I secure some type of funding/deal for it. I don’t think it’s interesting because of the writing, but because of the content and context — and because I’ll design the shit out of it. One day, we’ll look back at the blogs of this era with a particular kind of fondness and sensibility for what it was like to grow up under the conditions I did.
On what already exists
- Updating engine.lol and formally publishing it on itch.io, and doing more work around it. I love the tool but have been a bit paralyzed, haha.
- I’m working on an idle-ish incremental browser-based gardening game that I teased a bit through Instagram. This will be the next big thing I release.
On the larger-scale
My long-term goal is to turn Developh into a community space in Manila. I want to create a library and community center that holds classes and events and small exhibitions, with a nice press and studio space to host residencies and the like.
I want to be the type of person that always creates communal spaces. From my new apartment in San Francisco to everything else in life I create: once I’m settled, this is 100% an invitation to come over and peruse my books and collections so we can sit down and learn from each other, and I can cook you a meal.
I want my whole life to be about creating spaces where people can create, so they can create the spaces they need and the people they love need, and so on and so forth. I want to constantly create worlds.
If you are interested in any of these ideas
I want to talk. hotemogirlfriend at gmail, DM me on Twitter, or 4752091571 ( I can only text if you have iMessage because my carrier sucks, try other methods if you’re not Apple please, sorry ! )
Last updated: 10/1/2022
Initially published: 10/1/2022
Comments
[…] After settling into this new life, I feel like I will be soon in a position to choose a ceiling within the commitments that we’re bound by in society; especially ones that my student visa here restricts me to. Whatever leveling in a company I choose to go for, I’m sure I can eventually work my ass off and reach, in an institution that aligns with my larger goal of making creation ubiquitous. This is not saying I’ll half-ass my work; I think design and computing, which might seem very contrary to the goals of closing distance and being face-to-face with people, can be reclaimed as purposeful agents to construct this ideal world. Again, there’s the tactic of rerouting and the preservation of my mental energy outside of work hours to build larger structures of care: ones more pertinent to the people I love, ones that will outlast me so greatly that I will make them and find myself no longer necessary. Creating systems that empower the people I love to continue building those systems is of main interest to me, amongst other things I want to do. […]
love the idea of hosting workshops about field recordings and collecting mundane conversation snippets in our daily lives. it’s a bit cliche but as the world is opening back up and we’re figuring out a new routine for ourselves, we’re all kind of living in a limbo of being accustomed to isolation and loneliness but also dying to reconnect with those around us. sometimes the word vomit that we stumble across or the awkward conversations that acquaintances exchange that we also happen to overhear bring such a small light to our otherwise dull days. i would love to see how this project grows beyond the community you’ve built for yourself, and i’d also love to see how i can contribute. i absolutely love ending my days with a casual podcast where the host talks about the ideas that have floated across their minds recently or the emotional rollercoaster that they had to ensure on a random thursday afternoon. we’re all just human after all and it’s these seemingly trivial connections we make that have the potential to change us.