Editing

The 2024 Are.na Annual is themed “trace,” as in to find or discover through investigation; to copy, sketch, or superimpose; a mark, a sign, an inkling, a glimpse.

Read more about this year’s anthology in the Editor’s Letter.

Contributors include David Reinfurt, Terry Nguyen, Daniela Bologna, Jon Chen, yana m’baye, Shelby Wilson, Amirio Freeman, Michelle Santiago Cortés, Sarah Chekfa, Michelle Kuan, Noa Mori Machover, Desmond Wong, Sanaa Asim, giorgia chiarion, Andrew Walsh-Lister, Laurel Schwulst, Tracy Ma, Christophe Clarijs, Sean Catangui, Meghna Rao, Lester Rosso, and Scott W. Schwartz.

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For Montez Press Radio, Rigoberto Lara Guzmán, Michelle Santiago Cortés, Sharon Neema and I talked about what we’ve been thinking through by way of an Are.na channel. I wrote a meandering intro essay on shimmering ideas, language, and writing as image-making. Rigo spoke about rural electrification and energetic futures. Michelle ruminated on blood, mysticism, Vampires as hyper-Catholics, and “collaboration as contamination.” And Sharon went deep on attention, notetaking as an act of noticing, and small repeated acts of care.

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A digital publication of eight works from Are.na and Naive Yearly, a conference on the quiet, odd, and poetic web. Featuring pieces from Chia Amisola, Elliott Cost, Benjamin Earl, Tiana Dueck, Laurel Schwulst, Marty Bell, Maya Man, Alice Yuan Zhang, and Kristoffer Tjalve.

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A yearly anthology of writing from the people of Are.na. This year, the Annual is themed "service," as in an act of helping or supplying; to repair or maintain; to provide a public need; a meeting for worship, a place to refuel.

Read more about what's in it in my Editor’s Letter.

Contributors include June T. Sanders, Tiger Dingsun, Chris Rypkema, Morgan Strahorn, Miaoye Que, Jo Suk, Maxwell Neely-Cohen, Teah Brands, Molly Soda, Ada Popowicz, Aisha Ghei Dev, Alice Yuan Zhang, Zander Abranowicz, Cindy Hwang, Luiza Dale, Tuan Quoc Pham, Stepahnie Marie Cedeno, Charlotte Strange, Adriana Gallo, Rohan Chaurasia, Michael Norman, Robin Mendoza, Michelle Jia, Moon Mokgoro, Imani Cooper Mkandawire, Sharon Park, and Carolyn Li-Madeo.

Book design by Leslie Liu and Daniel Pianetti, and beautiful cover design by Rohan Chaurasia.

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Editing for Ben Schwartz’s book of interviews on bootlegging as creative practice.

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This year’s Annual is themed “portal,” as in an opening or point of entry, in the form of a website, gate, door, or hatch; an approach; a way to get or do something, a portal to.

Contributors include Njari Dimario Anderson, Evelyn Bi, Agnes Cameron, Cortney Cassidy, S.A. Chavarría, Ayana Zaire Cotton, Madelyne Cummings, Ariel Dong, Sophia Dorfsman, Paige Emery, Elena Flores, Laura Houlberg, Leslie Liu, Tess Murdoch, Cori Olinghouse, Cedric Payne, Brixton Sandhals, Laurel Schwulst, Travess Smalley, Roque Strew, Mike Tully, Alex Turgeon, Bryce Wilner, Lukas WinklerPrins, and Rue Yi.

Book design by Daniel Pianetti and Leslie Liu, and cover design by Ayana Zaire Cotton.

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Editing for Ben Schwartz’s essay-publication, "Let’s Consider the Bootleg," which looks at bootlegging as an artistic gesture. Following Ben’s UNLICENSED series on Walker Art Center’s The Gradient, this piece is the culmination of a year of research at Jan Van Eyck Academie and the first part of a larger, forthcoming publication project.

Editing for an interview between the two artists for Identity Pitches, a book of conceptual music scores that Cory and Stine based on the knitting patterns for traditional Norwegian sweaters known as Lusekofte. Their conversation gives context to the work by delving into the history of Norwegian folk music tunings and the knit patterns, and their intersection with the cultural identity of the country over the last millennium.

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Editing for a book published by A24, with filmmakers Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, about the multiverse. We commissioned some writers, illustrators, poets, scientists, philosophers, and quilters we admire to make work about the different multiverse scenarios, and came away with was a book about perspective, possibilities, myth-making, and information overload. Featuring works by Ted Chiang, Esme Weijun Wang, Etgar Keret, Emily Segal, Raymond Queneau, Jorge Luis Borges, and many more. Published in March 2022, alongside the Daniels’ movie Everything Everywhere All At Once, which also takes place across the multiverse.

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Editing exhibition materials and editorial pieces for digital art gallery Feral File, co-founded by Casey Reas.

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Editing for the first draft of Multidimensional Citations by Laura Coombs, Laurel Schwulst, and Mindy Seu, which was later commissioned and edited by The Serving Library.

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Editorial for Source Type, a platform for typographic research and visual literacy from Laurenz Brunner.

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Our second Aren.a Annual was themed ”tend,“ as in to care for or manage, to give your attention to, or to move toward a particular direction, an inclination or “tendency.”

Contributors include Rona Akbari, Zainab Aliyu, American Artist, Weeda Azim, neta bomani, fiona carty, Juliana Castro, R.C. Clarke, Shea Fitzpatrick, Melanie Hoff, Madeline Hsia, Clemens Jahn, Lucy Siyao Liu, Omar Mohammad, lily nguyen, Emma Rae Bruml Norton, Lai Yi Ohlsen, Alice Otieno, William Pan, Elizabeth Perez, Ingrid Raphael, Charlie Reynolds, Michael Bell-Smith, and Austin Wade Smith.

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“It's basically just a bunch of people musing on the possibility of expressing love online, how love exists online, things like this.”—Laurel Schwulst

I edited the second season of THE LIFE AND DEATH OF AN INTERNET ONION, a layered webzine about the possibilities of love online. Season one published the writing of Laurel’s students at Yale, who also conceptualized the site, while this year’s contributions were from students at VCU as well as a few friends from the internet. Like any non-refrigerated onion, the "internet onion" has a shelf life of five weeks, during which it will slowly start to decay before dying completely. It comes back perennially in late summer and begins its cycle anew. This year's 15 new entries are naturally closest to the center, since onions grow new layers from the inside-out.

As curator Cori Olinghouse has put it, "Temporalities animate life...Rather than saving and preserving what otherwise might be lost, [the internet onion] invites visitors to move through states of change. There isn’t the possibility to grab and take hold."

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A printed book about the past, present, and future of the Internet, with republished essays from the blog and five new, never-before-seen pieces. Alongside a three-part essay “When It Changed” on witnessing the backlash against the corporate-owned Internet, the writings in the book explore and celebrate the creative, poetic, and personal potential of the Web. Contributions by Becca Abbe, Cory Arcangel, Omayeli Arenyeka, Charles Broskoski, Claire Evans, Will Freudenheim, Willa Koerner, Jasmine Lee, Eric Li, Meg Miller, Mimi Onuoha, Andy Pressman, David Reinfurt, Danielle Robinson, Rachel Rosenfelt, Laurel Schwulst, Mindy Seu, Leo Shaw, Toph Tucker, Karly Wildenhaus, and Gary Zhexi Zhang.

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In April 2018, 2018, Fei Liu wrote the essay “A Drop of Love in the Cloud” for Are.na and The Creative Independent. In April 2019, Laurel Schwulst asked me to work on a publication with her interactive design class at Yale that responded to this piece. She prompted her class, “What are other love inputs that might allow us to ‘reach across the chasm of a seamless signal’?” The answers were layered, they spoke toward duration and the possibilities of loving someone from a distance. We made the publication an onion, and like other onions, it has a shelf-life of 5 weeks, after which it will slowly rot and die. It may be dead now, depending on when you're reading this, but this publication is perennial, so it will be live again in April 2021.

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I edited a piece written by Cory Arcangel for the Italian gallery The Blank Contemporary and its publishing arm TB Editions. The catalog was for Eva and Franco Mattes My Little Big Data and Cory wrote an excellent essay called “Personal Photographs” on “the ‘image world’ that both consumes us and fits so snugly into the palm of our hands.” I provided editorial guidance, a topedit, and a fact check.

For the Walker Art Center and Are.na, I edited a series of essays that asked artists and technologists to offer their hopes for the future of the web.

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I edit the print magazine for Eye on Design, published by AIGA, the nonprofit professional organization for graphic designers. We publish three issues a year, each with a new theme and designed by a different designer, with the goal of telling stories that provide testimony to this moment in graphic design.

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Since 2017, I’ve run a publication for Are.na that publishes interviews and essays following the threads of interest and pieces of research collected on the platform. Key topics include bettering the internet, experimental publishing, and continued learning, but the focus is mainly on personal projects that aren't a means to an end, and on following one’s innate curiosity and sleuthing interests.

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