Supporter Update 🤝🏻 June 9, 2023

Hi everyone,

Greetings to everyone who has subscribed since the last Friday digest! Thank you for your support of this newsletter and our upcoming podcast. These updates are sent first to supporters like you, then shared with the full list the following week.

This week marked the launch of the new series of stories I’m guest editing for The Bentway’s summer arts-programming season. The theme is “Beyond Concrete,” and we launched with a short editor’s letter and a conversation between artists Leeroy New and Kelly Jazvac about the practice, poetry, and production of public art (and, for one more p, about plastics, too). Over the next four months, we’ll feature more conversations with artists and scholars, reports from São Paulo, Seoul, and Chicago, a book-club event at The Bentway, and more. Given the subject-matter overlap between the Bentway series and Frontier Magazine, I’ll share links in these Friday updates.

The next issue uses the biggest announcement in tech this week—Apple’s Vision Pro headset—but I promise not to add to all the hot takes. Instead, I’m excited to share the experiments in updating our computing paradigms that most excite me. 💻🧪

On to the links!

Love all ways,
Brian

Updates

More stories related to recent issues.

• In February, I wrote about where I’m looking in Web3 for culture, community, and collaboration. This week, Metalabel, one of the organizations I mentioned, launched Several People Are Typing with Seed Club and Foster. With more than one hundred contributors to its seventeen articles, it’s an experiment in collaborative authorship and “onchain media.” You can read it for free on Foster’s site or as a PDF, or collect it as a limited-edition on-chain digital zine.
• Last November, we recommended an emerging iOS health & fitness app called Any Distance. On Monday, it won a coveted Apple Design Award, which are given “for excellence in innovation, ingenuity, and technical achievement in app and game design.”
• Two weeks ago, I wrote about unionization drives in art museums, architecture firms, and tech-company offices. The very next day, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision (PDF link) that, as most headlines put it, “deals another blow to labor unions.”
• Wikipedia, as a subject, ticks so many boxes for me: knowledge creation and sharing; online communities; governance; editing and writing stories; history. Here’s another fascinating conversation about it: “It’s rare that digital spaces require stewardship and fewer ask us to do so collectively. Just identifying yourself with one of the roles makes you feel like you’re really part of an online ecosystem.”

Even more

Links from the lists I keep for you.

• 👜 A thoughtful review of Natasha Degen’s new book Merchants of Style, on the interplay between fashion and art: “In championing commerce as a key component of artistic practice and partnering with celebrities, Warhol opened the door for business enterprises to also directly participate in the art world.”
• 🪷 Casey Cep, whose every published piece I make a point of reading, on “what monks can teach us about paying attention.” It’s one of my favorite magazine essays thus far this year.
• 🗺️ The indispensible Rebecca Solnit on “why climate despair is a luxury”: “Despair can be true as an emotion, but false as an analysis.”
• 📹 I recently came across About Here’s engaging videos, which aim to help you “understand your city better.” Here’s ten fun, informative minutes on “how Vancouver’s waterfront became so boring.”
• 🖥️ My pal Lindsay Caplan, a wonderful art historian, with an ambivalent and penetrating take on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s major survey of early computer art.