Hi everyone,

In my last newsletter, I think I mentioned that the writing about the green light was actually part of something bigger…

Maybe you’ve seen this already… because I posted about it on my Instagrim. But I wanted to make no one missed it. It actually will only be legible for another week! It is this website, which is an online anthology in the form of an ephemeral onion I created with my interactive design class from Yale last year:

https://the-life-and-death-of-an-internet-onion.com

The website is up for 5 weeks—the average shelf-life of a non-refrigerated onion. It will start decaying later next week, so please read it while you can.

All the onion’s layers are sweet in their own way, but I wanted to share the penultimate layer, Taichi Aritomo’s, here with you…

Taichi writes:

One aspect of love is the knowledge that some parts of my memory are kept with other people, and, in turn, parts of theirs are kept with me. With love, we're running the risk of forgetting what or where are own memories are. But we're also trusting that we can put them back together one day, even if they don't turn out perfectly accurate. In this way, love can make a kind of cloud storage that's slow and forgetful, but subjective and surprising.

Last week, on the night before me and HJ got married, they made shabu shabu, and we ate it standing over the kitchen stove. I wanted to take a picture of HJ's silly, proud grin, but my phone was broken. I tried to save the picture in my head—looking at the kozara of ponzu, the gray linoleum counter, the white bits of fat bouncing around in the boiling soup. Maybe my attempt to save a mental picture shows how much I'm trained to digital memory. I could have also noted the tanginess of the ponzu that slowly diluted, the pain in my feet after a busy day, the dull ringing of worry for whether the bouquets we were making later would turn out alright. HJ will remember different things--maybe about the smells, colors, the heat--so that our little thought-bubble-clouds overlap slightly and diverge like a venn diagram. I think of the parts that don't overlap as the parts each of us keeps for the other.

On the digital cloud, the parts that overlap in our collective memory are made to be as large as possible. To do this, the cloud sends love data through pipelines, duplicating and distributing it across multiple servers around the world to guarantee immediate and lossless retrieval. Photos, chat logs, and email threads of the past are preserved by default, and the process of forgetting doesn't start until I delete a file or account. I don't need to remember anything for anyone, and no one has to remember anything for me. Looking through an ever-growing past on the cloud is fun, but I wonder if I've been depending too much on the automatic memory of digital love. It could be nice to try to remember love more on my own, or split it between me and others.

I think that handwriting a letter forces me to do this, because I'm sending away the only copy of my message. I can't look at it again. My friend holds on to that part of my memory, and if she replies, I'll hold onto hers. Similarly, maybe the love input I want is a button that says "Send the only one". If I could send a photo or a text or a sound while deleting my own copy, I might treat those signals more preciously. Maybe I'd even feel myself spread out into the tinier cloud between every two people.

***

This is an image of the comet Neowise, which came close to Earth recently. I was at my parents’ house in Illinois a few weeks ago when it was closest. We drove into the country to find a dark place to try to see it. We stood outside the car looking up for a long time. We didn’t see it, but I still have this picture on my computer in my found images folder. When I see this image, I remember how nice it was to hear my parents wondering out loud about the universe.

My friend Melanie Hoff recently finished teaching her course at the School for Poetic Computation called Digital Love Languages. I recently watched its final sharing session on Twitch. It seemed like a very special class.

The special dotted border that surrounds the elements on Melanie’s class website was made using Max Bittiker’s broiders tool. It allows you to make fancy custom pixel borders without the use of images, which is exciting.

I used this tool together with Taichi when we designed the Alt-Text as Poetry website, which went live recently. We are really excited it’s live because we had a lot of fun making it with Shannon Finnegan, the artist who commissioned us. (I highly recommend trying some of the image description exercises in the workbook, which you can access on the site!)

But if you scroll to the very end, you can learn more about our process and why there are flowers all over...

A flower is not a flower. It is made only of non-flower elements: sunshine, clouds, time, space, earth, minerals, gardeners, and so on. A true flower contains the whole universe. If we return any one of these non-flower elements to its source, there will be no flower.

— Thích Nhất Hạnh

Coincidentally, Taichi was wearing the black bucket hat with embroidered flowers (picture at the top of this email) during our first brainstorming session for the Alt-Text as Poetry site at a local café. This was of course before the pandemic, back in February.

I’ve been hanging out sometimes in Gossips Cafe lately, which is open from 8am to 11pm in your local timezone. There is a lot of nice positive energy in there, and it feels good to check in and order a nice drink. They say coffee time is a portal to a zone.

Elliott made Gossips Cafe but seldom hangs out there. He says he’s too shy. Elliott and I did an interview with Tiana about our websites and collaboration. I hope you like it! I tried out my new webcam and podcast mic. Trying to go pro :)

I’m also happy to link you to Toby and friends’ squads piece, which is happily live now. I have been telling friends that I’ve been “squad-ing up” this past year, and now maybe they’ll understand what I mean. I’m relieved to finally have a thing to link them to, with lots of memes. I helped Toby pick the background of the last image—all the blue flowers that remind me of 1000 squirtle pokémons.

Maybe I’ll leave you with this nice website made by someone I don’t know: https://emotional.codes. I especially like the “defining the relationship” page that’s actually all about DTR within the context of friendship. I think this is beautiful and important, and nice to see away from the typical context of the romantic relationship only. Thanks to Shea for reminding me about this site during the Gossips hackfest.

Peace on earth,

Laurel

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