On web design as architecture, understanding social systems, and making your own weird mistakes

How do we define and explore the material relationships of computers and the environment?

The hidden costs of digitalization and its effects on those outside of labor protection laws

What does it mean to film the natural world through a non-human lens? Is such a thing possible?

Companion–Platform on their “Vicia Faba” seed packet for the Are.na Gift Shop

Architecture has always been well equipped in manufacturing awe

Poetry as visual arrangement, a thing to be looked at

“As words go forward, they also go backwards.”

The first in a new series about work that occupies the blurry boundary between what we do and who we are

“Once you stop thinking of Wikipedia as a passive consumption space, it’s really empowering.”

On finding meaning in finding meaning in clouds

This year’s theme is “trace”

A conversation on the making of a Ramadan calendar.

Dispatches from a tombstone designer

Damon Zucconi presents: Carl Sagan’s “Diagram of All Space and Time” for the Are.na Gift Shop

On translation, interdependence, and the generosity of Ramadan calendars (Allahu Akram)

The mind may wander but the body still has to live somewhere.

On party planning, technology, and the collision of time

Localizing what culture means on an individual level

I hate work?

The keyboard smash remains an apt summary of fandom.

Reframing forgetting as healing, purposeful, and even eudaemonic.

Purpose, Longevity, Ethics, Asymmetry, Style, Utility, Refashion, Empowerment...

An investigation into the ever-evolving form.

This year’s Are.na Annual, themed “service,” is now available.

On upcoming changes to premium memberships

A conversation introducing the Are.na Gift Shop and our first product, How to Pass Time Inside This Room

Finding the fractures in game worlds offer a new perspective.

We're made of the same stuff.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the primordial ooze.

What kinds of vulnerability do platforms encourage, and what kinds of expression do they limit?

“How are we going to build it if we don’t imagine it?”

“I wanted us to leave something every day—it didn’t matter what it was.”

“To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be.”

If you choose another way, if you reject the clock, time will flow again.

Submissions should take their root in a channel and fall loosely under the theme “service.”

All of life’s greatest truths are wrapped in mystery.

A consistent space of refuge, a window into an elsewhere.

On exploring color through as many tinted lenses as possible.

In the ’70s and ’80s, the Community Memory Project explored how an information portal could be a shared experience.

Jottings on an elusive term.

To be “against” narrative identity is to recognize that we’re unreliable narrators.

And the potential of a society organized around awe.

More than a literary form, Poetry is the essence of inner feelings and thoughts as they relate to the external world.

Surfline provides live photo or webcam video feeds of surf breaks around the world.

And the different ways to organize and understand cooking and food.

This year’s Are.na Annual, themed "portal," is now available.

On Kamau Brathwaite’s Sycorax video style, the poet’s attempt “to put on the page what sound looked like.”

And the artist’s role in building a world where we are all supported in our right to live joyously

And the ways the app parallels a kind of religious experience.

The search for fissures in systems and networks, towards parts-to-whole relations with ecological and biophysical processes.

Piecing together a framework for reflection from various practices, quotes, and ways of thinking.

And lists, collections, diagrams, and configurations of discrete items that imply vast, continuous worlds.

A meditation on what keeps us going, on the occasion of Are.na’s 10th anniversary.

Exploring the correlation between sports and art through an African American, abstract, playful, creative, tech, stylish, and instinctual perspective.

On how things are made, who gets to make them, and how labor and time gets leveraged.

An assemblage of knowledge established within our mutual histories

As long as computers are built to be in service of, the limits of their intelligence will always be the limits of their suzerain.

Submissions should take their root in an Are.na channel and fall loosely under the theme “portal.”

How have tending and attention changed over time and across contexts, and what might that evolution teach us? 

"By cataloguing media relative to my fears, desires, and stresses, I’m able to trace my evolving reality." 

An ongoing exploration on how surfaces interact with the spaces they inhabit.

Loops, cycles, knots, revolutions, and the development of a new game called Fugue.

“Some of the blocks are like bookmarks for lines of research that I want to delve more deeply into.”

Ingrid Raphael talks with Rae Dand and Onelson Nicholas about how care is activated when our needs are met

Ecology is a weird compass, and through attendance, we can learn to use it.

“How are you? No really, how are you?”

On Afghan diaspora communities, film representation, and the practice of collectively cataloguing knowledge as it expands

Exploring the distinction between a life of occurrences versus a life lived and savored.

“By walking the same route around my apartment everyday, I was in a choreography of noticing and collecting.”

And using an ancient mnemonic device as an organizational tactic for storing and archiving information online.

Creating a future from the intersection of Blackness, rest, and technology in our past and present.

On meeting online, dating during a pandemic, and growing an internet garden together—an Are.na love story

Examining the desire to recreate controllable environments that fit within our own scales and bounds.

Black people are the dependent variable in the progression of civilization, not a function of it.

The Are.na Annual Too, themed “tend,” is now available.

Omar Mohammad, Shiraz Gallab, Florence Fu, and Darin Buzon on self-preservation

The famous Danish author was also a talented, intuitive, somewhat unhinged arranger of flowers.

Before the Internet, hypermedia projects explored open frameworks for moving through a body of knowledge

A centuries-old obsession with a single artwork made in a single moment.

Tables are both infrastructure for and signifiers of our social relations and interactions.

On two webzine anthologies and publishing an “oral history of the internet.”

Submissions for essays and interviews should take their root in an Are.na channel and fall loosely under the theme “tend.”

On new approaches to time, attention, tools, and teaching amid a global pandemic.

Andreas Jonathan, Eliseo Rivera, and Tina Nguyen talk about relationships as technology and finding spirituality and fellowship apart from dogma.

Code Societies’ Melanie Hoff talks with doula and childbirth educator Elizabeth Perez on the subject of the cybernetics of race/ism and sex/ism

In the summer of 1968, Vermont was about to publish a statewide billboard ban, courtesy of environmentalist and eccentric Republican Theodor Riehle.

Fifty years after Vermont's billboard ban, Facebook’s ad strategies prove a threat to American democracy. How did we get here?

What if software wasn’t designed to capture attention, but instead to promote presence?

Dedicated to an object that’s ubiquitous yet already nostalgic, the conference held equal space for history, futurity, and somewhere-else’s.

Designing for better channels of intimacy is as important for privacy protection as security protocols

We're committing to being supported entirely by the community we serve.

How a self-organized summer school is reorienting design education

Lessons from our workshop with The Creative Independent on building a healthy relationship with the web

In the 1970s, an analysis of Earth’s finite resources coincided with hundreds of thousands of Americans going off-grid. As we begin to see the limits to online growth, what’s the digital equivalent?

An unchronological search for the soul through time.

A walk through Are.na reveals the tangled assemblages connecting human and non-human life

And how labor often gets left out of the discussion around nostalgia for the old web.

Announcing the new version of Are.na groups

From survival guides to string stories to quipu, every knot is a set of instructions crystallized.