Here is a photo of one of my favorite moments this summer. This was in Minneapolis during Eyeo, a design-art-tech-all-things-in-between festival. It was Friday, the last day of the conference, and by some way or another a dozen of us had stopped by James Turrell's Sky Pesher.

In my diary I wrote,

What was so joyful about this moment was the way we each embarked on our private journeys to the art piece, and serendipitously realized, ah, there you are too. A friend aligned themself with a corner of the space, arms outstretched, feeling the sun and the sky. Soon six, seven of us had aligned ourselves with the other corners, forming what was later described as a portal, opening up to some dimension beyond.

This photo of us is important to me because it captures quite nicely what I’d like to explore and catalog in this Are.na channel, — connect. 

— connect has accidental origins. A friend and I were pushing the auto-suggested replies function in LinkedIn Messaging to see whether we could cycle through the six common story arcs through such sparse, generic, aggressively upbeat officespeak. There was something compelling about the way the depth of our human experience was distilled into these rather bland, agreeable smiley emoji. Was this how we wanted our computers to regard human relationships? Communicating with each other through the most extreme, bare-bones version of the site reminded me of other online exchanges where people either have to surrender to the limitations of the platform, or find ways to work around gaps in conversation.

— connect has grown to include perspectives on relationships between people as well as their personal relationships with the technology they use to communicate so intimately. — connect harbors many pieces of childhood writings and memories, pulling from personal moments nostalgic to me, in order to imagine what kinds of (digitally-mediated) interactions and encounters we might seek out in pursuit of that ambiguous feeling of cosmic love, of love for one another. Drawing from Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic, the particular shade of love this channel holds on to is that feeling of recognition when you’re with people — when you’re in good company — and their presence is enough to instill in you a sense of joy and vitality.