This piece came out of one of our “Are.na Walkthroughs” in which we ask people to take us through a particular channel, the blocks and ideas held within, and the ways those ideas may have evolved as the channel has grown and accumulated. Our third one was on June 25th over Zoom, and it featured Ephraim Johnson, Casey Tang, Sienna Kwami, and Tiger Dingsun. Here, Tiger shares some of what he talked about while walking us through his channel “
worlding.”
I first created this channel while I was in design school. At first, I was specifically trying to find examples of graphic design that felt like worldbuilding to me, but it has since expanded to include images that just feel taxonomic and expandable. By that I mean, I love seeing lists, collections, diagrams, and configurations of discrete items that feel like they imply a vast, continuous world that those items inhabit. I took the term ‘worlding’ from the artist Ian Cheng; he describes it really beautifully
here.
Worlding is a type of poetics to me, in the sense that I feel like poetry is also about trying to balance chaos, order, and some sort of third, transformative, spiritual force. I think the reason that this channel started off specifically in the context of graphic design is because in school it was obvious that design was about balancing order and chaos (see: adages like making and breaking the grid, learning the rules so you can break them, etc). But I was hungry for that third thing, that spirituality, for lack of a better term, that makes something feel like worlding.
Tiger Dingsun is a software engineer, graphic designer, and tiktok theorist based in NYC. He is mostly interested in the intersections between poetics, web technologies, and digital media cultures. More can be found
https://www.tiger.exposed/index and
https://otherinter.net/research/lore/.