01 Sep 2019 — Making a website

Some thoughts about making this website, written jointly by me and Piper Haywood (italics).

This website started as a conversation between Piper and myself. I had just left my full-time job and PH suggested that we could work together on a new website for my practice. It was also a good excuse for us to collaborate and explore some of our ideas about website design and development together.

I was interested in working with Gemma on pretty much anything! More specifically though, I wanted to work on a site that was less of an unchanging behemoth and more of a playground for learning, a permanent sandbox and ideas container. This is how treat my site, but I hadn’t had the chance to create something similar for and with someone else before.

From the outset, we set the intention that the process should be conversation between the two of us. We’re both interested in seeing design and development as a collaborative and iterative process, where both parties learn from the other. (Although, admittedly, I have learnt much more from PH during this process!)

You say that, but I’ve definitely learned a ton from you! Especially about letting ambiguity thrive, balancing it against structure.

31 Oct 2019 — A conversation with La Foresta

I recently spent a few weeks in Rovereto, northern Italy, to do a residency at La Foresta.

While I was there I printed a mini-newsletter, as part of an ongoing project that Evening Class is doing for the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. The newsletter is a short conversation between Brave New Alps, one of the initiators of the La Foresta project, and two of us from Evening Class.

Evening Class and La Foresta newsletter

I’ve added the text of the full interview below.

22 Dec 2019 — Dissenting Ephemera

Some of my notes from the Dissenting Ephemera workshop at MayDay Rooms a few weeks ago:

leftove.rs is an online archive of radical political ephemera, built in collaboration between MayDay Rooms and 0x2620 Berlin.

They’ve spent the last year digitising the MayDay Rooms archive and scraping other archives and now have a substantial body of material to work with. They’ve been experimenting with different ways of structuring, distributing and expanding upon this archive. For this workshop, they invited a range of people working in similar areas to share their experiences and contribute to the development of the platform.