Winter 2025

first seasonal update in the year 2025

Feb 01, 2025

Animitas by Christian Boltanski, 2016

Dear everyone,

Happy 2025! Wishing you light, life, and togetherness this new year.

How is everyone doing? What is going on in your world? In my world, I’m here as usual, this time typing from a library and listening to something beautiful. It’s music, specifically Soundcolors 3.

Some exciting things are unfolding this year. Soon, I’ll announce these things — some new classes, some new worlds, some new ports. Anyway, since I didn’t send any update to this newsletter at all last year, I wanted to “clear the air” by sending along something simple, which you can read below.

As always, thank you for reading this transmission!

In this letter:

Last year, 2024
This year, 2025
My Art

1 of 3.
Last year

The most essential things are invisible to the eye.

But I’ll start with visible things, because they’re like fires we can gather around —

On March 12, 2024, I updated my personal website, laurelschwulst.com:

It was the most significant update to my site I’ve done in a long time.
Also available from laurel.world, its background color is #fffff2.
It was designed and developed to surface the gradual interconnectedness of my work through year, medium, collaborator, and so on.

My entire year had an “ultralight” theme:

In January, I taught a workshop on ultralight websites.
In February, I gave an ultralight lecture at the University of Tennessee.
In the spring, I invited ultralight guests into my class at Princeton.
And over the summer, I published an ultralight publication in concert with my ultralight workshop participants.
Over the summer and through the fall and even now, I’m working on a local-first and ultralight journaling app and methodology called Ping Practice. It’s a “camera roll for your thoughts” or your “pings” as we call them.

In November, I traveled to Korea and Japan:

I was an artist-in-residence at (salt) in Jeju Island, Korea. The residency is called “layover,” which was a generous frame for me… pause between times of life…
At (salt), I organized a workshop called “Energy Spheres,” where participants created their own radial gradient portraits of places, things, and people. We started by exploring Jeju Island as an energy sphere.
In Korea, specifically on Jeju Island, I loved hiking many oreums 오름.
In Japan, I especially loved the Museum of Snow and Ice and Enoura Observatory.
I typed often on my Pomera DM30 (e-ink writing device) in both places!

“PBS of the Internet” is about imagining a “PBS” — which stands for “Public Broadcasting System,” a non-profit serving the American public through its educational, cultural, and informative television programming — for the modern digital, networked age. Over the summer, I was a guest on two podcasts, chatting about possibilities:

Podcast 1: “How could a PBS of the Internet cultivate a more human web?”
Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure, UMass Amherst w/ Mike Sugarman
Podcast 2: “The Quest to Build the Fruitful Web”
The Orthogonal Bet, Lux Capital w/ Samuel Arbesman⁠⁠⁠⁠

The above photo shares a Privately Owned Public Space (POPS) in New York City, which I’m curious about especially lately.

Finally, I led three workshops on digital gifting in December, which was energizing! It was fun to partner with organizations I’m inspired by through an umbrella theme.

2 of 3.
This year

I’m excited about this year, 2025…

In the next couple months, I’ll be announcing some classes, workshops, groups… and other things… so you can learn from/with me… and/or support me on my journey to create and maintain learning environments. Thank you!

3 of 3.
My Art

What follows is a working artist statement I composed earlier this month. In sharing, I’d like to surface what’s going on in my “dome” so that it provides foundation for fruitful conversation and development. So without further ado…

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Similar to how a spider’s web functions as an extension of its nervous system — allowing it to sense and respond to the world beyond its body — I create works that operate as living systems: spaces that cultivate curiosity, learning, and reflection through thoughtfully created environments.

Artists are sensitive to vibrations. But instead of catching bugs in their webs like spiders, artists pay attention to subtle changes in their environments that enable them to build ideas into art. Artists, then, are translators of experiences to people without such sensitivities.

My art is creating environments, systems, and infrastructures — through websites, artwork, and teaching — all public-facing, serving as guides for others and myself. I’ve done this work fluidly, consistently, and durationally because living works can also be life-giving.

While I’m an artist who creates environments, I’m also an environment myself. My concept “artist as ecosystem” explores how an individual artist can encompass multiple perspectives, names, and roles simultaneously. This approach emerged from my long-standing work with websites as evolving spaces, as explored in my widely-cited 2018 essay, “My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?” I believe personal websites can be what philosopher Andy Clark calls “the extended mind” — both personal sanctuaries and public interfaces that allow their authors to create not only works but entire encompassing worlds, complete with their own languages, rules, and architectures. For those who don’t easily fit into existing structures, world-building becomes a form of self-care.

World-building is exciting, but if we’re not careful, these worlds become rather heavy. This is one reason I’ve focused on “ultralight” approaches to creation — a minimum possible means to achieve an ambitious, even quixotic goal, as Dan Michaelson says. Similar to Oulipian constraints which generate new literary possibilities, or Fluxus event scores that transmit meaningful experiences through simple instructions, my work explores how certain intentional limits can breathe life into creativity and connection. My projects including Flight Simulator (2019, Soft) and “How to Build a Bird Kite” (2021, New York Times) explore how technological experiences can be both lighter and more meaningful when they become intertwined with physical reality and natural rhythms.

I’m particularly interested in works that embrace cybernetics — the transdisciplinary study of regulatory systems and feedback loops across technical, social, and cultural spheres. This surfaces in my visions for a “PBS of the Internet,” which reimagines public infrastructure for our current networked age, inspired by Fred Rogers’s belief that television — the dominant mass media technology of his time — had an incredible role to play if utilized for good. In our current era of algorithmic systems that prioritize commerce and entertainment, it’s essential to create infrastructure for personal, tasteful, and educational experiences that serve the public. My 2019 redesign of the website for Artists Space — a historic NYC non-profit promoting avant garde practices for 50+ years — shares this approach through its multiple entry points and reciprocal linking structure, inspired by Christopher Alexander’s insight — “the finer I slice the strawberry, the more surfaces there are; the more surfaces there are, the more it tastes.” Through generous entry and traversal, the archive becomes more accessible — open to air.

This relates to something I call an “ultralight program” — an idea that can transcend mediums, from software to environments to conversation itself. These programs are simple instructions which become foundations for my “worlds” — for example, my collaborative fragrance review project Perfume Area began by considering sampling a perfume as a writing prompt about an imaginary landscape. Relatedly, my project Flight Simulator started by taking timed, make-believe flights without wifi from my home. Both naturally evolved into numerous other expressions — from objects to exhibitions to books. Living systems grow from simple seeds.

Learning happens when people are comfortable and curious — this idea guides me. My role is director and guide, orchestrating environments that encourage curiosity, reflection, and learning. When I cultivate learning environments, I encourage people to create their own metaphorical webs — frameworks that attune them to receiving ideas and perceptions — while understanding creativity as an ongoing process rooted in lived experience.

Looking forward, I imagine creating holistic learning environments that combine physical comfort with intellectual stimulation: spaces where libraries might connect to saunas, and performance halls to gardens — where discovery emerges naturally from the balance of quiet contemplation, warm conversation, and explorative movement. In our overwhelmingly accelerated and information heavy world, I’d like to create what is most life-giving: spaces that offer the gift of time, support, and reflection.

This is Laurel’s “Letter” newsletter, which is (somewhat) seasonal in format.

Note that it might move away from Substack this year, so please pardon the forthcoming dust.

Thank you for receiving this transmission!

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Special thanks to Becca Abbe, Jungsuh Rhee, Meg Miller, Amelia Rose Farley, Alex Wolfe, Dan Brewster, Calvin Hu, Peter Pelberg, (salt), Jisu Lee, and many others who have inspired the ideas I share here.

Laurel’s Letter

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