List of articulations
- I make internet environments and infrastructure that invite, empower, and honor the people inherent to all technology.
- My work focuses on creating environments that highlight the agency people have in shaping computers and the internet and the meaning and connection we create through digital mediums.
- I create infrastructure for a more playful, light, and communal internet in the form of new interaction mediums, website environments, open protocols, and local-first applications.
- Spencer Chang (he/they) is a San Francisco-based artist, designer and programmer who creates infrastructure to create space for alternate internet imaginations from the dominant single narrative
my philosophy
an attempt to answer the question “what am I working on.” communal computing: I care about how technology can help people relate to each other, create space together, and express themselves more fully on the internet.
answers from other people
- organic forms of computing that also join back with the physical / embodied forms alicia guo
- place-based metaphors kevin chang
- (aspirationally) computing is a mechanism which creates new ways and spaces for people to gather (jacky zhao)
my purpose
I care about people and computers and the internet. People I met on the internet through my computer gave me a lifeline when I felt devoid of drive and desire. I think it’s a shame that everyone has a super powerful computer in their pocket now, but the device is completely personal. Screens have become demonized for all the harm they bring: addiction, misinformation, unfulfilling connection. But I’ve known them for all the joy, fulfillment, intimacy, and creative expression they can bring. I want to help imagine a world where our default computing infrastructure supports these kinds of desires, where the internet, by default, feels like a place inhabited by people, not slick corporate websites, ads, SEO-ified blogs and clickbait, where it feels like a medium and infrastructure for sharing space together, discovering ourselves, and pushing for better worlds. I care about the computing that…
- allows people to gather around
- can be held and interacted with and impacted. that is shared together, used to play together, a source of fun observing other people playing
- gives each person some individual meaning in their own relationship but every one ties together into a larger canvas of communal meaning
- acts as a collective artifact for communities, allows people to impress themselves upon it, to shape it to their love in the same way a space shapes to the people that inhabit it
- enables and empowers and hold space for, the kind that gives safety to tinker and explore and co-play
I care about computing that feels light, everyday, and inviting, that holds people together like light glue, that offers the possibility of coming together where you wouldn’t expect. Cozy enclaves of shared data. Open rooms with lots of natural light and all the people you love and have yet to love strolling through at all hours of the day. A space to be breathless, a gap to marvel at the awe of being alive, an excuse to wonder what might be.
the vibes
keywords for inspiration / what i want to make / the values i want to propagate in the world
- something from nothing, leftover / chopped creations, everything can be inspiration / a starting place
- the place you’re at as am abundant and grounding constraint
- everyday magic, everyday art, everyday tools
- value is inherent and instilled in creation
- create what you want to see
- environments and containers for people to insert themselves in, to find and coexist and depend on others in the space
- process of continual dilution of interdependence of mutual flourishing of plurality
- value is inherent and instilled in creation
- domestic urbanism
- folk creation, computers, community
- spacemaking through creations, environments that invite play and personality and emergence
- memory marking and memorializing, i want to remember this. exchanging of memories and meaning and experience
- tiny, smallness, coziness,
- natural, togetherness collaboration
- blooming, mutual flourishing, expansion, expansiveness
- paradoxes, death giving meaning to life
- joire de vivre, indomitable, wonder and awe and curiosity