My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?

Artists excel at creating worlds. They do this first for themselves and then, when they share their work, for others. Of course, world-building means creating everything—not only making things inside the world but also the surrounding world itself—the language, style, rules, and architecture.

“I want to challenge us all to have greater ambitions for the web. I want the web to reflect our hopes and fulfill our dreams, rather than magnify our fears and deepen our divisions.”

I believe the common prevailing metaphor—the internet as cloud—is problematic. The internet is not one all-encompassing, mysterious, and untouchable thing. (In early patent drawings depicting the internet, it appears as related shapes: a blob, brain, or explosion.) These metaphors obfuscate the reality that the internet is made up of individual nod... See more

The web is what we make it

Sometimes you don’t want a website that you’ll have to maintain. You have other things to do. Why not consider your website a beautiful rock with a unique shape which you spent hours finding, only to throw it into the water until it hits the ocean floor? You will never know when it hits the floor, and you won’t care.

There is also no state of “completeness” to a website, like a puddle, since they’re ephemeral by nature. Sometimes they can be very big and reflective. Despite their temporal nature, I’ve even seen some creatures thrive in puddles. Meanwhile, some smaller puddles may only last a day.

A website could also be a puddle. A puddle is a temporary collection of rainwater. They usually appear after rainstorms. Like a storm, creating a website can happen in a burst. Sometimes it’s nice to have a few bursts/storms of creating a website, since the zone can be so elusive. Some people even call rain “computer weather.”

In the early days of The Creative Independent, we sometimes thought of TCI’s website like a house next to a river. We considered the interviews the flowing water, as they were our house’s nutrients and source of life. We would collect and drink from the water every day. But sometimes, depending on its nutrient makeup, the water would change our hou... See more

Websites are living, temporal spaces.