Jenna Guarascio

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Changing the way we fundamentally perceive and experience reality requires seismic shifts in the collective imagination; the difficulty being that our systems of sense-making are deeply entrenched within us; separating ourselves from them is, by definition, existential. Developing our capacity to hold the fear that comes with this, sitting with it ... See more

Who is doing this kind of research as leisure activity? Artists, often. To return to the site that originally inspired this post—I’d say that the artist/designer/educator Laurel Schwulst uses Are.na to develop and refine particular themes, directions, topics of inquiry...some of which become artworks or essays or classes that she teaches.

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Places that may have once been every-day, are now non-everyday places in nature, or what one might class as ‘infra-ordinary’ places of social significance within the built environment. Acknowledging that, while these places that used to present themselves as a great swath of the unexceptional, everyday life, needs only a little trauma for them to r... See more

The Browser is a daily newsletter from someone who reads 1,000 articles a day, choosing his five favorites and sending them out with a short summary. Oftentimes, these linked articles don’t have a paywall of their own at all — but subscribers of The Browser pay to have them sent in a curated list.

In a world of perpetual data overload, [curation] implies information design and selectivity: the channeling, filtering, and organization into intelligible and usable information; the digging up of new or long ignored cultural corpora. Most of these corpora are simply sitting in storage: less than 1% of the Smithsonian Institution’s permanent colle... See more

“ Internal Resonance: How did it feel to write and publish this? Did it make me feel alive, both intellectually and somatically? Did it feel like something no one else but me could have created? Did it feel true to who I am, and who I’m becoming? Did the content of this writing matter to the deepest parts of me, beneath all of the cultural stories

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the best content on the internet is created by people who have turned research into their leisure activity.

So what enables this derivative creativity and cross-pollination of ideas is a rich pool of mental resources to derive from. And I believe the two main mechanisms of how we fill that pool are curiosity...and choice.

So that, I think, is the role of information curators: They are our curiosity sherpas, who lead us to things we didn’t know we were interested in until we, well, until we are. Until we pay attention to them — because someone whose taste and opinion we trust points us to them, and we integrate them with our existing pool of resources, and they becom... See more