My family has really deep roots in black arts and black arts communities, and my dad was really into technology, really into games. I grew up in a household that also had various crossbreeds at the same time. How were you able to combine your technical and design skills with your interest in building a community? Was one there first? It requires adaptation and a culture of learning. The container that houses digital gardens is a commitment to sustainability, pluralism and cyclical growth. I understand digital gardens as online spaces where many people come together to cultivate seeds that can be understood as content. I heard you use the term digital garden when describing your work. It was really comforting to go to a place where I’m still fulfilling my desire to connect and talk to people, but in a digital realm that’s slower and a little more vulnerable, a little more contemplative and an ability to hold uncertainty. So much social media is compressed information by nature-it’s designed to be bite-sized. It has allowed me to walk into a space that feels calm and feels like it is moving more slowly. When you were online, was Somewhere Good a source of comfort to you?
So this week I was kind of offline and just capturing everything. This year I’ve really tried to break away from the fast-paced noise of social media and actually give myself some time to get off the screen. How are you? This month was particularly intense, worldwide and therefore also on the Internet.
Hansteen-Izora spoke to us about how Somewhere Good came about and how to use the internet for sustenance, community building and possibly even personal growth. His work expands our imaginations of what the internet can be and his own personal use of social media platforms is an example of this. Her multidisciplinary creative output includes artistic direction, poetry, a newsletter, memes, user experience and web design, and a book entitled Tenderness: A tribute to my black gay joy and anger, and more. Hansteen-Izora, who uses the pronouns they/she/he, describes herself as a queer artist, writer and designer. And it was designed by Annika Hansteen-Izora. This is all presented in the form of a path that curves back and forth across your smartphone screen. A new prompt is released each day for each world, and users can record their own responses and/or respond to others’ responses. Currently, the app includes four “worlds” that users can enter: Artist Rituals, Communal Care, Radical Library, and Deep Discourse. There are no followers, no likes, no personal feeds, or profiles beyond the basics: name, pronoun, location, and photo.
However, what is most striking is the way it is designed. Not only does it require users to agree to a set of community guidelines, but it also invites them to collaborate and make suggestions to expand and improve it. The app is like nothing I’ve seen before For one, it is based on voice recording. Somewhere Good, a new social platform that launched last month, wants to find out. Is it possible to put your whole self on one social media platform? Is it possible to get the connection and conversation we crave without the doomscroll? Our online existences are inherently incomplete and designed for consumption. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook are built on users’ feelings of inadequacy and loneliness, offering an endless, scrolling loop of aspiration, virtue signals, and doom. What are we sacrificing when we choose social media? We trade everything from a minimum to a massive chunk of our mental health-not to mention a massive amount of privacy-to connect, to get the dopamine boost of being quite “liked” online.