Creative Recommendations from January

What I'm reading, learning, watching, and making art with!

Hi friends,

It’s time for my Creative Recommendations from January! These are just for my lovely ~patrons~ aka my paying subscribers. 

Each month, I curate my favorite things I’ve been reading, learning, watching, and making art with. If you want to upgrade to receive these once a month, you’d make my day 🥰

Reading

I’ve gone down a rabbit-hole of Silicon Valley tell-alls. I’m currently reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams which is about the early days of Facebook told by their first Director of Public Policy. It’s wild to hear some of the stories of her forming foreign relations to expand Facebook around the world and the political dynamics behind the scenes. I’m still at the beginning and I just read about her being sent to Myanmar alone and thinking she was about to be held hostage. It also is very critical of Sheryl Sandberg which I wasn’t expecting. Here’s a good summary I found on Substack of the book for those curious.

I’ve also been reading Brotopia by Emily Chang, which I found on a stoop in Park Slope. Brotopia has been really helpful in learning about the history of Silicon Valley and the gender dynamics that shaped computer science.

I’ve been studying the science of phone addiction and screen time for the past year to build my app, Free Time, but wanted to zoom out a bit and learn more about how we ended up here in the first place. I just launched Free Time on Product Hunt today! If you want to check it out and give it an upvote here that would be SO helpful, it just takes a second.

Making Art With

Most of my art has been digital right now! I’ve become fascinated by the intersection of art + tech and went to an event called WordHack last month where they do an “Open Projector.” People bring up their computers and present the creative technology projects they’ve made. It was really inspiring! They stream all of their events on Twitch and post them on YouTube after if you want to watch them here.

One of my favorites was called “inprogress.works” which is a lightweight social media platform designed to share progress updates on your side projects. You have to post your own weekly progress update to be able to see the feed, which is such a great idea for accountability. View the website here.

I just submitted an application for a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship under their Digital/Electric Art discipline. It felt good to finally communicate how I’ve been thinking about building the app as a form of artistic expression. Here is an excerpt from the application:

My work explores how people can find balance with technology in a culture where constant connectivity is expected and attention is treated as a commodity.

The submitted images document Free Time, a participatory digital art piece in the form of an iOS app blocker. This work invites participants to do something unusual: stop using their phones. Free Time locks distracting apps like Instagram and TikTok, and to unlock them users must pause and complete a short mindfulness or cognitive activity.

These activities are designed as embodiment practices that ask users to think before they scroll by tuning into their sensory experiences.

Learning

I’ve been using my iPad to make these little poetry comics about digital minimalism. I got a new pack of brushes in Procreate and it’s been a total game-changer. I finally feel like I can express myself in color digitally. I want to get better at making digital art this year.

I’m trying to get better at drawing people (when am I not?). Right now, I’m letting go of creating realistic humans and starting to design my own abstract characters. They ended up turning into a Keith Haring meets Strange Planet and I’m very here for it.

Dreaming About

SUMMER! Good god I am not having this winter. My apartment has been 62 degrees most mornings which makes it ~extremely difficult~ to get out of bed.

My goal for next January is to flee to a warm place for at least a week or two. I used to do this in the past, but these past two years I decided to double down on New York in winter. But I’m DONE.

The main reason I can’t currently flee is because my book, Quietest Places in New York City is coming out in less than a month! My pub date got moved up to February 24! So I’m here filming fun content about some of my favorite quietest places.

I just got the invite for my launch event and I nearly started crying because I’m being interviewed by my best friend in the world Abi Inman, who works at NPR and previously worked at Atlas Obscura. It’s so surreal to see it all coming together! It’s on March 10 at the Rizzoli bookstore, I’d love to see you there!!

I started this new series on Instagram called Quiet Club, where I’m basically doing ASMR content of my favorite spots in the city. If you told me a year ago (or any amount of time ago) that I would be doing ASMR content, I would have never believed you, but here I am. And I am shockingly loving making it! It feels like the least intrusive way to capture these places.

If you want to pre-order the book, you can do so here! And if you want to follow me on Instagram, you can here.

Watching

As always, I save my most embarrassing (and this month, spicy!) recommendation for my paying subscribers. So this month I binged watched