Tourists stroll the pavements in a never-ending stream. Their eyes reveal they are mentally elsewhere, caught up in ancient myths and anecdotes told to them through wireless headphones by their shepherd who walks ahead with a closed umbrella or a laminated piece of paper to guide the snake through the tiny streets of the old town.
As summer is catching on, more and more tourists crowd the streets, like the rising rivers from the melting snow. They are learning about the birth of democracy and Athena, the goddess, and the Acropolis. We, on the other hand, are on our way to school, invisible to their tourist gaze until we cross the procession and temporarily break their trance.
Last Friday was our last trip to school before the summer holiday. On our way to school, Uno said, “Dada. A day is a long time.”
That’s the world I want to live in for the next almost hundred days until school opens again and the city returns to the locals. It also means I’ll be pausing this newsletter. I don’t know when I’ll be back in your inboxes, but I believe it will be with news.
With care,
Kristoffer
Ps. can I ask you of a favour? We are accepting nominations for Tiny Awards. All you have to do is let us know your favourite website(s) from the past year.
Ivan Zhao: Infinite Almanac
Ivan Zhao has built an interactive online calendar drawing on traditional Chinese lunisolar systems and the Japanese poetic form of renga. The project expands the classical seventy-two-day cycle to cover all three hundred and sixty-five days of the year, with each line working as both a daily meditation and a line of verse.
Zhao made the work after wondering how different cultures picture time. Growing up with decorative Chinese calendars, he became curious about the extra layers of text printed on them. A year-long poetry programme focused on formal structures, together with Yun Hai’s contemporary lunisolar calendar, brought the idea into focus.
The browser is the right home for it because the format is malleable: you can read it straight through or return to it daily like a mantra. The colours shift with the seasons, cooler in winter and warmer through summer, and soundscapes trigger as you scroll — insects, thunder, rainfall — echoing the poems’ references to the natural world. Zhao wanted the visuals and audio together to feel like submerging into another world.
Underneath runs a question about queer temporality: how marginalised bodies resist a straight, linear march forward. As a gay Chinese man, Zhao sets cyclical, seasonal time against the hegemony of predetermined developmental arcs.
Field notes
- Tiny Awards. Please nominate your favourite websites from the past year. It’s free to nominate sites, and you can add sites from others, too.
- Meanderware: Things I loved about cyberspace. “I like playable-essays like this because it’s impossible to reduce it to parseable content.”
- Taper #16 : For Good Measure. Spring issue of Taper is out. Remember to view source to read the artist introductions.
- HTML Day 2026 is August 8th. Meet people in parks to talk about websites and freewrite html. Already thirty confirmed cities.
- Over the summer, I’ll keep connecting events and artist opportunities to the two Are.na channels Call for Participation and Poetic Web Calendar. Both channels are open for submissions if you have things to share with the other readers while I’m on hiatus.
Wayside flowers
- Wiki Spy
- Garfriend
- Jesus Swimming
- Still Saying Good Morning
- Tangible Media Collection
- Are.na Hypernormalisation
- 8 Ball TV
Send Summer postcards to kristoffer@naiveweekly.com :)