field companions
[TI-17] a world of computation all around us and infinite possibility
I'm a hoarder by nature. It might have come from my parents who keep every spare grocery bag, packaging box, and more stacked high in organized clumps in their extra storage room.
I feel a deep nostalgia for objects and places. I'm obsessed with all the history they hold, especially when their lifetimes may be several times our own. We encounter so many things in our daily lives that have seen much more than we have. Whenever I visit a place with history, I try to picture scenes that happened so long ago in the same place. If I listen closely, I can feel their energy communicating with me.
Maybe that's why I'm obsessed with finding faces in objects. I have a whole Are.na collection dedicated to them (curated with Gather of course).
It's definitely a romantic notion. It takes a certain faith and a certain hope to look for meaning beyond the current reality. You have to be a dreamer, to be open to letting your imagination lead you into precarious positions, teetering1 between the real and imaginary.
My latest project, Field Companions is an ode to this romantic feeling. It's a dedication to the desire to hoard, to hold onto the memory of our objects, to listen to the earth.
Field Companions are a collection of everyday objects that I've transformed into interactive sculptures, imbued with the agency to share their stories. Found stones from meaningful locations have had centers carved out and replaced with a portal to a 1-min audio memory from the moment they were found. Tapping your phone to this "soul" initiates an interactive web experience that captures a mini time capsule of its history.
(A limited first collection of 25 from 5 different locations is available on Metalabel as they graciously invited me to be an artist for their FW2024 collection.)
This idea is an extension of my initial exploration of embedding NFCs with site-specific websites into objects to create computers you can touch. I wanted to see how I could apply the same concept to things that already exist. But embedding computational capabilities into things that already exist is just a small drop compared to if manufacturing changes to start embedding everyday things with computation.
What do our lives look like when this is taken to the extreme and becomes the norm, when every barcode and label is suddenly a computer chip? And is this the kind of world that we even want?
We seem to be at or near a threshold point with this kind of everyday technology entering popular culture. Since COVID, contactless payments have grown exponentially, doubling twice from 2019-2023. I've never seen so much public awareness around people customizing NFCs for use in their daily lives. TikToks showing tutorials and life hacks using NFCs to automate your life have millions of views.
IYK is a company that makes its own branded NFC chips loaded with mini-apps for specific purposes (like saving memories or sending a video message). I like the concept of these mini experiences, but I can't say I don't feel some wariness given they're backed by a16z's crypto arm.
Nintendo has also been sneaking NFC technology into the hands of kids through their amiibo, interactive figurines that can connect to their video game consoles. These little toys can unlock characters, equipment, and even custom data. I love the social behavior that this platform enables: I can share my favorite game assets with my friends by bringing over my amiibo.
Computation is seeping into our surroundings. More and more objects around us are becoming enchanted. But while the technology is becoming more available, the experience is still rough at the edges and can be unpredictable. Sometimes scanning tags involves a juggling act of moving your phone around until it hits the sweet spot.
Still, we seem to crave this physical intimacy with our technology. It seems to stem from the interpersonal tension with our phones—these all-powerful devices that seem to steal our time and energy even as they enable so much of our daily functionality. These physical-digital experiences are a path for redemption for our devices. They offer surprise and whimsy, a joy that we forgot we could have.
Even though the experience feels new and cutting edge, the feeling we get from it feels nostalgic, reminiscent of an old internet (or at least our experience with it when we were younger), when going on the internet meant playing a dumb game or reading a poorly designed site rather than wading through optimized flows and corporate-speak-pretending-to-be-hip copy.
The other day on Bluesky (follow me I'm optimistically transitioning from Twitter to it), I asked about devices that inspire joy in a home. Suzanne recommended Cube World to me, and I was blown away by the demos2. R also sent me this video of Pixel Chix, made by the same company, which seems to be mostly the same thing but marketed to girls and more intense Tamagotchi-like gameplay. For a Kernel Magazine launch event, Jacky and I had ideated a communal mobile Gashapon that required putting two phones together and pulling an on-screen handle down at the same time to trigger an exchange of digital files from your device (unfortunately Web NFC is still in experimental mode and we couldn't actually make it).
image credit Reddit
The combinatorial possibilities that these toys hint at make me think of the magic of things like Conway's Game of Life: simple interface mechanics that enable a seemingly limitless set of interactions. This limitless possibility is what makes the real world so exciting. Every day you can discover something new from a particular reflection at a time of day to what makes little wind cyclones form and the kinds of patterns that form when rain races across a windshield. What if our digital worlds could offer this too?
Rather than captors of our attention, I hope our phones feel like portals to this possibility one day. Where you could discover a game someone made by offering your phone at your favorite park bench, or retrieve someone's last played playlist in the window seat on the bus, or receive a compliment while grabbing a coffee from your local cafe. I dream of a day when our devices feel like facilitators in forming in-person communities: where the limitless possibility of our physical worlds meets the infinite expanse of our digital worlds. I dream of a day where the internet feels real, human because of each other.
Updates & Asks
I teased a "patron/sponsor" benefit of a bi-weekly raw audio dump & discussion thread of the latest of my thinking and research for my sponsors, and i'm going to do a free test run this weekend! I'm thinking about either combining this with Substack's paid tier (for non-Github users) or just centralizing it all to something like Patreon(?) If you have thoughts on this, please let me know (like if you would support but Github is too big of a barrier). As a reminder, all my writing is and will always be free and public, and my sponsors enable me to do that and the rest of my independent work.
I am experimenting more with AT Protocol and Bluesky! I'm in the process of making something to explore the links being posted in real-time
I'll be part of an experimental 24-hour livestream / net performance that thing.tube is hosting! It'll be streaming December 29 from 12:00 a.m. to 11:59 p.m. EST. Put it on in a corner while you celebrate the holiday season with your family?
S & I's new office / workshop is coming together... I'm looking for essential tools that you find yourself reaching for again and again in your work space. What do you recommend?
This dispatch was sent to 1189 inboxes. My writing is always free and open, but I am independently funded and appreciate any support you can offer. Consider sharing this with a friend and sponsoring me if you have the means.
Thank you to the 25 people who supported my independent work with a monthly sponsorship last month: Shaobo, Janvi, Raymond, Jacky, Sunil, Jess, Tim, Sarah, Jon, soft networks, Nikhil, Alejandro, Andy, Caro, Riley, Charles, Greg, James, Crystal, Dan, Jonah, Rachel, Gleb, Yorke, and one anonymous donor.
I recently read a book accompaniment to one of Sarah Sze's early exhibitions. In it, the writer discusses one of the two main methods of Sze's work as teetering between states. To explain the reasoning behind this phenomena, they write "this teetering keeps us on our toes, active and open, visually, bodily, and mentally, as each new piece tasks viewers to solve a puzzle that is both perceptual and cognitive, and to do so live, in real time and space. In short, it renders us epistemologically alert, which is a value in its own right." This liminal transit between two opposites—a paradox—is the kind of feeling I can now imagine I was searching for in naming my newsletter "spencer's paradoxes." This precarious state seems to offer the most leverage for change (along with the most risk).
I am afraid to admit that I was influenced and purchased a set from eBay as my holiday gift to myself. I can't wait to play with them.