i'm teaching 2 workshops this summer and you're invited
research, write, make, and reflect with me at ultralight school (NYC) and FWB Fest (Idyllwild, CA)
One of the great themes of this newsletter is creative practice and the communities that sustain it. This spring, I began thinking about what it would look like to explore this in the real world—and now that it’s summer, these plans have finally…emerged? bloomed? into 2 workshops:
In late July, I’ll be in NYC to co-teach a weekend workshop, Research as a leisure activity (Friday, July 24–Sunday, July 26), as part of Laurel Schwulst’s ultralight school. We’ll collect and share works that have inspired us, and learn how to channel our admiration into creating new works. You can learn more about the workshop here and apply here!
The weekend after, I’m doing a daytime workshop, Let other people sharpen who you want to be, at the art–tech–culture–music festival FWB Fest in Idyllwild, CA. You can learn more about the festival here (some of the writers–artists–technologists I admire most will be there! Maya Man, Spencer Chang, Kelin Zhang, and others)…and get tickets here!
I’d love to see some of you at these workshops! More below—
How to create new works informed by research, appreciation, and collaboration
Research as leisure activity ✴︎ ultralight school ✴︎ NYC
July 24–July 26 ✴︎ Learn more and apply here by July 3
First: I’m co-teaching a workshop with the artist, designer and writer Laurel Schwulst in NYC this summer. The workshop—we’ve also been describing it as a “weekend retreat for collecting and creating”—is loosely inspired by one of my most popular newsletters:
It’s also inspired by our shared belief that ambient research and curation activities (losing yourself in a particular historical period, say, or collecting images around a theme) can lead, very beautifully and naturally, into creating your own work.
Laurel and I both work across disciplines, and so we’re excited to see all kinds of work: websites, essays, poems, objects, zines, songs…
This workshop is meant to be a mutually encouraging, invigorating environment where each of us can start and finish something new. As Laurel and I wrote:
There’s a special quality that comes from starting projects, and a different, also special quality that comes from finishing them. Because of that, we’d like this class to be a container for making something (even if it’s small!) in a single weekend.
We believe the best retreats, classes, residencies, etc. offer a protected space to reflect on one’s practice to encourage new, exciting directions to go towards. Similarly, we want this class to help shape the work you’ll do later on this summer, autumn, and beyond.
And we’re particularly excited about creating the social infrastructure, so to speak, where we can help each other with these projects! The workshop will include some solo time and some collaborative exercises—more like conversations than conventional critiques.
For those who aren’t familiar with Laurel’s work: I love her interactive NYT essay from 2021, “How to Build a Bird Kite”; her 2018 essay “My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?” for The Creative Independent (which she also designed the logo for); and Perfume Area, her collaborative perfume review project with the artist Sydney Shen:
In addition to her design practice, Laurel has taught at Yale, Princeton, and Rutgers, and currently teaches design at Washington University in St. Louis. She’s also directed independent initiatives like fruitful school and now ultralight school.
In one of our earliest conversations, Laurel mentioned that, when she first began teaching, someone gave her the advice: Treat all of your students like they’re geniuses. I found this really beautiful and touching—the best classes and workshops, in my opinion, can help draw out the best of the participants and offer people direction in their future work.
I hope this gives you a sense of the community we’d like to create during this weekend workshop—and if you’re interested, please read more here and apply by July 3!
How to define your life’s work—and then do it
Let other people sharpen who you want to be ✴︎ FWB Fest 2026 ✴︎ Idyllwild, CA
July 31–August 2 ✴︎ Learn more and get tickets here (and the organizers have also let me share a discount code, WFW50, to get 50% off!)
Second: I’ll be at FWB Fest (“part music festival, part emerging tech conference, 100% a secret third thing”) the weekend after. The 3-day festival includes musical performances (including Kim Gordon and AceMo this year), daytime talks and panel discussions, and workshops—including one I’m facilitating!
The story behind Let other people sharpen who you want to be (90 minutes, daytime) goes something like this—
For most of this year, I’ve been trying to figure out what gives people shape, structure, and direction in my own work—and what environments can help facilitate that:
One important element, I think, is a feeling of direction and impact: Where do you want your work to go, and what can your work offer to other people?
Another element—and one I lean on a lot—is having the right interlocutors to articulate these things. I use the word “interlocutor” to describe someone who is invested in your work and helps you understand it more deeply, but is not directly involved in the way a collaborator would be. Interlocutors can help draw out what matters most to us (in a particular project, or in our overall practice).
This particular workshop is meant to offer both elements: it’s about drafting a personal mission statement, through improv-shaped, game-like conversations with other people:
A collaborative workshop where we’ll draft and shape our personal mission statements. These statements can be about your artistic practice, your technological ambitions, or other long-term projects.
Mission statements make our ambitions legible to ourselves and to the external world. But writing one can feel lonely and uncertain, like fumbling through the dark recesses of our psyches. The right interlocutors can help us fumble through a little faster.
This workshop will borrow exuberantly from ideas in the Chinese philosophical classic Zhuangzi, the contemporary philosopher C. Thi Nguyen’s work, and a constellation of other reference points. Defining your life’s work doesn’t have to be daunting—it can be a playful, iterative struggle that we share with each other.
And if you’d like examples of mission statements, I particularly like how the artist and technologist Spencer Chang (who will also be at FWB Fest 2026!) describes their work as “software you can touch”; and how the independent tech journalist Jasmine Sun describes herself as an “anthropologist of disruption.” Both are really precise, evocative, and immediately recognizable descriptions of the work they do.
I’m looking forward to this workshop! I’m also excited to bask in the Californian sun and listen to great music and meet people doing original, interesting, weird, compelling work in culture and technology.
And if you’re curious what else you can expect from FWB Fest, here are some of my favorite talks from previous years:
Emily Segal’s “The End of Trends” (in essay form, in video form) at FWB Fest 2025. Segal is an artist and writer who cofounded K-HOLE, the trend forecasting group that popularized the term “normcore” in a 2013 research report. Her new project is NEMESIS.
Daisy Alioto’s “The Taste Economy” (in video form) at FWB Fest 2024. Alioto is the CEO of Dirt Media, which recently launched a new publishing project, Dirt Books.
Charles Broskoski’s “Here for the Wrong Reasons” (in essay form, in video form) at FWB Fest 2023. Broskoski is an artist, entrepreneur, and cofounder of Are.na. I also referenced Broskoski’s essay in my Proust newsletter from last spring:
Toby Shorin’s “Life After Lifestyle” (in essay form, in video form) at FWB Fest 2022. Shorin is a researcher, writer and technologist who cofounded Other Internet.
Instead of my usual recommendations—this is a brief newsletter!–I’ll leave you with two images from my summer:
I hope you’re having a beautiful summer (or a cozy winter for anyone reading this in the southern hemisphere!) and I’ll write to you soon!
These sound amazing! Will you do any teaching in the uk?
so awesome!!!!! 😊