I stopped by an astrology app's pop-up
Plus, r/Snoo is hosting a contest for original art of the Reddit mascot, no generative AI allowed.
Today’s issue of PHONE TIME includes: my stop by the CHANI pop-up. Elsewhere online: you could win a year of Reddit Premium by participating in r/Snoo’s art contest, Polaroid, understandably, wants you to log off, and a cool marine animal body size database.
On Saturday, I stopped by the pop-up for CHANI, the app launched by astrologer Chani Nicholas in 2020. The pop-up, timed with the summer solstice, ran June 20–22, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. at 21 Spring Street.
The location is one of the pop-up spaces of Parasol Projects, which describes itself as “NYC’s premier full-service pop-up agency.” Other pop-ups there have been for TENFOUR Jewelry by Victoria Paris and Gille Peeters, Millie Bobby Brown’s Florence by Mills, and Matilda Djerf’s Djerf Avenue.
I was hoping to add to my PHONE TIME amateur drink review series and try the café cart I had seen on CHANI’s Instagram Stories, but I arrived late in the day and it sadly wasn’t there.
Inside the space, there were multiple stations: an “Astro Booth” photo booth, a “wheel of fortune,” and an “affirmation machine” where you could put in quarters to receive an affirmation card. On the “unhinged manifestation wall,” people pinned notecards with manifestations or hopes for their life or the world. Candles, mugs, planners, and other CHANI items were also available for purchase.
I keep a few astrology apps on my phone, including Co-Star, The Pattern, and CHANI, mostly to keep track of trends in the space (pun intended?) rather than track my daily horoscope. The three apps have quite varied aesthetics and branding. The CHANI app’s pastel purple, collage-like imagery was definitely translated into the pop-up.
This was CHANI’s first IRL event. In 2023, Co-Star installed a horoscope vending machine first at Iconic Magazines in New York City and later in Los Angeles.
If you’re working on a cool project you think I might want to cover on PHONE TIME, reach out! I’m more concerned with craft and creativity than hype, VC funding, or follower count. More info here.
Elsewhere online
Caroline Drew covered the Welcome to My Homepage digital residency program for The Austin Chronicle. “Shaping the internet to mimic physical realities feels particular, now, to a time when GeoCities and NeoPets dominated the zeitgeist, before the form and flow of webpages took on the cookie-cutter architecture driven by capitalist interest and click-based research,” Drew writes.
Read my conversation with previous resident Jackie Liu here.
Dreamcomposer, essentially a shared idea board, caught my eye today. Upon clicking the “+” button, you’re prompted to “share a figment of your imagination” by typing up to 240 characters, and tagging it under tech, health, business, community, environment, or media. You can also link back to your social profile. Some are AI-related; some are more serious than others. I like being able to visually see a lot of different ideas at once.
My favorite idea: "A rotating online gallery, given to a developer, designer, artist every month to do whatever they want with it. After each month the work is gone forever, never to be shared again,” from Lovish Saini. People have been sharing their favorite “Phineas and Ferb” scenes on X.
The open-access Marine Organismal Body Size database “has collected body size data for more than 85,000 marine animal species and counting, ranging from microscopic creatures like zooplankton to the largest whales,” Jennifer Ouellette reports in Ars Technica. You can find the database on GitHub here.
Polaroid has been leaning extra hard into the offline movement with its social campaigns for the Polaroid Flip, released in April.
“As someone currently holding a phone, we’re sure you’re aware of how algorithms work. While they’re great at serving up recipes you might like, we’re a little skeptical on whether they’re doing more harm than good,” Polaroid wrote in an Instagram post on June 16. “That’s why we made the Flip—the camera for an analog life: The real, authentic, physical life we live in the real world away from screens.” The caption also acknowledged “the irony of posting this here.”
Some other brands incorporating retro tech in social content: Trü Frü, Unwell Hydration
Experiences like “Netflix House” seem like a logical progression of “Instagram museums.”
Both the Philadelphia and Dallas locations are more than 100,000 square feet. / Via Netflix House r/Snoo is hosting a 10-day art contest for Reddit’s 20th birthday: “share your vision of Snoo [the Reddit mascot] finding something new—any medium, any style, any level of weird.” AI-generated artwork is not allowed, but users can utilize Reddit’s 3D Blender model of Snoo. All participants will get an on-platform trophy. The top 30 finalists will get a 20th anniversary Reddit shirt, and the ten winners will also get one year of Reddit Premium.
