This website-poem asks what it feels like to be visited by grief
Writer and technologist Omayeli Arenyeka made interactive website "Grief Found Me" to capture the rogue and permissionless nature of grief.
Today’s issue of PHONE TIME includes: “Grief Found Me” is a poetic website by Omayeli Arenyeka that uses desktop folders and text files to represent grief.
Elsewhere online: the Internet Archive wants to hear about your memories on the web, here’s where Lorde gets her aura read, and can you guess which publication partnered with Warby Parker for its latest issue?
In “Grief Found Me,” Omayeli Arenyeka recreates the experience of being visited by grief through text files and blue desktop folders.
“I am an unwilling participant in a game grief is playing. Sometimes I stare at a picture of my dad and wait but I feel nothing,” Arenyeka, a technologist and writer, writes in the piece. “Other times I will be minding my business, stirring some soup or in downward dog on my yoga mat and I will be brought to my knees unexpectedly, suddenly.”
The website invites users to interact by clicking on desktop folders with titles including “on the c train heading home,” “on my birthday,” “on his birthday,” “on a hinge date.” Each folder contains more folders or text files to click on. A file path on the left side traces where you’ve been.
An early version of the project began as a list of locations that Arenyeka had written down in her Notes app.
“I would be walking or just doing something, going on an errand, just doing regular stuff. And then I would feel this pain of something, and I would realize it was grief,” she told me. “Then I would try to realize why the grief was coming at this point … like something reminded me of my dad [that] I didn’t know it was reminding me of my dad.”
She eventually realized that desktop folders were an ideal interface for the project. “I really wanted it to feel like something that could just go on forever,” she said.
She submitted the project to Crawlspace, a journal publishing “interactive and multimedia writing and art that experiments with the expansive freedom the web offers,” it describes. Crawlspace provided guidance on elements including user interface and experience.
The interactive, user-guided structure of “Grief Found Me” is meant to reflect the uncontrollable nature of grief.
While Arenyeka had previously aimed to capture her experience through writing, she wrote in her artist statement that “the permission-lessness and spontaneity of it remained impossible to capture without introducing an unknown and rogue element (you, the users) into the equation.”
The project also brings together Arenyeka’s backgrounds in both writing poetry and making websites.
In her essay “What is a Website Good For?” for Are.na’s editorial section, she explained that she stopped writing poetry while in college, having become fascinated with new mediums: websites, Twitter bots, browser extensions. She graduated in 2017 from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study with a degree Computer Science, Art and Design, after moving to the United States from Nigeria.
Upon the death of her dad, the end of a relationship, the beginning of the pandemic, and an expanding “awareness of all the wrong in the world,” Arenyeka found herself disillusioned with making websites, she wrote. After a seven-year-hiatus, she returned to poetry.
Especially as “Twitter was falling apart,” which meant a loss of infrastructure for creatives and technologists, she found community through attending an open mic night in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
“What could a website do in a pandemic? What could a website do when another Black person was gunned down by the police? What could a website do when my father died? What could a website do in a genocide? What could a website do?”— Omayeli Arenyeka, “What is a Website Good For?”
But even when she wasn’t making websites, Arenyeka was still collecting and looking at them. She found inspiration in work that cultivated intimacy and connection, such as “wall of windows” by Spencer Chang. “It’s a credit to everybody out there who’s making a poetic website that I was able to get back into it,” she said.
Creating “Grief Found Me” as a website-poem necessitated reuniting both of her passions. The project also helped her work through the question of what a website can do. While she still doesn’t have an answer to that, as she wrote in her Are.na essay, she does have answers to “what they might be good for, why we might reach for them.”
“There is still a reason to make on the web, despite all of the bullshit on the side,” Arenyeka said.
“Grief Found Me” is at crawlspace.cool/grief-found-me. Find Omayeli Arenyeka’s other work at omayeli.com.
Elsewhere online
Ahead of the Wayback Machine reaching one trillion web pages archived, the Internet Archive has a Google form for people to share how they’ve used it to “remember a moment, recover a lost page, or research something important.”
For i-D, Flora Medina went to Lorde’s go-to spot, Magic Jewelry on Canal Street, to get their aura read. “Vibrant colors attract good luck, while more murky ones tend to indicate a need for some healing,” Medina writes.
Byline launched its “most visual issue yet,” titled “See For Yourself,” online today, with a print edition coming next week. The issue is “a play on what’s required to see lucidly,” which makes sense given that it is a partnership with Warby Parker.
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