Enter the gift interface

An archive of generosity

In late March,

Spencer Chang

and I wrapped up our Gift Interfaces class at the School for Poetic Computation. Over the course of 10 weeks, we immersed ourselves in gift-giving cultures and practices to imagine design behind scale, questioned the norms of what shape a gift can take, and most importantly, gave and received: to and from each other, our loved ones, and our communities.

For our final class, we held a potluck and gift wrapping party where we “wrapped” (documented) all the gifts given throughout the class, uploaded them to a gift interface, and took turns opening each others’ gifts. The resulting website represents the archive of our work together:

This is the letter we wrote to our students:

Dear Gift Givers,

The very first day that we met, we shared stories of meaningful gifts we've received. Elan told of the many summers that his mom spent weeks pre-cooking and individually wrapping a month's worth of kosher meals so that Elan could attend sleepaway music camp. Spencer spoke of a group living experience in which gifting was permanently in the air --- communal meals, skill shares, handwritten notes.

We couldn't have known it at the time but it feels obvious now that in those very first 10 minutes we were already casting a powerful spell, manifesting the kind of learning that can only come from gathering, and the kind of gathering that can only come from learning, and that in so doing, this gift of gatherlearning would be reflected back to us tenfold.

You attended to each other as strangers, in your strangenesses, and then unfolded the ones you thought you knew best, only to love them in their unknowability. You made instruments that measure the color of the sky. You hid poems in flower petals, wrote letters to trees. You saw as much of god in mosquitos as in artichokes. You implored us to imagine a large wide-mouth jar, wrapped extremely tightly with duct tape around the top so it won't leak, weighing about a pound, sour mango deliciousness.

We channeled into you the words of

Sal Randolph

: "The line between gift to the other and pleasure for the self is always blurred and shifting. The gift goes back and forth a thousand times a day. It's a kind of game." Little did we know how short and blurry the day would be, that the game had already well begun. We channeled into you Robin Wall Kimmerer's story of a hunter who, when asked by an anthropologist why he shared surplus meat instead of storing it for lean times, simply replied "I store my meat in the belly of my brother." All the while, you were already filling our bellies to the brim.

After we prompted you to give gifts, we requested gift interfaces: rituals and tools that create the context for giving. And in the resulting exchange, in between the literal responses to our query, a preposterous glimmer. Tacky! Inevitable! Exquisite! You were the gift interface the whole time.

Thank you for all your propositions, questions, and stories throughout our time together. We cultivated generosity materially in our gifts but also spiritually in our mutual attention. Exploring these questions so core to our identity as a people together, we hope you have found a few ideas about the mystery of giftmaking. We hope the seeds you have planted (and will continue to plant) grow beyond us. We hope they gain lives of their own, sow seeds of their own. And we hope those seeds eventually find their way back to you, like a long lost classmate, again and again and again.

Love,
Spencer and Elan ~ May 19, 2025

Visit the website to peruse the wonderful gifts, view our syllabus, sift through inspiration, listen to the class playlist, and add a thank you note.

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🏃 Escape attempts

Acts of algorithmic resistance

rithm.love is a dating app where your profile is just a screenshot of your instagram explore page

Abandoned blogs is a collection of abandoned blogs

The Rent Reducer 9000 is a little free library that passively monitors nearby open houses and triggers a gunshot noise to bring down rent prices

Internet Roadtrip is a crowdsourced Google Street View roadtrip

hear to there lets you can travel to places through voice memos and field recordings

seven39 is a social network that only works for three hours a day

Library Spy is a scraped feed of books that are checked out of the New York Public Library

🌸 Screenshot garden

Souvenirs from my internet travels, presented without context

📬 Mailbox

letters and ephemera from ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporters

This month, I received this delightful postcard from London, sent by Escape the Algorithm’s newest ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporter, Janis:

I hope this card has safely crossed the Atlantic!!

When I saw the opportunity to be a minor supporter of your newsletter, I immediately thought of this (post) card as I think it symbolically & timelessly met your newsletter is about. The painting by Monet was part of an exhibition at the Courtauld on Monet's works in London. He was there for a short period, staying and perched at the fancy Savoy Hotel across the corner, looking southwards across the river to capture the views in painting. The challenge, and charm, was that Monet liked the short one hour window before what we now know as "golden hour" — mist, fog & pollution smog, which gave the sky & river different hues.

And so Monet sat at the hotel window every day for months to capture various iterations of the same view.

In many ways, to me, this feels like escaping the algorithm, like treasuring the brief moments with friends, like finding your own enjoyment of (weirdly) specific niches, and documenting small acts of daily occurrence, object & observation for mostly personal or occasionally public pleasure. At least that’s what your newsletter & essays feel like to me.

Thank you for your writing & sharing your curiosity with us!

Janis
May 2025