For our inaugural web-exclusive edition, we asked you to submit work experimenting with the web as a medium. Our thirteen contributors shared ways to transcend barriers of material, distance, and time, tenderly embedding the poetry of the web into our screens.
We noticed that they activated the web in specific and scintillating ways and tagged them accordingly as interactive stories, distorted navigation, ambient education, chance operations, digitized ecologies, and disembodied feelings. Some of these works are tagged with multiple descriptors. Others are neatly described by one. So, as you take your first steps into our digital ecosystem, you may traverse digital odysseys, chart encoded landscapes, surrender to the gamble of algorithmic generation, or confront the disconnect between the self and the screen. Take it all in as fast as you can, or take your time with each click. However you engage, each work has something fresh and exciting to tell you.
As longtime digital explorers, we’ve always enjoyed the Internet as our common playground, our greatest collaborative masterpiece. This issue is a snapshot of the digital world we know now, whether as a close friend, a loving parent, or a small devil on our shoulder. It’s our first intangible (but undeniably sensorial) publication, so we are venturing into the virtual unknown together. We’ll see you around——in a comment, in the cloud, or hiding in a collection of long-forgotten pixels, preserved in the perfect amber of your screen.
Always yours,
v.1
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Ellen Fritz • BFA PT 2025
Gutenberg Generator
Ellen Fritz’s ever-evolving digital verse-maker dually utilizes HTML and Tracery, a Javascript library. Its corpus——the dataset informing a machine’s output——comes from Project Gutenberg, a volunteer effort initiated in 1971 to digitize and archive over 75,000 written works to increase their online accessibility. Ellen’s hand-coded algorithm filters through this data pool, pulling words that can be categorized as “poetic.” Within this grab-bag of language severed from its source, we may question the limits of authorship. Constructed from the work of those who passed long ago, to whom do these poetic lines belong? How can the literary arts disobey time and order? How can language beget new home bases? –—SA
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Abbey Foreman • BFA TX 2025
a good hand
Abbey Foreman’s generative story, rooted in the whimsy of Mad Libs and the unpredictability of friendly conversation, disrupts mundanity with serendipity, pouring out infinitely from a sentimental narrative. Her webpage, unfussy in design, invites a tender kind of touch from us——we can hover above and click on phrases suspended in screen’s blankness, spawning new fragments of text that gradually piece together a story. A speaker calls someone and recounts days past, ways of passing time, favorite foods, lucky numbers. Playing cards, randomly peppering the white expanse, crescendo into a phrase echoing the unresolved psychology of the addressee: “I guess so.” With over 4 trillion ways of composing and experiencing this story, we can only cherish what we are given and imagine, inconceivably, how many other ways it all could have played out. –—SA
Xinyu Jiang • BFA FAV 2027
Where It All Begins
Where do you go when you wander into eerie hallways, abandoned garages, or staircases leading to nowhere? Only the dwellers of these liminal spaces know. The Backrooms are semi-fictional, dangerous pockets of space, where current occupants utilize the web to communicate survival methods for others trapped within. In Xinyu Jiang’s story, we get an introduction to her take on the Backrooms canon—–an ever-expanding collaborative online writing project—–and how it is intertwined with her experience on the Internet. Where It All Begins opens the door to some of the most “unreal” parts of our reality. Xinyu personifies these spaces, constructing and simultaneously deconstructing tones of liminality, uncanniness, and horror. —–AX
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Janice Lee • BFA GD 2026
Silent Trails
Janice Lee visualizes the accumulation of space junk around the moon from 1960-2020. From this website made for RISD Astro, a club engaging in rover construction and competitions, Janice gained a new understanding of the physical debris left behind from human space travel. Using data from CelesTrak, she built an interactive timeline showcasing how many objects, like satellites, tools, and dust, have entered the moon’s orbit. Does the space junk serve as a twinkling reminder of our scientific advancements in space travel? Or is it a confrontation of our tendency to always leave a trail of litter behind us in our discovery of new frontiers? What might the moon have to say about her growing collection of debris?
Note in the top left of the site a citation of LunaSCOPE, the research endeavor that inspired Silent Trails. ––AR
Jiaying Li • BFA ILL 2026
Your Destination Is on the Left
Jiaying Li’s video artifact takes us on a journey through a dreamlike 3D-rendered world. The subverted landscape is constructed from a combination of digital modeling and 3D scans of buildings further augmented with hand drawn elements in ProCreate. This project explores the blind trust we put in navigation systems like Google Maps and the disorientation caused by this destination-centered way of navigating the world. Inspired by unfortunate stories of people following digital voices into situations of peril, Jiaying incorporates a repetitive soundscape over an uncanny visual dissolution into a constructed multiverse. We wonder, does the most efficient route more often lead to reward or disaster? ––NC
Audio not recorded by Jiaying Li is sourced from Freesound.
Mateo Reggie • BFA TX 2027
Haunting the Satellite Graveyard
In a digitized expanse of air, water, and earth, Mateo Reggie illustrates the perspective of a satellite interned at the spacecraft graveyard in the South Pacific Gyre, at a spot otherwise known as Point Nemo. This HTML website functions as a concrete poem to be experienced by scrolling in all directions, emulating the extreme ups, downs, and side-to-sides of satellite movement. Text, from the aerial point of view of the satellite, is integrated into the site and randomized with each refresh. With this element of chance, meaning can be unearthed beneath layers of sediment or the inevitable miscommunication through different mediums. Mateo considers how humans imbue spacecrafts with awesome power only to drop them into a point somehow more desolate than outer space. Rather than what is lost to pollution, he aims to look at what remains. What happens when retired satellites become unusable or insignificant but are still there? Do they merely observe, or do they contribute to the underwater chorus, echoing through history into the present? Does it feel comforting to know they’re there? ––AR
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Vishakha Ruhela • MFA GD 2025
Emotions
How long do your emotions last? Do they linger after the initial onset? Do they bleed into other emotions? Vishakha Ruhela’s Emotions is a web visualization of serenity, despair, fulfillment, and so much more. Inspired by the forms of blood cells and cellular biology, Vishakha maps emotional states into an interconnected web, fluid and ever-shifting, like the nature of cells. This digital map explores the unpredictability of emotions’ intersections, overlaps, and potential to disappear into the periphery. Ignore the words to find a space for ambient contemplation or focus on the text and consider how you might relate or empathize. ––AX
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Jess Skyleson • MFA DM 2025
The Labyrinth of Twisting Vines
Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths, Jess Skyleson’s choose-your-own-adventure game lets you explore a spinoff story of limitless paths and co-existing possibilities. Cast as a fugitive spy on the run, your every step predestines your next. Or does it? This piece examines how the choose-your-own-adventure story illustrates the earliest form of web hyperlinks, jumping from one location to another across compressed, unseen spaces. It also intertwines the idea of chance in human-machine interaction through the use of AI images, interrogating themes of choice, agency, and ethics. Every experience of the game is unique, encouraging viewers to play multiple times. ––AX
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Julia Sung • BFA ILL 2025
Random
Julia Sung’s indexical website explores memory, objects, and randomness. Inspired by the aesthetics of early-internet personal websites and the unique specificity of video essays, Julia associates various objects with short thoughts and links to other websites. These links bring us to videos, didactic essays, places to shop, or pages that go deeper into Julia’s digitized psyche. Experimenting with simulated embodied sensations, we are invited to engage in Julia’s tactile world, full of both human mundanity and natural phenomena. Random functions best on a 16” Macbook Pro. Be sure to open the fridge! ––NC
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Justin Xiao • BFA GD 2026
Sarah Feng • BFA GD 2026
Marie You • BFA GD 2026
Nor Wu • BFA GD 2026
Greentopia
Greentopia is an artificial landscape created by Justin Xiao in collaboration with Sarah Feng, Marie You, and Nor Wu. In this world, the greenhouse becomes a constructed ideal of nature shaped by rules, selection, and control where visitors manipulate digital gardens through on-screen prompts. Justin was inspired by a visit to the Roger Williams Park Botanical Center where he was struck by the simplicity and irony of its man-made gardens. As you navigate through the site, where “glamour fades, truth decays, and lies [are] woven into tangled vines,” you’ll find layers of contradiction and irony. Think of your “Greentopia”—–is it wild or polished? Does it disappear as soon as it’s built? Can you take a piece of it with you? Should you? ––NC
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Ryan Yan • BFA GD 2025
Do you love me?
A quiet room, a keyboard, a dimly lit screen, and a burning curiosity...Does ___ love me? Ryan Yan recalls the rituals of love calculators, Magic 8 Balls, and plucking petals–—he fuels our urge to find answers in probability. Built with simple HTML and JavaScript, the backend of this fortune teller questions why we entrust complex emotional truth-seeking to the logic of a machine. The experience is both overwhelming and intimate as an explosion of text collapses under its algorithmic fate into a lingering, final answer——the truth of which is open to interpretation. ––DL
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Marie You • BFA GD 2026
Thoroughfare
Thoroughfare is a collection of stills from a transient 3D landscape envisioned by Marie You, exploring their relationship to a small but all-consuming slice of Providence—–the space between the Design Center and 15 West. Marie experiments with Google Earth as an alternative drawing material, inspired to create a multi-textural and self-referential visual poem meant to be experienced from all angles. Thinking about mapping practices throughout history, Marie takes apart their personal geography and reconstitutes it into a disorienting and honest feedback loop. They consider the potential of transient in-between spaces, or thoroughfares, to provoke reflections: Are maps ever works of fiction? How do we notice subtle changes in the systems that place us in time and space? What is home? How do we remember the way there? ––AR
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Tina Zhou • MFA GD 2025
Birds of Prey
We encounter war-related content in many places. However, compared with sound, imagery pales in conveying the psychological terror of war. Birds of Prey associates the sounds of war-related aircraft with their silhouettes. It creates an experience of watching “birds of steel”—–like the IAI Heron or F-16 Fighting Falcon—–that is akin to the act of watching actual birds. Through navigating the site, we see and hear an index of aircraft that have been sighted and used to commit large-scale violence in Palestine since October 7th, 2023. In this web field guide, we are encouraged to become arbiters through seeing and experiencing. Tina Zhou asserts “it is a necessary act—–and all we have to learn is how to see.” ––DL
This piece uses sounds and images from a combination of journalistic outlets, each hyperlinked on the site.
Angelina Rodgers, Mina Troise, Katherine Fu, Arete Xu, Sako Antonyan, Nino Chambers, Henry Ding, and David LeGrand
Tuesday, March 4, 2025
Saran Qianyin Feng, Nadine Macapagal, and Lucy Nguyen Pham
Font: Martian Mono, Redacted, DM Mono
Languages: HTML, CSS, JavaScript
