email from Nathan: 30 (Hybrid Realities Lab)

Nathan Smith

08 May 2025 — 2 min read

Hi this is a new format email! Please consider this a soft trial as I tell you about an event you can join (today!) where I'm showing some work. If you hate this format, please let me know! This is only good so long as it's useful.

I don't have time to delve into the specifics right now, but I'm trialing moving the lo-fi email blast to my own self-hosted Ghost server. It looks and feels a little like Substack but I promise it's not! All my previous emails are archived at writing.grpahicdeisgn.com, and this platform is open-source and hosted by me on my virtual private server. I suspect that over time, sending out emails from my email address to dozens of recipients could end up blacklisting my email if the list grows at all, and I'd like to make the process of signing up or unsubscribing a bit easier. I've been enjoying the process of moving to self-hosted solutions for most of my studio practice via this VPS and my NAS, if anyone's interested just reply and let me know and I would happily write a few thousand mind-numbing words about it. Anyway the news!

Today: Hybrid Realities Lab #2 Virtual Studios Exhibition

Today at 5pm I'm exhibiting the work-in-progress outcome of my involvement in Six Minutes Past Nine's Hybrid Realities Lab #2. You can grab a free ticket to join the live stream from 5pm on Eventbrite. I'm sorry for the late notice, I've been nervous about presenting this work!

HRL2 is a development programme focused on exploring the creation of virtual and hybrid studio/gallery spaces. Taking this perhaps a little too literally, I've built a virtual space which mirrors my physical studio and gallery space Grpahic Deisgn (which is also something we need to talk about).

At first a shallow recreation of 'visiting' the gallery space as you stand outside and peer through the window, the space tempts its audience to distend from convention and break through the outer walls, deviating from the constraints of the physical to quietly question the agency afforded by 'unfettered' virtual spaces.

Would love it if you can join but if not I'll detail it later!
from Nathan

email from Nathan: 32 (In Translucence)

Two emails from me in two weeks! This one will be delightfully relatively brief, I mainly wanted to let you know about a new interactive artwork I'm displaying in Glasgow this weekend, and some reading/watching/listening updates I missed out last time. Before I talk about the

email from Nathan: 31 (The (Absolute) State of Technology Criticism)

What's up 💡I know a lot of you receive these emails less because you care about my dumb ideas about tech or art or politics but more because I don't really share life and work updates anywhere else, so rather than bury that info at the

29: Reads

I enjoyed this piece from Rob Horning, where by a chance encounter a north american discovers Gogglebox while visiting Europe and appreciates it without irony. I've enjoyed following Rachel Coldicutt's opinions on critical social technologies, especially coming from the perspective of a woman who's

28: Translucent Technology

I've been thinking about a concept which I might unimaginatively call translucent technology or invisible technology (or shadow technology or ghost tech, idk something like this, hopefully someone else has already determined a much better name for it). The rough gist is that as a tech bubble deflates,