Hi,

Writing now is Taichi Aritomo, a Japanese-American in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

About me

Since late-2018, I have been programming websites with Beautiful Company, the graphic design practice of Laurel Schwulst, and, since early-2019, volunteering at the Adaptive Design Association, an organization that fabricates unique objects with and for disabled people. Over the years, I've also informally taught math and science as a tutor, workshopper, or summer school teacher. These exposures got me interested in programming and improvisation, how the decisions we record into technology can complement our aspirations, growth, and reality.

About this website

When I made this website last year, I imagined a clearing in the woods: People might stumble onto it, but I wouldn't really know if anyone ever did. Without an infrastructure of click-tracking, likes, or comments, I thought I'd be able to publish with less self-consciousness. I think it helped in some ways. I found a place to put half-formed thoughts and things, and a few friends responded to them personally.

Last year, however, I also realized the importance of embracing visibility. Gardening outside in the spring, I became closer to my neighbors just by seeing them and being seen by them every day. In the winter, working on my applications for graduate school, I learned a lot about myself by sharing my intentions and work with friends, often for the first time. Over the year, I enjoyed sharing moments from my daily life through Instagram stories and receiving a response, sometimes from people I hadn’t spoken to in a long time. Written out like this, it seems kind of obvious—visibility good!— but after trying to escape social media for a while, I've arrived at this new position: Not to avoid networked culture, but figure out how to participate in ways where I can grow sustainably with others.

So, this year, I hope to cultivate a website that can help me understand myself through my image. I hope to take more seriously that this website will be seen and use that opportunity wisely. I hope to point to other people and events that surrounded and supported the things I was working on, in order to form new connections.

It will always be a work in progress, but I have started with hyperlinks to my work, collaborators, and advisors.

In the works are: improvements in accessibility/web-standards, and a 'friends' section for admiring out loud.

Keychain

This is the second version of this page, hand-written in HTML ❇️ on January 7, 2020. (Previous version). The typeface used throughout this website is Authentic Sans.