I’ve never graduated beyond the ‘computer as slightly enhanced typewriter’ phase of tech.
Almost everyone else has, though, and there’s been genuine good that’s come from that.
I have, through no labour of my own, a brand new website, sporting the good old name.
People who know what they’re doing and know my work and its habits crafted this upgrade.
I am reassured that it is by leaps a better event and a better kind of engagement for all concerned.
Given how short life can be, a good experience is surely a good thing.
So, I do hope you’ll find it merits your time in with it. It’s a precious thing, your time.
-Stephen Jenkinson
Founder of Orphan Wisdom
Over the last six months, almost every time I mentioned the project of the new website, Stephen made a comment along the lines of not being convinced he needed one. I would roll my eyes and carry on.
And the question lingered, quietly and persistently. What does it mean for a body of work, so rooted in the long arc of culture-making, to take up space in this particular way?
He’s not wrong in holding firm to the old handmade ways of being together. Those are indeed the reasons many of us have been drawn to Stephen and to Orphan Wisdom in the first place.
And yet, I can recall in 2018, when there was a small notice under the events page on the Orphan Wisdom website of something happening other than the school, a stand-alone one-off event, an apprenticeship. I was thrilled and wrote in that same day. Even then, the site had served as a quiet threshold, a place where Stephen’s work could be encountered and where a next step could reveal itself.
It is from that tension between slowness and access, between the old ways and the material at hand, that this new website has come into being.
The platform itself was chosen for what it makes possible. It is built on open-source software, meaning it belongs to a shared commons rather than a proprietary system. This allowed the site to be shaped directly, rather than assembled from prefabricated structures. As the project development lead described it, “We treated the site less like a product to assemble and more like raw material to work with, taking the time to sit with Stephen’s work and shape the site around what was being said and shown, rather than fitting it into something already pre-developed.” The intention was to create something durable and adaptable, able to carry Orphan Wisdom through the changes the next decade will bring.
A hand-hewn website.
~Khadija Striegel
Director of Orphan Wisdom
Website design moromidesign.com
