A collage of a woman in summer clothes beside one in winter clothes; three authoritative-looking women; a girl against a night sky; a woman with her eyes closed; a colorful pattern of sacred geometry; a Chinese water color of birds; a sleeping woman; a woman wearing a poncho; a woman holding a gun.

An altar to Pachamama comprised of a striped blanket with geometric patterns and several items ion top of it, including 5 small plants, other textiles, an Andean alcoholic beverage in a jug (chicha), a basket, other textiles, and a bag of seeds.

Letter to Art #3 - Young People, Unmoored Asian Americans, and Doing Good

Letter to Art #4 - Ukraine, Trans Rights, and Doomscrolling (March 2022)

Echoes of our ancestors,
Heard across time and space,
We find the key to our future
As we look into the past.

Calling all Andean and Asian American folks! AltSalt is creating two multidisciplinary collections of work — and we want you to be a part of it.

Who: Zinesters, writers, artists, designers, game developers, videographers, musicians, and more who identify as Andean or Asian American.

What: Team up or work solo to submit a publication based on the following prompt: “Envision a future in which your culture, history, and values have guided the world to an alternative reality — and harnessing that energy, create a piece to resonate with our times.”

When: Work can begin as soon as you read this message. We’ll hold a workshop weekend July 17-18th (schedule available here) to spend time together and share progress (the workshop weekend is over!), with a final submission deadline of Sunday, August 15th. The date will come fast — let’s get started!

If you’d like to get involved, please…

Join our Discord server (optional, highly encouraged).

We also welcome folks doing cross-community collaborations. Want to team up and combine Andean and Asian cultural influences? Do it! We’ll have special sections for cross-community projects in both collections.

Brainstorm ideas, form teams if applicable, begin work



Saturday, July 17th — Sunday, July 18th

Workshop weekend to connect and share progress (full schedule available here)

 

Sunday, July 18th — Sunday, August 15th

Continue working on and submit final projects



Our Broader Vision — Our purpose is to envision and create an alternative world through our collective creativity. To grow in community, we must become curious on how we can not only grow as one, but with the multitudes we intersect with. We hope that this can be the first of many initiatives to create solidarity across communities and share knowledge. Let’s transcend artificial boundaries; let’s connect.

Why these two communities? They’re the ones us, the organizers, are most familiar with and the ones that we belong to. We hope to offer a similar space for other communities on AltSalt in the future!

Open To All Creatives — No matter where you are in the creative process, whether your work is free or commercial, you can get involved:

Have you already created work and want to list it in the collections?



Have you started working on creative projects but haven’t had the capacity to finish them?



New to zine-making or creative publications? 

You are welcome to participate! Just fill out the participation form, then join our community of creatives on Discord for inspiration, collaborators, or guidance, and get involved with our upcoming events.

The Andean collection aims to highlight creative and artistic works in diverse mediums/publication styles from self-identified Andean creators. We utilize the term ‘Andean’ to embrace and honor our shared history before colonization, although we recognize that today many of us are accustomed to identifying by nationality (such as Peruvian or Peruvian-American). We appreciate the rich complexity of identities represented in our community and welcome anyone who has ancestral or social ties to the Andes (whether Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, etc), and its diasporas, to participate. Andean identity is also intersectional and extends beyond an Indigenous, Spanish, mestizaje, or Latinx/Latine dichotomy; therefore, we wish to be inclusive of diverse diasporas such as Peruvian Nikkei and Afro-descendiente communities.

This collection is by and for us, our ancestors, and our future generations. Our goal is that it feel both intimately familiar and, at the same time, entirely new because it encompasses diverse perspectives within our shared cultural repertoire, which is so rarely represented in the dominant narrative.

This is an experimental place to explore your individual identity, your creativity, and be a part of our community. We invite you to visit, contribute, and collaborate with us in whatever ways are most inspiring to you.

A S I A N   A M E R I C A N   C O L L E C T I O N

The Asian American collection seeks to explore the many facets of Asian American’s experiences and varied cultural heritages through creative mediums and publications. This collection is for and by Asian Americans, including those whose backgrounds encompass East, Southeast, and South Asian, Pacific Islander, multi-ethnic and diasporic Asian identities.

In defining a collection, the distinctions of who is included in ‘we’ and ‘us’ remains slippery. Within our communities, there are often inequalities of power between groups. Differences within ‘Asian American’ across class, color, gender, sexuality, religion, immigration status, history, and national origin produce asymmetrical and uneven histories, and encounters with state violence. Additionally, calls for community might strategically offer unity yet conflate the differentiated effects of racialization and colonization under one umbrella term. Rather than demand inclusion, our collection offers a space for sharing narratives that speak to different intersections of histories and experiences, within those who identify as Asian American.

This collection seeks to provide a space for identity exploration, community building and a creative well, to come to nourish ourselves, refill our cup and continue to explore without boundaries, to stretch the limits of our imaginations — using our creative practice to puzzle through the times we’re in together towards a future of collective liberation.

To envision an alternative world.
Because representation matters.
Sharing knowledge and consciousness,
Let’s create the future.




From left by row: Artwork by Jessica Tin, Jamie San Andres of Rimay Raiz, Layqa Nuna Yawar, Lia Coleman, Felix Kar-wah Fok courtesy of Shirley Man-Kin Leung, Sandy Enriquez, Adina Farinango, and Angela DelosReyes. Background pattern by Artemio Morales with gratitude  to the teachings of Zadir Milla Euribe. Music by Jonathan Morales. 

Alternative Worlds: The Andes and Asian America

This is the first in a series of ongoing letters between me and my friend, Charles Huang, exchanged via public posting. You can find his blog here. 

I’ve had a lot swirling around my mind the past few days; so much is happening all at once and I often feel like I’m being swept up in a big current. Then there are moments like right now, as I revise this letter, having just meditated standing barefoot on the ground (literally grounding), and I feel at ease.

As you know, I just turned 31 this past week, and I’m considering more and more what I value, what we as a culture value, how I find myself within that and how to live a good life.

Over the weekend, I went to an offering to Pachamama; it was a beautiful day on Governor’s Island where I was surrounded by inspiring community members, and while I can’t speak to everyone’s specific personal beliefs, being together to honor ancestral traditions helped me to feel increasingly connected and supported in mine.

My spirituality is something I’d been wrestling with for a while; having been raised Catholic, I’ve faced a lot of doubts regarding what our relationship as individuals is to the cosmos, even as I move toward practices that feel more authentic and healthier to me than what I was raised with. It wasn’t the first ceremony I’d been to, though this weekend did feel like an inflection point in my understanding of those relationships.

This Peruvian heritage bed was stewarded by Claudia Urdanivia and Carlos Jimenez Cahua of the the Andean community in NYC; the offering to Pachamama was part of an event to honor Andean farming traditions.

There’s so much power wrapped up in our beliefs; the stories we tell of who we are, and where we come from, shapes our destiny.

To that end, there’s an Andean prophecy stating that humanity, in our current historical moment, has the opportunity to usher in a new stage of consciousness, to become more enlightened and compassionate as a people. It’s a big if; nothing about this is preordained in the Andean worldview from what I understand. And we’re currently up against the largest existential threat we’ve ever faced.

We have a global climate crisis at our doorstep; communities are already being displaced; myself I’m uncertain whether I’d like to raise a family because our collective future is so uncertain. And yet as I began writing this letter last week, I was embarking on an hour-long car ride to visit my family in upstate New York, followed by another 2.5 hour-long car ride to visit family in Pennsylvania. Later this year I’ll likely take a flight to see my family in Florida. Billionaires recently launched themselves into space.

Is it ethical to be doing all this consumption? Shouldn’t we all live locally within walking distance of our families and friends in small neighborhoods to limit our carbon footprint? Shouldn’t we be drastically reshaping our culture and institutions to preserve the planet for future generations?

This huacatay, a crop native to the Andes, was harvested from the Peruvian heritage bed.

Recently while meditating, in an effort to address these anxieties, I’ve been asking my ancestors and the universe for guidance. Doing this regularly, I eventually had the insight to try connecting with the value of ayni, or reciprocity in Quechua; and taking inspiration from the mudras of Buddhism, I’ve been holding my hands in positions found in the sculptures and artwork of the Andes that represent this idea of ayni — one hand on my heart, the other on my side; or one hand held out in offering, the other held out to receive.

Having set that intention, one day a visualization of the invisible tendrils and geometry that interconnects our reality came to mind; patterns interweaving, layered upon each other, our spirits as nodes in a vast web of those relationships, my entire being just a mirror reflecting the people, places, and circumstances of my life.

Increasingly this is how I’m beginning to see the world regularly, and it offers so much agency — everything we do, everything we are, matters — and the energy we receive, transform, and project into the universe has far-ranging effects we can’t begin to understand.

I don’t know where all of this leads yet. I feel hope, though. To see my life not as the span of my individual experiences, but the echoes and reverberations of all that has come before, all that is touched in the present, and all that ripples into the future, is both comforting and a challenge.

To know, to believe, that the world will not end, that it will simply be transformed, is so inspiring. As to what form that future world takes, that’s up to us, and one of the most radical actions we can take is believing that we’re going to make it out of this — sincerely recognizing our role in the interdependence of our surroundings — and gently cultivating the inner strength, agency, and intention that will allow us to transform the energy within and around us so that someday, we emerge as the humanity we aspire to be.

Someday, our descendents might look back and see, when faced with the greatest crisis we’ve ever known, we collectively reimagined and reshaped our culture, that we answered the call and rose to the challenge.

Here I'm holding the huacatay, which is used in several dishes including ocopa, a potato-based recipe of Peru.

I’m still working through how this all manifests in my life; I feel like this is a start, though. To move forward, I think we need to remember who we are, and maybe that’s as simple as touching our hands to the ground, offering a prayer, and gathering in community to catch a glimpse of how things might be.

So here I suppose I’m sending you some of the thoughts, anxieties, and hopes that have been on my mind recently. I’m looking forward to reading your letter! And maybe reading some of the things you’ve been thinking up.

(Dear Charles) The Shape of Our Future

First Letter to Art - Human Nature, Technology, and Blown Up Babies

Letter to Art #2 - Egos, Deadlines, The Twisties, and Sandwiches

Everyone

United States

Taiwan

China

Peru

Mobile Android Browser

Desktop Chrome

Desktop Firefox

MacOS

Windows

Android

Mobile Chrome

Mobile Firefox

Digital Comic

Interactive Fiction

Twine

Choose Your Own Adventure

Zine

Game

New Media Literature

Drama

Adventure

Horror

Essay

Experimental

Letter

Slice of Life

First Person

Serious Game

Impact Game

Introspective

Children's Lit

Perzine

Ancashina

SGI Buddhist

Second Generation Immigrant

Indigenous

Quechua

Latinx

Andes

Asian American

English

Spanish

A few minutes

About a half hour

Tech Raptor Preview

Games for Change Summer Expo

Global Game Jam Success Stories

Reflections at Sunset Home Page

Apple App Store

Google Play

Itch.io

Etsy

Cover of the author walking down a city sidewalk

The title "Cultural Correspondence" along with the illustration of a hands holding uprooted plants and dirt

Group of friends peering through a wire fence

A small machine using a flashlight to repel a tentacled monster

A small machine facing a tentacled creature with option to use "vacuum" and "flashlight" as attacks

A laptop on a shelf with a pair of headphones

A small machine next to a mustached scientist speaking technobabble

A woman being followed by a llama down a sidewalk

A woman standing in front of a wall of graffiti

**SHORTLISTED for the New Media Writing Prize 2017** **SHORTLISTED for the Opening Up Digital Fiction People's Choice Award 2017** **FEATURED in the upcoming Electronic Literature Collection Volume 4 by ELO** **FEATURED in the Babycastles Art Gallery Wordhack Anthology**◇ ◇ ◇"Above the mirror, small and low, hung a fluorescent bulb whose light shone through my skin..."People we love often fade away. As time goes on, how do we remember our relationships, and what insights does that distance afford us?Featuring an original soundtrack, 22 photo illustrations, and a few innovative surprises, A MODERN GHOST explores a young man's memories of a love that was never realized.A prototype story, it is the first release by Artmayu Studios.

A Modern Ghost

Your thoughts wander at sunset, taking you to different conclusions like waves to different shores...

This is a text-based game where you view the sights and sounds of the sunset and provide a space to inhabit your personal thoughts and feelings.

It was inspired by my experiences with meditation and the process of how innocuous thoughts could lead to more personal ones in a nonconfrontational way.

As such there are multiple conclusions you may reach with yourself.

Will you experience joy? Sorrow? Love? Loss?

Remember, your thoughts are yours alone to share.

- Mudita Heart

Reflections at Sunset

First Generation

Andinx

See Sandy is a 14 page storybook zine — follow the protagonist (yours truly) through a sunny day of exploring New York City!

This is a trilingual zine in English, Spanish and Quechua. I made this zine with lots of love for my baby niece because I wanted her to grow up knowing, hearing and seeing Quechua. I also made it as a way to continue practicing Quechua and challenging myself to keep learning.

This is written at the beginner level of Quechua.

See Sandy

Quechualish is a zine I made about learning my ancestral language, Runasimi (better known as Quechua).

I made this zine for people like me, who want to learn Quechua and connect to it because it is their culture and ancestry.

It is a short zine with only 4 pages. This zine centers on my experience as a heritage language learner. I'm not yet fluent in Quechua, so I often code-switch between Quechua/Spanish/English, which I lovingly call "Quechua-lish."

I also included some very basic and introductory lessons and short exercises in Quechua if you are interested in learning.

Quechualish: An Indigenous Language Zine

Beanie Hat Prototype

Philippines

Cantonese

A creative game of telephone, this was created for the <a href="https://www.altsalt.com/community/project/alternative-worlds/1">Alternative Worlds</a> shared collection and contains poetry, artwork, and reflections on our creative processes as they relate to our Andean and Asian cultural heritages.

Located across the United States, each person passed the project to the next, who then responded to the previous piece, building up the collaboration via long distance in a way befitting of our times — digital, cultural correspondence :D

Cultural Correspondence

Riveted in the Word

SHTF: A Post-Apocalyptic Pick Your Path Adventure

(Dear Charles #3) Thinking, Feeling, Creating

Inspired by Lovecraft and stories of abandoned ships like the St. Mary Celeste,  you play as GWR 3000, an autonomous Rooombra vacuum cleaner.One night aboard a transatlantic vessel, you and your creator are having a relaxing night when an interdimensional portal opens on the ship, killing the whole crew. Now it's up to you to save the world.<ul><li>Fend off intergalactic creatures with your flashlight.</li><li>Engage in an epic RPG final showdown.</li><li>Ponder humanity's coexistence with robots.</li><li>Do it in less than 10 minutes</li></ul>Made with love during the Isolation Game Jam of 2020 hosted on itch.io

Rooombra to the Rescue

Choclo y Chicha Vol. 2

Free

Paid

Resonate

Book

SoftwareApplication

Artmayu.com

Website

itch.io

Twitter

I'm a software developer, director of Artmayu Studios, and founder of AltSalt.I love the digital and literary worlds, especially exploring new kinds of digital literature, from experimental multimedia books to narrative adventure games.Currently, I'm in the process of learning more about my Andean background, and thinking through how to bridge that heritage with the world of technology.

Guttenberg Arts is dedicated to increasing opportunities for artists that encourage artistic evolution while creating cultural experiences for the community that promote creative thinking. Since 2014, we have promoted the visual arts through providing practicing artists with the space and time to develop their work, engage with the public, and expand their community.Participating artists benefit from increased career opportunities and public exposure through peer collaboration and promotion to curators and collectors in the tri-state area.We enable artists to explore new techniques in our studio (a 4,500 sf facility for the visual arts accommodating working in 2-D &amp; 3-D including printmaking and ceramics) and to share their experiences through artistic mentorship, creating new opportunities for artistic evolution.  Supporting Guttenberg Arts will provide artists the space and time they need to develop work that represents the uniqueness of their voice and the platform to share it.Guttenberg Arts hosts a dynamic array of public programming that includes, free community workshops for all ages, panel talks and artist lectures providing diverse perspectives and actively engaging a range of audiences inspiring new dialogs. Guttenberg Arts aims to be a cultural cornerstone that serves the arts and artists within the community to create meaningful experiences.

Paper Crown Press is an artist-run publisher committed to creating uniquely designed artists’ books and magazines that push the boundaries of publishing while promoting interdisciplinary collaborations across visual art and literary forms. We collaborate with a range of artists, designers and writers every year and encourage unfettered pursuit of personal vision, without regard to current trends. Since 2010, Paper Crown Press has been publishing Carrier Pigeon, a quarterly magazine of illustrated fiction and fine art. More recently we began publishing outstanding and affordable books related to the field of art and literature and the collision of both.

Carrier Pigeon is an artist-run magazine of illustrated fiction and fine art. Four times a year we put creative control into the hands of the contributing writers, illustrators, fine artists and designers in order to promote respectful interdisciplinary collaboration. The results are organic, collaborative, and quickly evolving compositions featured alongside full portfolios of contemporary work by fine artists from an unrestricted demographic range. We believe that loyalty to each artist’s personal vision, without regard to current trends, provides the best environment in which to collaborate on fully personal work. The main goal of this journal is to provide a magazine that is, in itself, a piece of artwork.

The Andean diaspora* community in the United States is confronted with discrimination and a sense of dual exclusion from both Latinx and white US heritages due to histories of colonialism and imperialism that continue to impose Western epistemologies across time and borders. Rima(y) Raíz, an Andean diaspora collective based in NYC, NJ, IL and CA, confronts these issues by documenting and sharing inter-generational oral hxstories of the Andean diaspora in efforts to reclaim a sense of identity, alter dominant narratives about their communities, preserve experiences and knowledge of their elders for the next generation, and create a sense of solidarity. &nbsp;We are inspired by Andean notions of time, space, and community such as pachakutik and the ayllu and we choose oral hxstory as a medium due to its inter-disciplinary, borderless nature. Oral hxstory also acts as a way to decolonize the production of knowledge. The main components of the project are (1) interview three generations across the US-Andean diaspora, including community leaders (2) archive the oral histories in a public website, (3) share and discuss the stories via a podcast, zine, public space installations, and virtual Raymi or parties, and (4) organize gatherings of Andean organizations and leaders to celebrate and unite cultural advocacy efforts.Coloniality may have traversed time and space, but so has our resistance.*The Andean diasporic community includes people with South American heritage from Andean countries such as Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. Hence, Rimay Raiz utilizes the term Andean to refer to this region of South America, as opposed to folks that are strictly from the highlands. We remain inclusive of the many nationalities in the Andean region, and recognize that people that may identify with diverse backgrounds, such as that of the coast and the Amazon, Black, Indigenous, mestizo, and we welcome all people who identify with our mission and background, whether they are recent immigrants, second generation, or have not connected to their ancestral countries for generations.

I am gardener and composter passionate about equity in the food system. Quinoa scholar and oral history and community archive enthusiast. Runasimita yachapakuq. Member of the Rimay Raiz colectivo.&nbsp;

Ecuadorian-American sociologist, of Huancavilca and Kichwa descent. Bi-coastal, born in Queens, NY and raised in both NY and CA. Musician, community activist, project coordinator at an immigrant and workers rights org, and co-founder of Rimay Raiz.&nbsp;

I am a triple fire sign, Catholic and a feminista. My family is Peruana, my parents immigrated to the U.S. and I was raised in Central Florida. I write poetry on Mami_soy_emo on Instagram about growing up in the between of Peruvian and American culture, therapy , sisterhood, empath struggles, and my ongoing haphazarduous love life. I am inspired by my Mamá, sunsets, pollo a la brasa con papas, and humanity's ability to heal. I am also an immigration attorney who works with survivors of gender-based violence, a plant mom to 17 plants, and a mediocre ukelele player. I am currently working on a zine about my therapy journey.&nbsp;

I am an Indigenous Adoptee from Peru. I've grown up in Brooklyn, NY and I've gone back to Peru several times to reconnect with my biological family.&nbsp;

Bridging the worlds of the West and Andes through storytelling...Artmayu is a digital book production studio, and the studio behind AltSalt!Our name comes from Artemis, the Greek goddess of the moon, and Mayu, the celestial river from Andean cosmology.In addition to maintaining the AltSalt website, we make animated ebooks, games, and other creative digital projects.

Editorial content by the AltSalt team.

Hi, I'm Charles H. Huang, game designer, narrative designer, game programmer.Also I have a lot of values and ideas and things I wanna do and dumb ideas, and it's hard when they conflict, but I remind myself I'm a person from circumstances, so I try not to be too hard on myself.I'm Founder of Unparty; Co-Founder of Friendship Garden - a nonprofit for underrepresented game developers.&nbsp;I'm a current MFA Candidate at NYU Game Center and an Adjunct Professor at Hostos Community College.

Imanalla! I'm Sandy, a zinester librarian in sunny southern California. I started making zines as a way to practice and maintain Quechua, my ancestral language and one of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages of the Americas. I now feel like I have too many zine ideas and too little time, but I try to make it work!&nbsp;I participate in several Andinx community projects like the annual May Sumak Quichwa Film Showcase and oral history collective Rimay Raíz. I love creating spaces for our community to share our cultures, languages, and experiences in the diaspora.&nbsp;In my spare time, I enjoy reading/watching things in the realms of sci-fi, fantasy, or horror. I also like to weave and garden (especially with, you guessed it, Andean potatoes!).&nbsp;

Envisioning an alternative world

Analisa Freitas

Student @ Scripps Institution of Oceanography

@afreitas1

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