Christopher Knight and Social Media as a Private Public Space

Posted on June 17, 2011 by AXM

Christopher Knight at the Los Angeles Times recently wrote a little about my work after reading the ARTnews “Social Revolution” article: “Social media art involves ‘seamlessly blending the online and offline worlds,’ in the words of L.A. artist An Xiao Mina.” That he called me a Los Angeles artist is an honor, especially right now as I’m based in Asia and wishing I could be swimming in Malibu right about now. He also cited my “widely read” essay on social media art in Hyperallergic.

Knight brings up a good point that I think very few people, if any, have really discussed when it comes to social media art:

A potential limitation: Like the space in a shopping mall, social media sites create the illusion of being public places, when in reality they’re corporately owned and operated. On the up-side, the tension between public and private often provides fertile ground for creative exploration.

This is an important distinction to make, and it’s a tension that I think is hardly touched on in the growing practice. Except for one artist whose work has been censored and shut down on a regular basis, many artists haven’t yet acknowledged that the public sphere of social media is actually very easily controlled and managed. This is part of what makes social media different from previous net art; it’s based in large, corporate-owned spaces, rather than the relatively free, wild wild west of the 1.0 Internet.

As Knight explained in an email to me, it’s all part of a larger trend of privatization. He pointed me to this Politico article by Matt Stoller, who starts with a story about the publicly-founded Hoover Dam and then points out that

The real infrastructure trend in America today is privatizing what is left. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman John Mica has been holding hearings on privatizating Amtrak’s Northeast corridor – ostensibly because private capital can more easily bring in high-speed rail.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback just turned over arts funding to the private sector, making Kansas the only state without a publicly funded arts agency. Cities across California, meanwhile, are trying to outsource nearly all municipal functions. Chicago famously sold its parking meter revenue to a consortium headed by Morgan Stanley. The Arizona Legislature sold and then leased back its state capitol.

With regards to the privatization of the Internet, and the responsibilites therein, Ethan Zuckerman wrote about this issue brilliantly. His post is focused on politics but it applies to anyone engaging with contemporary mainstream social media:

Hosting your political movement on YouTube is a little like trying to hold a rally in a shopping mall. It looks like a public space, but it’s not – it’s a private space, and your use of it is governed by an agreement that works harder to protect YouTube’s fiscal viability than to protect your rights of free speech. Even if YouTube’s rulers take their function as a free speech platform seriously and work to ensure you’ve got rights to post content, they’re a benevolent despot, not a representative government.

Whether in China or the US or any other country, it’s important to remember that art engaged in the public spheres of Twitter, Facebook, Skype and others is art in a private-public sphere. The Internet may have started out as a government project, but today this private-public space is subject to unique norms and regulations that don’t fully apply to private or public separately. My social media art collective, @Platea, touched on this for a week with Co-Modify, a performance in which we pretended to be sponsored by companies for a week. But I think there are more, interesting tensions in this arena that haven’t been explored too deeply yet.

You can read Knight’s full post here. Image above is my own, from Sanlitun Village Beijing.

Loren Munk: A new art world paradigm?

Posted on June 13, 2011 by AXM

In addition to physical-world places like Roberta’s, Facebook has become the popular hangout for artists and art world types engaging in dialogue about changes in contemporary art. Recently, James Kalm, aka Loren Munk, posed a question about the “new paradigm” of the art world. He received a ton of responses, many of which were interesting, but I honed in on the brief dialogue he had with Hrag Vartanian, editor in chief at Hyperallergic (emphasis my own):

Loren Munk: Like it or not, the current art world is being replaced with a new paradigm. I’m studying Fluxus and The Situationist International for ideas that might be useful in empowering artists in the future. Any other suggestions?

Hrag Vartanian: Curious where these thoughts are coming from, Loren. Did anything trigger it?

Loren: I, like a lot of artists (yourself included) have been thinking about this for years. Watching this latest Bushwick Open Studios weekend forced me to realize that there really are changes happening. The web and loose alliances of … artists are making a great impact. The idea of an “Artist Union” has been tried and failed many times. Great art exists in a rarefied psychological environment, it’s not just a commodity. One of the greatedt challenges is in its monetization.

Hrag: I wonder then if artists should be more comfortable with the idea of being artists, artisans and designers at the same time. In the Renaissance it was common for artists to design objects, buildings, etc. but now there is a sense t …hat it’s too commercial or being a sell-out if you make commercial objects, etc. though I think that is changing more and more. When I recently read the stat that Kickstarter is the third largest comic book publisher in the US, it made me wonder why contemporary artists aren’t doing more to engage a global audience directly. Imagine if Kickstarter was bigger than any commercial gallery for artists. I think the key is to move away from one off luxury objects into something that a crowd could experience (and pay for) or something you can reproduce.

Loren [not responding specifically to Hrag]: I don’t agree that “there being no good solutions”, there are however, no easy solutions. A lot of this requires artists to get out of their studios, take charge of building their own reputations, not relying on the “media” and forming their own networks of support.

Their conversation got me thinking about a few things. Well, one thing: money. And why it’s often such a taboo subject in the art world. At a recent talk I gave at Mindshare Los Angeles on social media and art, someone in the audience asked me how the work sells. So far, I’ve been fortunate in that my work supports itself; through a combination of commissions, talks, writing and other support, I’m able to pay back any costs of my work. Projects like the Gwangju Design Biennale provide a livelihood while continuing to challenge me creatively. But I’m a lucky one. I know so many artists who have to work second or third jobs to make ends meet, and these jobs often have little to do with creative fields.

How can artists tap more into online networks to raise not just awareness but funds? A few years ago, I used Kickstarter to raise nearly $1000 to support an installation on the Brooklyn waterfront. As with comic books, could it be that the next major funder and exhibitor of art is a site like Kickstarter? As Loren said, maybe it’s time for artists to “take charge”, not just of building their reputations but also their funding base and livelihoods. Maybe there’s more to Facebook and the Internet than raising awareness, having conversations and engaging in performance.

ARTnews, Creator’s Project, and Why Social Media Art is Important

Posted on June 4, 2011 by AXM

I’m thrilled to appear in “The Social Revolution: The Art World on Facebook“, a cover story by Barbara Pollack for the June edition of ARTnews:

“Artists who have been working with the Internet and with new media since that genre began are interested in participatory systems and social networking,” says Lauren Cornell, the curator of “Free.” “What is new is more advanced technologies and new applications connecting masses and masses of people. It’s really just a progression.”

An Xiao, an early adapter to Web 2.0 and the founder of @Platea, a collective of online art makers, would disagree. “I think social-media art is a new genre of art,” she says. “It blends many different things. It blends performance art because it is people interacting socially with each other. It blends visual art because Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and the rest all rely on very visual elements. It blends net art, but it is in more of a public space than traditional net art.”

Personal art aside, this is an exciting moment for the emergence of social media art. ARTnews is one of the oldest arts publications in the States and reaches a large, mainstream audience not necessarily tuned into the goings on of us art tech nerds. It’s difficult to say if social media art has come into its own yet as a practice, but it’s certainly on its way.

There haven’t been many social media art commissions from non-digital art organizations. Pollack mentions a few, including the Brooklyn Museum commission, 1stfans, that I helped kick off. It was the first time a major arts organization not focused on technology had commissioned art on (not just about) mainstream social media. Independent curators like Hrag Vartanian and Olympia Lambert have commissioned work (and I’m working on an exciting new project that I can’t talk about yet with two indie curators as well). And then there’s Creative Time’s Creative Time Tweets:

Twitter has expanded the definition of public space, providing a rich environment where-140 characters at a time-revolutions are organized, the banalities of everyday life are shared, and artists create site-specific interventions. Creative Time Tweets, a series of three commissioned Twitter performances, explores Twitter as a viable place for art that engages audiences, promotes dialogue, and intersects with the physical world.

Why is it important that social media art be commissioned by non-digital art organizations? It’s because I believe strongly that there’s a fundamental distinction to be made between net art and social media art. Yes, the basic tools are the same. I was there for the Telnet, BBS and Usenet age, and there’s nothing fundamentally different on the technical end with Twitter, Weibo and Facebook. They’re all essentially the same service.

What’s different today is two things: scale and mobile. Mainstream social media today have huge scale, and scale matters. Sina Weibo, the hot microblog service in China, has 140 million users. Twitter has 200 million. Facebook is more than half a billion. Compare that with AOL, once the reigning Internet service provider: at its peak, it boasted 30 million subscribers. Scale matters. Few people knew what Telnet was during its heyday, but everyone knows Facebook. It’s the difference between a blank stare and a glimmer of recognition when you mention a service, the difference between techies and people from all different walks of life (an aside: this is why so many people from Westchester County and northern New Jersey say they’re from New York).

And the other key factor is the introduction of mobile. By putting social media into our hands with mobile phones, we’ve essentially put social media into the streets, the subways, our offices and bedrooms. This means that contemporary mainstream social media aren’t solely a computer-based phenomenon; art on these media leaps from the screen while being situated within it. A recent @Platea performance, Following Piece 2.0, looked at this overlap of physical and digital, as we recreated Vito Acconci’s seminal Following Piece using Web 2.0 tools.

Put this together, and you have the new public streets, a new, global forum for contemporary art in the public sphere. This is why @Platea has commissioned two social media art projects and plans to commission more. One, #PlateaKnit, was spearheaded by Ingrid Murnane and featured in Art in America . The other, Tree-Blogging, was led by Jonny Gray, and featured in the ARTNews piece above. Ingrid lives in Portsmouth, UK, and Jonny in Carbondale, IL, and their co-performers came from multiple continents and countries far from the traditional art power centers. Art on mainstream social media has a way of increasing access, both by geography and the fact that the psychological barrier to entry is much lower (it’s always easier to make a commitment online than in physical space).

Kevin Holmes at The Creator’s Project nailed it on the head, I think, with his recent Creativity Bytes piece (another exciting sign that social media art is starting to reach a wider audience):

As a platform, [situating art on social media] means art works and performances are now accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world, in real-time. But as a means of creating art, pieces become participatory, curatorial, social, and performance-based. People engage with the art-the performer, the audience, and the work become one. The artist is the genesis, the instigator, and the art work then sets off on its journey into an uncertain collaborative future.

I recommend checking out Kevin’s piece above, and the ARTnews piece, “A Brief Guide To Social Media Art“, which provides a great summary of what’s going on in the field, and what exactly it means and why it’s different. (He also made me blush in that humblebrag sort of way when he called me “one of the medium’s most well-known practitioners and advocates”…)

Another note. Barbara Pollack’s ARTnews review comes at a difficult time right now in the art world. Pollack, a veteran arts writer and contributing editor to ARTnews, spoke with me about the article back in January, when I had just moved to Beijing. Just last year, she released The Wild, Wild East: An American Art Critic’s Adventures in China , and in it discussed the major players, including Ai Weiwei, a huge practitioner of social media art. Ai’s name at the time was just beginning to emerge in the West, and she featured him in another cover story for ARTnews’s May issue. I recommend picking up the book, or, barring that, tuning into Pollack’s lovely interview with Jeffrey Brown at PBS NewsHour. It’s an insightful look into the Beijing art world.

[The magazine images above come courtesy Joanie San Chirico; the others come from web sites. These are NOT on a CC license.]

The Enduring Value of Soho

Posted on June 3, 2011 by AXM

A sign outside Jianwai SOHO, a home office complex in Beijing’s Central Business District. The enduring real estate value of the word “Soho” is amazing to me. It apparently started as a hunting cry that became associated with a fashionable part of London. Then New York sprouted SoHo, of course, which has arguably outshone its forebear. Los Angeles has WeHo and NoHo.

On the other side of the world, in Beijing, SOHO stands for Small Office Home Office. It’s a real estate agency, and the name defines some of the most expensive and hip sections of urban China. Its value as a name is so important that it’s not been Sinicized. It’s written 建外SOHO, and it’s the height of Chinese real estate:

SOHO China was founded in 1995 by Chairman Pan Shiyi and CEO Zhang Xin. A leader in China’s real estate industry, SOHO China stands out as a developer of high-profile branded commercial properties in central Beijing and Shanghai. Presently, SOHO China is the largest real estate developer in Beijing. The company collaborates with internationally-recognized architects, translating their innovative designs into iconic real estate which possesses strong appeal to property investors and the local businesses and customer bases they serve.

Soft power. Throughout the capital, even in the parts of town where very little English is spoken, I hear Empire State of Mind and Alicia Keys belting out “New Yooork”. In the West, it’s quite common now to talk about the decline of America and the rise of China, but economics aside, it’s impossible to ignore the enduring value of Manhattan as the model city for developing urban areas.

I’m biased, of course. I used to live in New York. Maybe I’m just looking for and clinging to the familiar signs of home. But it’s hard to deny that Beijingers know more about New York than New Yorkers know about Beijing. And as China rises, then its neighborhoods should eventually start to hold cache, the same way SoHo has globalized more than any other. When will the time come that we in the West call our neighborhoods 朝阳 (Chaoyang) or 浦东 (Pudong), in Chinese script, to symbolize the essence of desirability? When will the names of 李亚鹏 (Li Yapeng) and 张曼玉 (Zhang Manyu) roll easily off the Western tongue and attract more than a million followers?

The other half of this story is the way language spreads. I love that a 17th century English hunting cry has evolved into a word that 21st century Beijingers understand to represent anything but. It reminds me a bit of qiaokeli (巧克力), the Chinese word for chocolate. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word chocolate comes from two Aztec words, namely, xococ, meaning ”bitter” and atl, meaning “water.” These words also date to roughly the 1600s. That I can order a Snickers bar from a central Chinese migrant for whom Mandarin is a second language, because of a word combination developed in 17th century Nahuatl, is amazing to me.

Tumblin’ a life

Posted on June 1, 2011 by AXM

I’ve been Tumbling for a while now, and blogging for a while too, but I decided to really turn my Tumblr, anxiaostudio.tumblr.com into the scrapbook I claim it is. I’m now posting more pictures and notes from my travels, little design things I see, little bits of culture, in addition to the cool links I run across while clicking around the Internet.

If you’ve ever seen me in person, you’ve seen my always-at-the-ready Panasonic Lumix. I figured I should archive those shots somewhere other than just my hard drive, and I enjoyed the format Tricia Wang takes on her Tumblr. So come join me as I Tumble Zen graffiti, Hong Kong ferry coins, Manila fish markets and more. Hope you enjoy seeing what I see too (and thanks to Day LP for the super scrapbook-esque design).

Speaking of Tumblr, did you know China’s starting to catch onto the trend? Tumblr is blocked, but there’s always Sina Qing:

With huge user base and high engagement, Sina Qing fits right into the gap between Sina Weibo and Sina Blog, the former is easy to use but fall short in multimedia features, while the latter is more powerful but lacks behind in usability. Combining their strengths, Sina Qing will be a major threat to Diandian and other light-blogging services in China. The bottom line is, majority of weibo users have been engaged actively on Sina; the Chinese portal can easily transfer these uses to its own platform.

via technode

One of the best Twitter exchanges I’ve seen in a while

Posted on May 31, 2011 by AXM

Tricia Wang’s terrific exploration of the instant photo phenomenon (suishoupai/随手拍) on Weibo has gotten me thinking about unexpected uses of social media and the way we take ownership of a medium beyond its original intent. Here’s one of those beautiful exchanges that shows what happens when you combine a real-time social space like Twitter, a dense city like New York, and the serendipity afforded by mobile devices:

Walking back to Bklyn over the bridge because L is fucked. If anyone is near bedford L & can put a quarter in a meter i'll b 4ever grateful

May 31, 2011 7:03 am via twidroyd ReplyRetweetFavorite

@jen_dalton

Jennifer Dalton

@jen_dalton where's the car parked? I'm en route to work in a taxi.

May 31, 2011 7:05 am via Twitter for BlackBerry®ReplyRetweetFavorite

@Powhida

William

@Powhida right in front of salvation army at n 7, thnx so much!!!!

May 31, 2011 7:09 am via twidroyd ReplyRetweetFavorite

@jen_dalton

Jennifer Dalton

@jen_dalton two more hours. No ticket here

May 31, 2011 7:20 am via Twitter for BlackBerry®ReplyRetweetFavorite

@Powhida

William

@Powhida I got the car and NYC was deprived of my parking ticket income, thx again. I've been supporting NYC way too much lately

May 31, 2011 8:34 am via TweetDeck ReplyRetweetFavorite

@jen_dalton

Jennifer Dalton

Aesthetic Minimalism, Ethical Minimalism

Posted on May 30, 2011 by AXM

When I moved to Asia, I packed up only two carry-on size luggages. “That’s it?” my friends asked. “That’s it,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else. I had my casual clothes. My nice clothes. A couple dresses, a few pairs of shoes. Jewelry. Electronics, of course. If I needed something, I figured I could just buy it (and I have). But with a few exceptions, I haven’t missed much of the wardrobe I left in Los Angeles, which I’d already reduced after a move from New York.

Minimalism has always been an aesthetic choice for me. I like things simple, straightforward and streamlined, with perhaps just a little flourish. The life of George Clooney in Up in the Air appealed to me. Yes, perhaps his character’s life was a bit too spartan, but I usually travel with just one carry-on luggage myself. There’s nothing like travel to force a reevaluation and repackaging of one’s possessions.

But a recent chat with the folks at We Are ULTRA, a sustainability collective, has me wondering if minimalism isn’t also an ethical choice. My latest (and first!) article for Change Observer opens with the “Ultra 10 Challenge”: reduce your wardrobe down to 10 items, and live with them for 365 days. The idea seems radical, but not too radical to those who already subscribe to the basic idea:

“I’m really relieved, actually,” Schlaikjer told me over Skype. What initially began as “a selfish way to declutter” is becoming a joint project in sustainable living among We Are ULTRA, one of Asia’s leading sustainability collectives; LOHAS magazine, which focuses on health and wellness in China; Greenovate, a China-based sustainability organization; and Schlaikjer’s Wellness Works. At the end of the year, Schlaikjer and others participating in “The Ultra 10 Challenge” will return their outfits to be repurposed and reused, and they’ll have the option to buy a newly designed set on discount.

Suddenly, the idea of stripping down one’s possessions isn’t just about streamlining, but about reducing environmental impact. The less you own, the less you purchase… the less you contribute to the global manufacturing machine. Air dry your clothing. Travel with less. Mix and match, use accessories to spice things up. This lifestyle may not be practical for all, as the comments in my article suggest, but it can be practical for many. And it should be seriously considered by everyone.

But ethical living isn’t easy. We all know that the purely rational, ethical choice isn’t necessarily comfortable. How many times have we compromised our values for the easier route? What We Are ULTRA’s move gets at, what The Uniform Project gets at, is that aesthetics and ethics not only can exist in harmony, but they should exist together. Good design makes the choice to reduce one’s enviromental impact easier, and therefore more likely to happen.

Community helps too, as does storytelling. Julie Lasky, my editor at Change Observer, recently highlighted the blog of Chappell Ellison, who’s giving away personal possessions to those willing to take them. It’s a lovely gesture, because it softens the edge of stark minimalism and embraces the inevitable nostalgia of the little trinkets we own by telling stories, building communities. I hope it works:

“In an attempt to learn how to live with less, I’m giving away my things, one by one,” she writes. “Sometimes the object will be accompanied by a personal narrative that might make you want the object more (or less).”

Ethical minimalism is rarely a simple, singular choice, and I’m not convinced it should be. It should come from a mixture of influences. The folks at ULTRA put me in touch with Fatiha Sharif, a supporter who lives in Kuantan, Malyasia, a few hours’ drive east of Kuala Lumpur. She summed it up, I think: “Organic clothing sounds brilliant on paper but to implement it can be a real test,” she told me over email. “A local clothing line that is eco-conscious with cutting edge designs from equally talented designers…sounds fab, right?”

It does sound fab.

JeepneED: A Mobile Science Lab and Internet Cafe

Posted on May 18, 2011 by AXM

I always loved science labs. The beakers, the strange liquids, even the white aprons we would wear. I never pursued a career in chemical or biological science, but I continue to have an intellectual interest in the field. And when I’m curious something, like when my dentist showed my teeth in his iPad, I know how to research.

Many schools in the Philippines, however, don’t have this privilege. Science equipment is expensive, obviously, and the country as a whole has fallen severely behind in this area. Everyone knows that hands-on learning improves retention and understanding, especially with science. But what can be done? Constructing a lab in every school is costly, especially if, like in most countries, lab time is limited to once or twice a week.

In steps JeepneED, a mobile science lab. They use jeepneys, the most common form of public transportation here in the Philippines, to transport the equipment. It’s a repurposed repurposing, given that jeepneys are themselves repurposed military vehicles that filled a gap for public transportation. They’re an affectionate symbol of the Philippines, and a fun way to bring much-needed education resources to students around the country. I imagine JeepneED could become the ice cream truck of science.

I met with co-founder Shaina Tantuico recently and found her to be a dedicated educator with an entrepreneurial spirit. She and her partner Erika Pineda raised money through Kickstarter to fund their first jeepney, and they’re going to be livestreaming the creation on Friday, 9am – 12pm Manila time, which is Thursday 9pm – midnight in New York. Be sure to check it out.

This time, I’ll gladly take some (just a little!) credit:

Inspired by @anxiaostudio to make an event out of painting @jeepneED and a live stream out of the exciting construction. What do you think?

May 11, 2011 7:46 am via webReply RetweetFavorite

@JeepneED

jeepneed

(image via Wikimedia Commons)

My Talk at co[LAB] Manila and Why the Philippines Rules Social Networking

Posted on May 13, 2011 by AXM

Great afternoon helping kick off co[LAB] Manila’s new Spark Series, a series of talks and workshops designed to inspire Manila’s creative and entrepreneurial community. A bit of a homecoming for me, as I’ve not lived in Manila since I was a wee one, and I must say it was quite lovely. The space itself is amazing–a perfect place for collaboration and inspiration whether you’re a Manileno or just passing through. I focused on art and social media, as I usually do, but given the audience I tried to talk up some of the Philippine-specific stats about social media. Turns out the country truly leads the world in this area. Here’s some of the really cool stuff I discovered:

The Philippines is often dubbed “the social networking capital of the world”, according to one web site, with a whopping 95% penetration. It certainly feels that way, being here. Just yesterday at a salon I was asked to provide my Facebook and Friendster account information to stay in touch. Social media are everywhere.

It’s one of the first (if not the first) nations to oust an unpopular leader by organizing via mobile phones/social networks, all the way back in 2001 when texting was hardly a household term yet in the US. [MSNBC]

Facebook has a 93.9% penetration rate, making Facebook the top-visited site in the country and the Philippines the #1 country on Facebook in terms of per capita usage. [Yahoo] Compare that with 50% penetration in the US.

Eighth most popular country on Twitter with 16.1% penetration. [Yahoo] Compare that with roughly 6% in the US. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that the country regularly leads trending topics, from Pacquiao wins to national debates to typhoon reports, despite being only about 1% of all Twitter users in terms of raw numbers. This suggests an intensity of usage much stronger than the raw numbers suggest.

Still the world leader in texting, even now as texting is increasingly popular the world over, with 600 texts per month per user. [GMA News/Mashable] Compare that with roughly 420 in the US.

Once the world leader in Friendster, and it’s interesting to see the responses now that the site itself is shutting down and folks have largely moved on to Facebook. [Global Voices]

Had a really interesting Q&A afterward, with great discussions about the reasons for the trends above. Still throwing together thoughts on just why the Philippines seems to be leading the world in social media usage, despite its relative size and wealth relative to the US. So what is it about Filipinos? Some ideas: English speaking nation, strong family ties, historic connection with the US, large overseas foreign working population, free speech protections and open Internet, ubiquity of Internet cafes.

Folks preferred to chat with me face to face instead of live tweet (ironically enough, given the stats above!), but here are some of the responses from Twitter:

[@banjbillions] Kicking off # SparkSeries at @ coLABmanila with guest speaker @ anxiaostudio …

[@Lynn] lecture by an xiao Mina starts. self portrait using one’s twits. love the idea.

[@JeepneED] Inspired by @ anxiaostudio to make an event out of painting @ jeepneED and a live stream out of the exciting construction. What do you think?

[@coLABmanila] Use technology to become present for each other. @ anxiaostudio # SparkSeries

Here’s co[LAB]‘s wrap-up of the evening. Many thanks to all who attended! I hear video will come soon. Really honored to connect with everyone. (Image above courtesy Chaneli Bengbeng)

Rosary Designs

Posted on April 29, 2011 by AXM

Something I rarely see discussed in the design world is the role of new design in religion. How have Filipinos, quite often devout Catholics, adapted to the needs of modern life? Here are two examples: a stainless steel rosary to handle scooter riding through Manila streets, and a single-strand, single-decade design to be carried in a pocket without getting tangled.