To contribute to this issue, consider your own relationship with representation. How faithfully do your Kinopio spaces capture your thoughts? What transformations occur in the process of externalization? What essential qualities remain stubbornly beyond representation?

An online & multiplayer zine about Kinopio’s culture & community.

Final thoughts

Status:

The Adventure Easter egg: “Created by Warren Robinett”.

Submission deadline: June 1st, 2025.

In David Lynch’s Lost Highway, when a detective asks Fred Madison if he owns a video camera, Fred’s response exposes the fundamental tension between objective documentation and subjective experience. By preferring to remember things “[his] own way… not necessarily the way they happened,” Fred rejects the supposed objectivity of mechanical recording in favor of the malleable, personal nature of memory.

Collect · Connect · Create

Submission guidelines

Bluesky · Mastodon

Unlike Fred Madison, we choose to create external records of our thinking. What are we seeking in this process that Fred rejects? Perhaps clarity, connection, or simply liberation from the burden of remembering everything “our own way.”

Lynch’s film explores how recorded images can become terrifying because they show something we can’t control – a version of reality that contradicts our preferred narrative. The mysterious videotapes that appear at Fred’s door represent an intrusion of objective reality into subjective experience.

Share a thought with a card below 👇

3. When we capture an insight in a card, what remains outside the frame?

2. In what ways do we map our knowledge, and what cartographic choices shape what others see?

This issue explores how these three metaphors – the mirror, the map, and the photograph – illuminate our relationship with Kinopio as a tool for thought:

Welcome to the second issue of Spirit of Kinopio, where we examine the tools we use to reflect, map, and capture our thinking – and the beautiful distortions that make them uniquely human.

Yet like all representations, our spaces transform what they represent. The map is never the territory. The photograph frames and excludes. The mirror reverses what it shows.

1. How do our spaces mirror our minds, and where does the reflection distort?

Perhaps the most valuable insights emerge not from perfect fidelity but from creative tension – the space between reality and representation where meaning takes shape.

In our Kinopio spaces, we face these questions daily. Our spatial arrangements of thoughts are maps of our minds, attempting to reflect neural connections through visual proximity. We capture conceptual snapshots, freezing fluid thoughts into cards. We hold mirrors to our thinking processes, hoping to see ourselves clearly.

But is any representation truly faithful? Can we ever capture the world without imposing our perspective?

In our endless quest to capture reality, we humans have created tools that promise objectivity. The mirror reflects without interpretation; the map translates terrain into navigable symbols; the photograph freezes a moment exactly as it appeared. Each claims to show things “as they truly are” – a perfect representation of reality.

“The mirror, the map and the photograph have all at one time or another served as emblems of the yearning for a representation so faithful and so complete that it can’t be distinguished from what it represents.” — Lorraine Daston

Spirit of Kinopio

One of my favorite hidden features of iA Writer is related to link creation: when you already have an URL in the clipboard, there’s no need to paste it after typing cmd-k when some text is selected – it’s automatic!

possibly the precursor to MS Flight Simulatorl

Hidden Features Have you discovered delightful, lesser-known features within your favorite game or Kinopio itself? Document these “Easter eggs” and how they’ve enhanced your note-taking practice or brought you joy.

Incubation & Emergence Reflect on how the egg as a symbol mirrors your thought process in Kinopio – ideas that begin fragile, require nurturing, and eventually hatch into fully-formed concepts. Show us your incubation process.

Time Capsules Document your experience revisiting older spaces and rediscovering your past thinking. What insights emerged when viewing your thoughts across time? How did your past self leave surprises for your future self?

one of my favorite easter eggs is the secret flight simulator app included in early versions of Excel.

Unexpected Connections Share your experiences discovering surprising relationships between ideas that only became apparent when visualized together in your Kinopio spaces. How did spatial proximity reveal connections you hadn’t consciously made?

Contributors will receive a coupon for 2 free months off a new, or existing, Kinopio subscription.

Share a thought or an anecdote by adding a card below.

A single egg can contain multitudes.

Welcome to the first issue of Spirit of Kinopio. May your collection of thoughts continue to connect in ways that create meaning, surprise, and delight.

For this inaugural issue, we invite contributions exploring the theme of Easter eggs in any of the following ways:

We invite you to explore this space with a flâneur’s spirit. Let your eyes drift. Follow unexpected threads. Notice what resonates. Contribute if you can.

Submission deadline: May 12, 2025.

The universe begins as a primordial egg containing all potential, which then hatches or divides to create manifest reality.

Unexpected encounters can be dangerous.

The art of useful representation isn’t perfect fidelity but meaningful abstraction. While the empire’s cartographers failed by pursuing exactitude to its logical extreme, we succeed in our spaces by making thoughtful choices about scale, detail, and relationship.

The cartographic choices we make – what to include, what to omit, how to arrange our cards – transform raw mental experience into something navigable. We create meaning through deliberate reduction, emphasizing certain connections while allowing others to fade into the background.

Wander is the way As collectors of thoughts, we’re constantly engaged in our own egg hunt. We gather fragments of inspiration, snippets of knowledge, and kernels of questions. We scatter them across our digital landscapes, sometimes forgetting where we’ve placed them until a later wander through our mind-gardens brings them back into view, often transformed by new context.

This paradox illuminates our relationship with Kinopio spaces. Like maps, our digital gardens represent mental territories – but their value lies precisely in what they exclude and simplify. A thought space that captured every neural connection, every fleeting association, every subconscious link would be as unwieldy as Borges’ empire-sized map.

Borges’ miniature masterpiece presents the paradox of perfect representation: a map that achieves complete fidelity becomes utterly useless and is abandoned by the next generation to the “Inclemencies of Sun and Winters”.

Rebirth & renewal The egg itself carries rich symbolism across cultures. It represents rebirth and renewal – the potential of new ideas cracking open to reveal something unexpected. Each note we place in our spaces contains this same potential energy, waiting for the right connection to transform it into something more.

Beyond the obvious Easter eggs exist at the intersection of intention and discovery. They are deliberately placed yet meant to be found through exploration rather than direction. Since the first digital Easter egg – Warren Robinett’s hidden signature in Atari’s Adventure game (1980) – developers have tucked away playful secrets for users to uncover, from hidden rooms in Mario to concealed messages in applications, rewarding the curious who venture beyond the obvious path. In Kinopio’s universe of spatial thinking, we find our own version of Easter eggs when disparate notes suddenly reveal unexpected relationships and patterns emerge from seeming chaos.

When we create cards in Kinopio, are we taking faithful “photographs” of our ideas? Or are we, like Fred, choosing to remember things our own way?

In the digital gardens we tend through Kinopio spaces, there’s something magical about discovering the unexpected. Like stumbling upon a colorful egg hidden in tall grass, the serendipitous connections that emerge from our collected thoughts often surprise and delight us. This inaugural issue of Spirit of Kinopio celebrates the concept of Easter eggs in all their manifestations.

Contributors will receive a coupon for 2 free months off a new, or existing, Kinopio subscription.

Objective reality vs subjective experience.

“I like to remember things my own way… not necessarily the way they happened.” — Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), in Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997)

Sparked by Thibault Malfoy, cultivated by many.