A website to wander through

Hello fellow walkers and art lovers—

Toto here. 👋

In our last dispatch, we quietly introduced our new website and promised to tell you more. So, here we are.

I’ve been carrying the idea for this website in my head for at least two years. I knew exactly how it should feel. Finding the time to build it was another matter. Work, life, moving around, and all the other things that apparently happen while you’re trying to finish a personal project. It’s a relief to finally send you a link.

Some of you may not know this, but I’ve always been a software engineer. I started with web programming almost twenty years ago, and I still get excited by a website someone has clearly enjoyed making. One with its own character, a few thoughtful details, and a reason to stay a little longer. I wanted to make one of those for Jinny.

Visiting Jinny means walking through Jingumae, spotting a yellow flag, peering into a streetlamp case, and carrying on down the street. You might follow the whole exhibition, or get distracted halfway through. Both are perfectly reasonable ways to visit.

I wanted that feeling on the website, so the neighborhood is always there, drawn as a 3D map with all 42 streetlamps where they actually stand. You can move around, open a case, look at the work, and walk on to the next lamp.

I’m particularly happy with one small detail. The map follows sunrise and sunset in Tokyo, so when evening comes to Jingumae, the website gets dark and the lamps glow. You can switch it yourself if you’re impatient for nightfall.

Over the past three years, we’ve also built up a surprisingly rich archive. We’ve photographed the exhibitions, the artists’ works inside the cases, walks, workshops, and gatherings at NININI·NI. Opening nights. People leaning in to look at something. A lot of the life around Jinny has ended up in those photographs.

For a long time, Instagram was the only place we could show them. We’d pick a handful, post them, and move on. The rest went unseen, and finding anything from two years ago meant a lot of scrolling.

The new exhibition archive gives that material room. Choose a show from the poster wall, read about the artists, and spend time with its photographs and videos, from the artworks to the opening night. A show can go on being discovered long after the work leaves the cases.

Some shows have much fuller records than others, and we’re still bringing more in.

And you can travel in time a little. Open an older exhibition and take a virtual walk through the photographs of its lamps. The streets stay in place, but what’s inside the cases changes. Revisit something you remember, or find a show you missed. For friends outside Japan, it’s also a way to see each work where it actually lived, out in the street.

There’s something for artists, too. If you’ve ever considered exhibiting with us, you’ve probably wondered what actually fits inside one of those cases. I got a little carried away answering that question.

Our new technical sheet lets you inspect a streetlamp in 3D, choose a pole, and enter your work’s dimensions to see how it fits. You can also see how it meets the eye of an adult, a child, or someone seated. We’ll still check the actual case together before installation, but now there’s something to play with while you plan.

On a more personal note, as life takes me away from Japan, you’ll see more of me on Jinny’s digital side. I’ll be handling most of the technology and business, the website, and these dispatches. Lorenzo stays in Japan and is the one you’re most likely to meet at openings and around the neighborhood.

We’re still building Jinny together, just with more distance between our desks. Having a little version of the neighborhood I can wander through from elsewhere means a lot to me.

Please come and have a look, in English or Japanese. Pick an exhibition you remember, or one you’ve never heard of. Open a few photographs. Take a detour.

And if you find yourself in an old opening-night photo, do tell us.

See you around the hood,

—Toto, Lorenzo and the Jinny Team