SFPC has offered RTP for over seven years, and the current iteration moves the course towards new forms. While the course was created and has been taught by Zach Lieberman — for this iteration he is joined by three co-teachers: Hind Al Saad, Edgardo Avilés-López, and Murilo Polese — all former RTP participants.

Like many other fields, computational art has centered the contributions of white men in historical archives, underwriting the contributions of other people who don’t fit into the dominant culture. The Recreating the Past curriculum has been instrumental in addressing sexism and re-writing the role women have played in computational art history such as Muriel Cooper, Lillian Schwartz and Vera Molnár.

In feedback sessions about the course, participants in previous iterations of RTP have challenged the syllabus for centering mostly white American perspectives. There is a collective desire for more engagement of computational artists from other backgrounds, as evidenced by a student-organized list of artists and designers from diverse cultural and racial backgrounds in relation to topics covered in RTP in the summer of 2020.

Zach reflected on past RTP curriculum in a letter to the SFPC community when stepping down from a leadership position at SFPC:

“When I designed the class I was thinking consciously of elevating strong female voices, but I didn’t consider how the nature and material of the course paints the picture of ‘media art as a white domain.’ I take full responsibility for this shortcoming and admit that the content of this class needs to change, that it is a failure as an educator to not have a wider, more diverse and inclusive curriculum.”

The generosity of these critiques on the part of students, along with Zach’s willingness to take accountability and work with students and teachers to transform RTP, has offered an invitation for play and experimentation in this new iteration of the class.

Over the course of multiple sessions in the springtime, Zach, Hind, Edgardo and Murilo reworked the framing and content of the course, not just by expanding the canon but also by incorporating critical inquiry into what forms “recreating” the past can take: reproducing, reenacting, rethinking, reframing, and so on.

“Those working sessions in the spring were really important for re-imagining what the class could be. I feel really grateful that we had that time to work together,” Zach recounted. “It sounds silly to say, but every zoom call we’d always be smiling just thinking through and imagining new more inclusive curriculum. I’m doubly grateful that we had the chance to teach together as well.”

The new experimental iteration of the class offers a toolkit to facilitate the recreation process by centering artists brought by participants as well as all four teachers — offering more views and perspectives on what art is important.

This toolkit helped participants ask questions like:

● What was the medium the artist was using and how does it differ from today’s available medium?

● What part of society was the artist representing or actively choosing not to represent?

● What political tensions was the artist involved in? Who was on the other side?

The class also highlighted computational artists from various backgrounds in the Recreating the Past Artist Spotlight Series on SFPC social media. Artists featured in this series include Saloua Raouda Choucair, Norman Pritchard, and Ulises Carrión.

One highlight of the class was a call to BYOA (bring your own artist) which connects ideas and approaches from the class to artists that students themselves choose. This year involved recreations of early computer poetry, algorithmic calligraphy, and even one student recreating their father’s artwork.

We asked participants Yadira Sanchez and Lillian-Yvonne Bertram to give some reflections on their experiences in the class:

Yadira

What does ‘Recreating the Past’ mean to you?

‘Recreating the past’ means to me, appreciating that what our very current westernised cultures may call obsolete technologies/tools are actually a portal to reconnect and acknowledge that creativity, technique and art are part of a larger spectrum, always connected with the culture, community and politics of the times we are “creating” art or technology.

Tell us about an artist who has been influential to you in this class.

I really connected with Anni Albers’ and Rosa Menkman’s works. Anni made me dream, want to know more about Indigenous ancestral practices in textiles and reaffirm my application of reappropriating current technologies that fit and respect our spaces. Rosa’s work on glitch artifacts renewed my love for non-ordinary, non-perfect systems in ways that connect with my passions and dreams of non-progressive, non-upgradable technology and how glitch is a way to produce, use and perceive through our technologies.

How did the toolkit help you connect with artists who are meaningful to you?

Above is an example of the work I did during the course where I used glitch to capture a Milpa (crop growing ancestral system in Mesoamerica) and for me represented Milpa in a glitch form as a beautiful ancestral technology that is still used by many towns and regions to eat and thrive but which is threatened by climate change and big tech greenwashing; thus employing bends and breaks as metaphors for différance and using the glitch as an exoskeleton for progress, as she recalls in the ‘Glitch studies manifesto’. How this glitch milpa changes the context and acts as if it is not logical but profoundly irrational, behaves not in the way “technology” should!

I realised more and more as the sessions progressed, that I have a tendency or inclination for making art/technology based on what it represents to me and my community(ies), like the community I grew up in, where my culture and background shape and reshape my creative process. So the toolkit really helped me reframe and rethink according to my intention.

Lillian

What does ‘Recreating the Past’ mean to you?

[‘Recreating the Past’] means doing shallow and deep dives into how something has happened or been created, learning about methods and moments of creation, and then applying that knowledge to my own attempts at the same types of processes even if using different methods (computational methods).

Tell us about an artist who has been influential to you in this class.

All of the artists we’ve looked at have been amazing — it’s been such a pleasure learning about new artists and their works, especially artists I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. I really enjoyed learning about Odili Donald Odita, a Nigerian artist. I spent a lot of time looking at his works and thinking about his use of lines, geometry, and colors to create different depths and layers. I felt like I had to learn how to look at his work before I could attempt a recreation. I think the recreation I did of one of his pieces was one of my most successful in the class, and represented a breakthrough in coding but also interpreting and understanding what is happening in a piece of artwork.

How did the toolkit help you connect with artists who are meaningful to you?

I really appreciated the way the toolkit provides a set of frameworks for engaging with artists and artworks in ways that are structured but not limiting. It also gives you a way to think about how to approach learning about and engaging with historical artworks and artists.

RTP is organized around studying different artists’s practices using today’s computational techniques to mediate a close reading of the aesthetic qualities, underlying practices and social histories of influential artists creating computer mediated work. With this frame, the class has the power to develop a canon of computer art — a group of artists and artworks of whom and which are elevated and idealized within the field. How do we as teachers and participants in classes at SFPC want to contribute to something like a canon of computer art? Who gets to decide what artists are influential?

There is much work to be done towards expanding computational art canon and the discourse surrounding it. Creating a toolkit to engage participants and members of the SFPC community in the process of compiling a more inclusive archive is a small step forward. It will take the whole community to create a database of artists who are more representative of the gradation of cultural backgrounds, political movements, and art practices that make our rich and complex community beautiful. We’re grateful for the current teachers and participants for moving us in that direction!

● Keep up with Recreating the Past and other classes on Instagram and Twitter.

● Donate to our scholarship fund to help us grow towards becoming a beautiful school that can offer free and low cost classes and events in the future.

We’re here at the start of a new season, looking back at Summer’s COCOON and working towards new programs and new forms. We begin in full hearted gratitude for all 119 of the participants that joined us in COCOON this summer. 13 teachers pushed the boundaries of what Poetic Computation can mean: finding new personal and collective relationships to mathematics, reading through paper craft and book making, developing critical approaches to DNA analysis and ancestry, tracing the boundaries of augmented reality, and asking what role love can play in learning and coding. Participants weaved us all into a cocoon of seeming, becoming, unmaking… and, as Andrea Solestad and Madeeha Lamoreaux put so wonderfully in their Meet the Participants discussion, emerged (reluctantly) as caterpillars again. Always ready to turn inward and embrace the sticky, shared, messy and entangled muck without the expectation of coming out with wings.

That’s something we are looking at in ourselves as organizers, right now — our desire for SFPC to come out with wings. We are working on developing new structures to support teachers, participants, and organizers at SFPC. There is work to be done urgently towards becoming the beautiful school we imagine. We are beginning the process of becoming a nonprofit, seeking outside grants to help alleviate tuition costs, and building a supportive and cooperative leadership structure. This fall, we’ll be in collective study of what a school can be. As we do so, we will be scaling back our programming a little bit, offering two longer format sessions and focusing more of our attention on stabilizing organizational structures.

This fall is a pivot — the present is a portal. Our two classes are opportunities to develop stories of many histories and many futures through presence in shared creative practice.

• “Recreating the Past” taught by Zach Lieberman, Hind Al Saad, Edgardo Avilés-López, and Murilo Polese.

• “Reading into the Past / Writing into the Future” taught by Ashley Jane Lewis, with special guests to be announced soon.

Apply now→ https://sfpc.io/fall-2021/

This summer, we provided partial and full scholarship to over 40 participants in COCOON. We are so thankful to our members on withfriends for supporting scholarships in such a direct way. We are thankful for the participants for making these classroom spaces possible by paying full price or more, and asking their employers to help them pay. We’re grateful to our teachers who opened up more seats in classes. And we’re grateful to all the participants who told us what they could pay, and how. We know that inside this community there is more capacity for mutual aid and redistribution, and we are also looking for help elsewhere. We’re happy to announce that we have received a grant from the Ford Foundation to provide $54,000 in scholarships for incoming students of marginalized identities.

One of the things we are recognizing is that SFPC is a place where teachers teach the classes they would like to take. We think that’s a lovely prompt. We’re grateful to everyone who supports this community with their resources — time, engagement, funding, and above all, presence.

With overflowing gratitude,

SFPC Stewards

Zainab Aliyu, Todd Anderson, American Artist, Neta Bomani, Melanie Hoff, Galen Macdonald and Celine Wong Katzman.

Reading, Writing & Compiling is a workshop series stewarded by Neta Bomani and Kenlynn Albright for the School for Poetic Computation’s summer COCOON session. The series took place on Wednesdays and Fridays July through August and featured workshops by Jie Qi, Natalie Freed, Yuchen Chang, Gabrielle Octavia Rucker, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Neta Bomani which interrogated ways of reading, writing, compiling and learning with and without computers.

Reading, Writing & Compiling consisted of the following workshops:

• Storytelling with Paper Circuits by Jie Qi and Natalie Freed
• Paper System: Intro to Artists’ Books by Chang Yuchen
• Chicken Scratch Session: Intuitive Writing Through Asemic Practice by Gabrielle Octavia Rucker
• PLEASE DO NOT PERCEIVE ME: The Poetics of Dirty Data and Embedded Stellar Clusters by Kameelah Janan Rasheed
• Reading, Writing & Compiling Zines by Neta Bomani

For a list of participants check out: sfpc.io/cocoon/participants

Read a recap of each workshop below.

Storytelling with Paper Circuits

During our first workshop for Reading, Writing, and Compiling, Jie Qi led participants through storytelling with paper circuits. She explained the accessibility and familiarity of paper: “It’s soft, it’s affordable, it’s everywhere.” Exploring circuitry, light, and paper, putting three objects that we use to communicate in separate ways together, makes space for a new perspective. Flipping a light switch or triggering a circuit is something we do with little intention every day in different forms. Suddenly, this act is conscious and carries meaning. “Keep the soul. The soul is not the technology. The soul is the story:”

Later in class, Cezanne posed a question that got participants thinking about the possibilities of sensors and pressures: “I was thinking about how the different sensors create different human art interactions. And so my question is: if you could make any sensor to sense anything, what would it be?” Responses stumbled into the chat: Something that “senses edible plants?” or, “Maybe something that senses laughter?” The possibilities of paper circuits seemed endless.

Paper System: An Intro to Artist’s Books

I woke up thinking about our relationship to nature and reading. Many of my books are unbound and take the shape of leaves on the path to the creek by my childhood home. Growing up, there were natural systems we listened to. For example, there’s an edible mushroom I grew up picking in Indiana. My grandpa would tell me “When the oak leaves are the size of mouse ears, the mushrooms will start popping up through the late spring dirt.”

We listen to the leaves, that are listening to the mushrooms. We all read each other, exchanging pages, slipping notes and reminders everywhere. Creating our own symbiotic system. During her workshop, Yuchen read a line from a Chinese poem [by Xu Jun of the Qing Dynasty], “The wind doesn’t know words, [so] why is it flipping through books?” In response, Yuchen said “whatever this book is about, it is also a substance [that] contains some nutrition to some creatures.”

On Friday, we had a conversation about systems and randomness. The two are not mutually exclusive. With that, I also return to the overlap of simplicity and complexity in some artist books. Yuchen compared the compiling of some artist books to haikus. As the reader, you are given so few words, but at the same time, given the physical experience of the book. Your mind, personal contexts and histories are left to become the thread to bind it into an artifact that makes you feel.

Chicken Scratch Session

In our Chicken Scratch Session and journey through asemic writing, Gabrielle Octavia Rucker showed participants a diagram about “functional vs. nonfunctional pencil holding.” Differences in pencil grips and positions of fingers reminded me of the burden I felt as a left-handed kid. I worried about smudging ink when writing left to right, having to find a left handed desk on my first day of high school, and eight year old me in art class trying to find the lone pair of left handed scissors. These are some of the first memories I have of discomfort in uniformity and elimination of personal languages. Does “function” come down to how many people are able to interact or understand a piece of communication? Perhaps we can turn to a quote shared by Rucker from Peter Schwenger: “Asemic writing offers an implicit resistance.”

“Something that I think resistance looks like is re-establishing what language means to us… I’ve always thought this is an evolving tool that we have,” says Rucker in response to Schwenger. Breaking and unlearning limitations on our tools of communication is asemic practice.

Neta brought up a point about language that resonated with many in our workshop: “We’re constantly trapped in this crisis of articulation, that is to say that language is just an approximation of something.” To this point, Mon added, “sometimes I also feel like linguistic annihilation is an appropriate way to describe what is intended through systematic erasure of language. If the colonizer’s language propels linguistic determinism, then something is happening to the colonized.”

PLEASE DO NOT PERCEIVE ME

Our fourth workshop presented by Kameelah Janan Rasheed was “PLEASE DO NOT PERCEIVE ME,” an immediately relatable title. As we walked through the poetics of dirty data and embedded stellar clusters, the mention of Lucille Clifton’s “I am not done yet” (1974) stuck with me. Thinking of the “ongoingness and imminency” of a person, a book, or anything you may choose to read has no end date or limit. What do “life-cycles of a text” look like? How can things be read, re-read, and torn apart? During the workshop, Kameelah also brought to participants a passage from Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey’s All Incomplete, discussing what happens when a process is disrupted or when something that is not “already deject, reject, or just as well as dead” enters the system. Complicating these inputs, refusing “the grasp,” and creating with “a desire for aliveness” is a tactic to warp perception and limit surveillance.

Below are two zines showing our Zoom chats. In the dark green booklet, we answer the question: “How would you describe dirty data?” In the light green zine, we identify sources of learning.

Reading, writing & compiling zines

With Jie, we navigated circuits and circulation in the sense of literal light circuits, but also how circuits relate to the traveling of a zine from hand-to-hand. Yuchen engaged participants in understanding systems (and lack thereof), as well as bookbinding and improvisation in artist books. Gabrielle brought asemic writings and perspectives on intention, language, illegibility, communication, and abstraction. With Kameelah, we wandered through dirty data, perception, and reconstruction of what learning means.

In thinking about zine practice during Neta’s final workshop of the Reading, Writing, and Compiling series, the history of zine practice shows that zines are not neutral, nor passive. Zines are technologies. And all aesthetic objects — including technologies and codes — have ideologies embedded within them when we examine their history and context. At the core of zine practice is a do-it-yourself ethos of expression, knowledge sharing, and publishing that signals the refusal of oppressive hegemonic systems.

Kameelah mentioned subversion of the idea of “something having to be passive in order to be digested by a system.” Neta’s shared zines made by herself and other zine makers which take forms that both blur the line between artist book and zine and thwart what you may think to read and challenge this idea of passive, dead, or nonfunctional text and creation. Zines made by Neta take many shapes: a tea bag (“Tea”), a wallet (“Don’t be a Bystander: 6 Tips for Responding to Racist Attacks”), a library note card (“Black Women Librarians”), a bookmark (“Knotted Bookmark”), a ring (“Black Feminist Ring”). Individually, they transform the way we read, write, interpret, compile, and learn, naturally incorporating themselves into the mundane details of an everyday existence.

Join the participants of Reading, Writing & Compiling Friday, September 10 at 7pm EST as they share their collectively compiled publication featuring an array of creative writing, book forms, and performative readings to encompass what they’ve learned over the course of their study.

The showcase will take place on Twitch and be archived on YouTube and feature contributions from the following participants:

Andrew Tan Tuck Ming

Ayana Zaire Cotton

Derek Lopez Vergara

Dia Flood

Elizabeth Ellis

Heena Sharma

Kenlynn Albright

Maria Thomas

Monica Mohapatra

Stephanie Wu

We would like to share with you a message about the School for Poetic Computation’s transformation. Over the past year, a group of students, teachers, staff members, and organizers have begun stewarding SFPC. The people working together to steward SFPC during this transition are: Zainab Aliyu, Todd Anderson, American Artist, Neta Bomani, Emma Rae Bruml, Luke Demarest, Melanie Hoff, Tiri Kananuruk, Celine Wong Katzman, Taylor Levy, Ashley Jane Lewis, Galen Macdonald, Sebastian Morales, Amber Officer-Narvasa, and Che-Wei Wang. We’re learning together now, developing new leadership models as we go — committed to working cooperatively with each other and allowing fluidity within the group as we make this transition. We express our deep thanks to former administrators Lauren Gardner, Zach Lieberman, and Taeyoon Choi for their continued support.

SFPC in 2020

For the past year, in the midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic and the ongoing Black liberation movement, the stewards, along with other SFPC teachers and workers, have been advocating for SFPC to make transformations towards becoming a healthier place to study and work for people who have a variety of identities and needs.

In August 2020, SFPC workers organized around actively changing two longstanding patterns in SFPC’s culture and operations:

1. a pattern of harmful exploitation, inaction, and failure in addressing racism and especially anti-Blackness within the school.
2. a pattern of exploitation of the care and trust of its workers, rather than the creation of healthy boundaries, contracts, and job security.

We want to plainly speak to SFPC’s culture of anti-Blackness here: SFPC’s previous administration maintained a culture of gatekeeping in admissions and hiring processes. Black students have disproportionately held work-study positions, often spending time working for the school while their peers spent time studying and working on projects. Black people and people of color have experienced unaddressed racist macro- and micro-aggressions due to the school’s inadequate Code of Conduct and administrative policies. SFPC also tokenized Black students, using their work and photographs in marketing materials to suggest the school was more diverse than it actually was.

We also want to plainly speak to SFPC’s misuse of trust, “care,” and enthusiastic positivity as stand-ins for the messy and difficult work of negotiating power relations between admin, staff, students, and the community. Staff, who worked on short-term contracts, often felt pressured to perform feminized, uncompensated labor to prove themselves as valuable to be re-contracted. Emails to administration about late pay, lack of promised contracts, and other workplace issues were answered late if not ignored altogether, and staff were expected to pretend these conflicts did not exist in order to maintain SFPC’s outwardly-facing narrative advertising a learning environment built on care.

This pattern was not only harmful to teachers and teacher assistants; these practices created a culture that expected Taeyoon to speak to issues of racial and social justice as the only administrator of color; and expected Lauren to perform undercompensated labor beyond the scope of her duties as the only woman administrator. Often, Zach and Taeyoon’s busy schedules outside of their SFPC duties led to students feeling neglected, and placed the emotional labor of student support almost exclusively on Lauren and other staff. These patterns did not come from admin only. As past teachers and long time believers in the school, we take accountability for participating in the culture that allowed these patterns to persist.

We place these critiques within the reality that SFPC has been a place for pleasure, transformation, and connection for all of us, in spite of everything we are seeking to address. We are sure it has been for many people reading this post. Doing so allows us to acknowledge the ways that the current and past admin and leadership has let down the community, while also honoring the enormous contributions that Lauren, Taeyoon, Zach and others have made in creating spaces where hundreds of people have learned and built life-changing relationships. It offers us a chance to (re)build trust by doing work that we’re excited about doing together — work that can reawaken SFPC from its public dormancy, address the concerns of both the institution and its workers, and grow it towards the “beautiful school” it has always been ready to become.

Towards a Beautiful School

The Summer of 2020 forced us to find new ways to work, organize, learn, and care for one another. In August, teachers and staff wrote a list of demands to Lauren, Taeyoon, and Zach, urging them to address problems within the school before scheduling new classes. The demands are a testament to our collective investment in SFPC, and lay out a vision for working towards a “beautiful school.” The letter asked that the school immediately draft a new Code of Conduct, offer anti-racist and accountability training as professional development for all staff, and provide transparency about SFPC’s 2020 finances. Lauren, Zach, and Taeyoon agreed to work with us to meet the demands.

Between August 2020 and February 2021, during this process, all three administrators stepped down, and we are now collectively stewarding the school with their support. Statements published by Zach and Taeyoon about these transitions are here, here, and here. We thank them all for supporting this process, and for continuing to help us work towards a beautiful school.

We’re committed to transforming SFPC into a place for transgressive study. A place to learn at a pace that counteracts accelerationism within tech spaces. A place where we explore computation, but computation isn’t the point. A place that centers Black, Indigenous, racialized, gendered, disabled, Queer, trans, underrepresented, oppressed and minoritized makers. Where our approach to computation doesn’t end at the poetic, and where care and trust are built through the work we do with each other. We ask what it means to acknowledge that study is always-already work, just as teaching is.

Below, we’re attaching our collective vision for a beautiful school, as articulated in our internal demands from last year. We now have the opportunity and responsibility as leaders to enact the changes we demanded as organized workers. It will take time, and it’s our intention to be forthright about our limitations, and our plans to alleviate them, as we go. We ask our community to remind us to take accountability for this vision. We highlight point number 10 from our vision, that a beautiful school should acknowledge that its members are capable of making mistakes. We have already, we will again, and we’re grateful to those who will help SFPC keep its compass pointing towards a beautiful school.

For now, we invite you to join our mailing list, and to look out for announcements of summer and fall programs, which we’re excited to share with you soon. If you have questions or want to reach out, please email us at info@sfpc.io. Thank you for reading.

With love,

SFPC Stewards

— — —

The following demands were co-written during the summer of 2020 by Zainab Aliyu, American Artist, Max Bittker, Neta Bomani, Emma Rae Bruml, Nabil Hassein, Melanie Hoff, Celine Wong Katzman, Ashley Jane Lewis and Galen Macdonald. We have added minor edits to the language to reflect shifts in our current thinking.

We believe that a beautiful school should:

1. Actively work towards supporting Black, Indigenous, queer, trans, disabled, and communities of color who are connected by interlocking forms of oppression by dominant systems including but not limited to white supremacy and capitalism. We believe in doing this inside and outside of educational tech spaces in order to live in the world we imagine being possible.
2. Incorporate critical theory and history into all classes. Computation can’t be separated from its historical, political, and social impact.
3. Have guaranteed need-based tuition, or no tuition at all. Wealth should be actively redistributed via scholarships and just payment and should be invested in under-represented, oppressed and minoritized communities.
4. Practice radical financial transparency. The budget, income from tuition, income from donors, and salaries of employees should be public.
5. Protect its workers against economic precarity. Contracts must be issued and signed before teachers and teacher assistants begin work. These contracts must contain guaranteed minimum pay and a fee paid to the teacher for classes that don’t reach enrollment capacity to run. Contracts must clearly lay out the roles and responsibilities for each staff person. No unpaid positions or internships, even for school credit.
6. Have a cooperative leadership structure. This includes the co-creation of teaching resources, classroom environments, shared agency and responsibility of teachers, administrators, organizers, and students to cultivate shared learning environments; allowing for there to be clear and shifting roles without the harmful effects of hierarchy.
7. Treat students as collaborators and formally acknowledge the power of students to determine their experience & education. There should be clear avenues for developing/running/participating in new programming before, during or after becoming a student.
8. Extend into wider communities and welcome new communities into the school. Encourage students to be active members of their community, including outreach and volunteering within grassroots organizations. A beautiful school is not an incubator.
9. Actively support our communities by being a genuine platform for grassroots organizing around collective actions. It’s not enough to talk about movements or otherwise engage in “activism,” we must participate in movements to show true solidarity. For example, we should use our platform to (re)distribute resources and wealth or put public pressure on bad actors. We should use our space as a resource for protestors: distribute PPE, harm reduction supplies, food, water; let people use the bathroom.
10. Acknowledge that its members are capable of making mistakes. Commit to transformative justice approaches to changing the school based on the needs and desires of those it serves and supports.

Teaching, learning and unlearning can be a way to make sense of the unsettling world, to build a web of care and accountability and create micro-institutions for larger, social change.

Please join us for a series of online, free workshops.

Teacher: Taeyoon Choi
Teaching Assistant: Ashley Jane Lewis

To register, please click on the student names.

August 21, 2020 EST

2 PM — Introduction to Modular Synthesis using VCV Rack: Jonathan Foote
3 PM — You’re a Puppet Who Sings: Christina Jenkins
7 PM — Daal: The Staple of South Asia: Ahad Mahmood
10 PM — Rhyme Wright: Hip-Hop Lyricism and Creative Constraints: Brendan Schlagel

August 22, 2020 EST

12 PM — Bound Together: Elaine Lopez
1 PM — Following the Fun: Exploring Play through Improv: Elana Tee
2 PM — (un)Love: A Workshop Miaoye
3 PM — Post-haste: Sophie Rogers
4 PM — “Type Faces”: Ingo Raschka
5 PM — Tending Digital Memory: Diane Lee
6 PM — The Fabric of Self Care: Exploring the Mind Body Connection: Teresa
7 PM — Welcome to the Neighborhood!: Mapping Zoomspace: Jayme Yen
8 PM — Haiku and the Act of Listening: Ryan Patterson
9 PM — Adventure: Daniel Jackson
10 PM — Hidden Flowers: Andrew Kerr
11 PM — Recording Space: Masha Kouznetsova

August 23, 2020 EST

10 AM — Drawing with Grids and Patterns: Lynne Yun
11 AM — Listening to Care: Flor Salatino
12 PM — Distance Yearning: A Walking Tour And Zine Making Workshop: Kat Shannon
1 PM — The Design of Everyday Inequities: Maggie Delano
2 PM — Intentional Gaze: Making Collaborative Portraits: Mengwen Cao
3 PM — Recess: Juan Villanueva
4 PM — The snake and the mouse: Hannah Knights
5 PM — Sound, Noise, and Society: The History of Black Sound: Alexis Caudle
6 PM — Milpa & Mutual Aid: Lluvia Nisaye
7 PM — Cellar Door: Tanya Rubbak
8 PM — Languages, Codes, and Secret Message: Alex Pines
9 PM — Photographic Knitting Club: Rosalie Yu
11 PM — Drawing on Interfaces / Zooming into Zoom: by Tara Kelton

The classes will take place in SFPC’s zoom account. A link will be provided upon registration.

For questions, please write teachingart@sfpc.io

SFPC Teaching as Art Summer 2020 Showcase was originally published in Sfpc on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What’s your name? Where are you from? What do you do?

Hi! I’m Celine. I’m a writer and curator from New York. My work is focused on artists and creative practitioners who critically engage with new technologies, emphasizing social, political, and ecological responsibility. I recently completed a year-long curatorial fellowship at the Queens Museum. I have worked at the School for Poetic Computation since February 2018.

How did you discover SFPC?

I first visited SFPC when a friend from college, Max Fowler, invited me to the Fall 2017 Student Showcase. I was impressed by the ingenuity and poetry I saw in many of the projects. However, what impressed me most of all was the sincere and supportive energy of the community.

What are some exciting and challenging aspects of teaching at SFPC?

Getting to know creative practitioners in many different disciplines is one of the greatest joys of teaching at SFPC. It’s exciting to witness moments of mutual understanding between students whose practices initially seem wildly disparate. On the other hand, sometimes it can be difficult to bridge gaps when students don’t have a common language or set of references.

Any fun stories of your time at SFPC?

I always have the most fun at family dinners at SFPC. It’s the most special communal ritual. Everyone is eager to prepare and share their favorite meals from home which makes for a really lovely cultural exchange since students come to SFPC from all over the world. I feel that I get to know students best when we are cooking and eating together.

What have you observed about the student’s creative growth?

During the ten-week session, there are always a few students who dread writing an artist statement because they don’t think it’s a useful exercise for them, they don’t identify as artists, or they’ve never done it before and they’re nervous. These students are often the ones who grow the most from being challenged to write thoughtfully about their practice.

What projects are you working on?

Right now I am reimagining several curatorial projects that were planned before the COVID-19 pandemic erupted. While I work with digital media, my practice primarily involves arranging objects in physical space with a live audience in mind. So, our new social reality is posing a challenge for me. I’m hopeful that these awful circumstances will prompt cultural institutions to engage with the internet as a unique context for art and make a larger effort to make art more accessible.

What do you want to be doing 5 years from now?

I definitely want to be working with artists!

Any advice for people applying for the artist statement writing workshop?

Tell us why you are excited to take this course and send a link to your website, portfolio, or social media account so we can get to know you! A personal application is always more compelling than an anonymous one.

If you have any questions, please reach out to us and we will do our best to help: artiststatement@sfpc.io

Artist Statement: A User Guide

Date: Starting in June 1st, 2020 on Mondays. 5 sessions of weekly 3 hours classes, starts at 1 PM EST.

Teacher: Celine Wong Katzman

Application is now open until May 29, 2020

This workshop offers a combination of practical writing and critical thinking skills. Enrollment is open to anyone including artists, designers, creative technologists, engineers, architects, and others whose practices are difficult to define.

SFPC Teacher Interview — Celine Katzman was originally published in Sfpc on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Keina Konno — Video Engineer, YCAM

This post is about the the School for Poetic Computation’s SFPC Summer 2019 in Yamaguchi at YCAM. You can also read Taeyoon’s introduction, and recaps from Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7 and Day 8.

My name is Keina Konno. I work for Yamaguchi Center of Arts and Media(YCAM) as R&D staff and Video Engineer. For “SFPC Summer 2019 in Yamaguchi”, I have worked as the project manager. It was my first experience working as an organizer.

In March 2019, I visited School for Poetic Computation (SFPC) in New York for research. I met Taeyeon before in YCAM and he explained to us about SFPC in detail. I felt I already understand “What is SFPC”. Soon I realized “I don’t really understand SFPC yet” and “YCAM needs to do an SFPC program by any means”.

YCAM was established as a new type of art center. We work with the mission of “creating together, learning together” with local citizens and experts from various fields, exploring from diverse perspectives of approaching media technology; the potential of information as a cultural foundation; and further, the meaning of information for us humans.

SFPC is a school dedicated to exploring artistic and poetic possibilities through computation. The place-name is different, but we have so many commonnesses to the way of thinking about art and community. Commonness is one of the big reasons I felt we need to invite SFPC. I was especially attracted to 2 features of SFPC.

The first is the “community SFPC made.” The SFPC community is noticeably active and I had known the people related SFPC have strong connections even after graduating. YCAM also keeps trying to create a community of “creating together, learning together” too. So that’s why we know how difficult it is to create such an active community, especially when the target participants are adults. Through the many meetings with SFPC team and seeing the behavior of students in this program, we learned “SFPC has its own cycle of the students”. Students come to SFPC from all around the world, and study, and bring back their experience and ideas, and share those in their place. And also, some of the students become a teaching assistant and teacher of SFPC after graduation. The community of SFPC keeps growing by expanding the idea and continue to get a new point of view from new persons.

The second is the atmosphere of SFPC. It is really difficult to explain by words but I felt I never felt this kind of atmosphere in YCAM before. When I saw the SFPC class in NY, teachers, teacher assistants, and students were really “commingled”. So I couldn’t see who was a teacher and a student. After start SFPC Summer 2019 in Yamaguchi, I realized that the atmosphere made by the way of thinking about “responsibility” in SFPC. Before the start of the program, SFPC explains “Code of Conduct” to students. It is not for setting the limit of someone’s activity. It focuses on how everyone can feel comfortable, and focus to study and share own ideas. Because of every people related SFPC agreed on the ““Code of Conduct” in their heart before the program, the behavior of people makes such a great atmosphere in naturally.

For SFPC Summer 2019 in Yamaguchi, SFPC organizers and teachers set the theme of “Tech as a Gift”. At first, I thought “The sentence is really clear and easy to understand.” But through the preparation and holding the program, the theme became more valuable and meaningful. “Gift” means not only sending physical stuff to each other but also staring at and thinking about a subject. Staring at the friends, family, human being, and the world, and think through making something. That is the tips for making the world more valuable. I think that is the root of SFPC I felt attracted to, and the one of the style of the creation that YCAM is trying to reach.

Sometimes, I feel the personal feelings and the personal word are lacked in the creation of the huge new media art. “Tech as a Gift” shows SFPC has tried to “get close individuals’ feelings and words”, and the students reacted that idea in this program. Those moments were really beautiful for me. I still trust “Technology makes us happy”. And also I know it is difficult to keep trusting that now. We need to keep thinking and trying. I would say one of the answers to that is maybe capturing “Tech as a gift”. That’s going to be my long term theme.

Instagram / Twitter / Profile

Photo: Naoki Takehisa

Courtesy of Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM]

SFPC in Yamaguchi — Keina Konno was originally published in Sfpc on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Day 1: Credit the artists that inspire you

Today we had our first code-poetry class with Fernando Ramallo. Fernando is a creative coder whose work focuses on making playful interactions like games and tools for making games. Fernando opened us up to a whole new universe by showing us that we can make our own tools! It’s as easy as adding a ‘save’ functionality to something we’ve created. One of the advantages of making your own tools is you can build something for your particular needs. Fernando reminded us to use narrative structures, like tracks or liner notes in a compact disc, to help us put context around our tools.

The most interesting examples we saw in class were collaborations between two or three artists like Oikospiel or Content Creator Simulator because you could see the collaboration between the artists. For example in Oikospiel, you could see the separate influences from the artist and the storyteller come together to form an experience that complimented each others work to form something larger then could be created independently.

We used P5.js to create our own painting tools creating arrays of circles, making lines, adding color pickers and sliders. It was a wonderful experience to play with the tools our fellow friends had made as you could really see their personality shine through.

Day 2: Biometric data used in civil society

How do we perceive our bodies so that they are not understood as data? What are the underlying assumptions about surveillance in modern culture?

In Simone Brown’s book, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, she references the writings of Sylvia Wynter who noted that surveillance systems that classify and cast out citizens are becoming increasingly automated. She proposes biometric consciousness, and the need to consent and to also be able to opt-out of these systems for our own freedom.

We were joined in class by Rashida Richardson, who is the Director of Policy Research at AI Now. Rashida talked about the need to have regulatory frameworks to mitigate loopholes in existing technological applications regarding the use of biometric data. She also gave us action items and recommendations to actively and collectively address them like:

• Pay attention to local policies being debated
• Be actively part of the open calls to discuss applications of these technologies in your communities
• demand full transparency to the organizations using biometric data from civil society, to be aware of who and how is using this information.
• Companies are experimenting, so we should be always updated on the topic by attending summits, conferences and meetups to learn how they are being applied, and most importantly, how to take care of ourselves and others.

After class, our fellow student Mathilde, gave a workshop on recording sounds. We learned about the different types of waves that make sound, understanding amplitude and frequency, and we experimented with microphones, instruments and recording on different channels. Finally, we recorded a song together and had an amazing time.

Day 3: You gotta keep the motor running

DC, AC, brushless DC, servo, stepper, linear, there are so many motors! Today we learned the basics about them, and talked about best practices to work with them: mount it somewhere safe, and never ever use glue or tape.

We also understood the mechanics of different cams like drop cams, snail cams, box cams, and linkages. There was movement everywhere.

Day 4: Coding class

Today we learned about Nancy Burson’s interesting and controversial work. She designed an artificial intelligence used to age images of faces. Later, this was used to created the aging images of missing children that were put on the boxes of milk. This technique was based on taking different points on a face and moving them based on aging patterns.

Said Nancy, “I want to age people by computer to answer some frequently asked questions of others, but also my own.” This way of composite photography is today being used to create artificial intelligence capable of tracing patterns among humans. We had a deep ethical discussion about the weather it was a good practice, and how it has been approached through time by artists, governments, enterprises, and tech companies. Later we learned how to make different composite images using python tools to scrape images off the web, create arrays, and fed those images to our algorithms to create composite photography pieces.

Later we used face trackers to create images by aligning the position of the eyes on pictures, and understood how to anchor those images using the face tracker’s data.

Day 5: Showcase preparation

Showcase preparation classes are never easy. We had a class with Lauren about how to manage our time while building projects. She introduced us to tools and methodologies like how to manage our calendar by making Gantt charts, the Pomodoro technique to give ourselves focused time blocks of work, the importance of asking for help, and how to give help in more structured ways so it won’t eat into our own time. We then used the Pomodoro technique to give ourselves 25 minutes of uninterrupted writing time to develop our ideas for our showcase.

In the afternoon, Robby Kraft gave a workshop about origami. It was inspiring to match mathematical concepts with origami forms, and see the intimate dialogue between them. We were inspired by Robby’s examples. They were full of beauty and complex structures.

We learned to read guiding lines to fold paper on origami instructions, and we were introduced to different types of papers to get different results. We also experimented with straight lines and curved lines, and had a lot of fun making our own paper creations.

On Sunday, our professors CW&T invited us to their house & studio. We explored their place and were inspired by the machines and materials all around the house. We had tons of fun with their kids, and we were also moved by their stories, their journey to get where they are now and how consciously they have built their lives around care and respect for each others’ work, time and processes.

That afternoon we also were invited by our friend Mark Hernandez to The labor party party to discuss co-working spaces, why they don’t add real value, and how to design better coworking spaces centered on community and the people who inhabit the community. Sharing ideas is one of the nicest rituals we’ve experienced this semester.

See you next week!

blog post by Gia Castello & Esther Bouquet. video by Olivia Ross.

Day 1: On pixel manipulation

Last weekend, a few of us visited Storm King. The giant sculptures were inspiring and the site was so peaceful which was a welcomed break to our daily, noisy, New York City routine.

As Zach was away Monday, Robby Kraft exceptionally taught Recreating the past in Zach’s absence! We started by sharing our programs exploring typography manipulation inspired by Muriel Cooper. We started to see different approaches popping: some attempted to get as close as possible of Cooper’s work while others tried to shape their own interpretations.
Robby then introduced us to Ken Knowlton and Lillian Schwartz who both manipulated the pixels of an image and video feed. We learned that when Ken Knowlton started collaborating with engineers at Bell Labs to create experimental films, he ended up collaborating with Lillian Schwartz. Their collaboration resulted in mixing analog and digital techniques.

Robby used their works to demonstrate how to load an image and to grab pixels or data from the screen in order to manipulate them. In the picture below, he is explaining us how and why we need to skip every three values to get the red, green and blue colors of a video.

For homework, we are to create our own pixel manipulation program inspired by the work of one of those two artists.

Day 2: On our experiences of -veillance

For this week’s class with American Artist, we read the introduction of Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. The text was information rich but we noticed the readings starting to fit together, building on top of each other every week. We read extracts of the text pulling out concepts like airport security as a theatrical performance of unnecessary security measures and the history of the FBI surveillance on black artists, intellectuals and activists to discredit their actions.

After breaking into groups where some of us talked about the shift from physical surveillance to online surveillance, we gathered again to discuss the different types of “veillance” based on Mann’s Surveillance Plan and our experience with each; surveillance, counterveillance, sousveillance and racialized surveillance. This time, American kept track of all our thoughts on the board so we can have more insight at the end of our discussion.

Day 3: From logic gates to sequential logic

In Hardware and electronics class, we went back to logic gates. If lots of us hit a wall last week before class with our (non)understanding of logic gates, this week homework results were completely different! Thanks to Taylor’s patience, we all understood how to use them during class and Allison achieved the distinction of building the first calculator ever of all SFPC cohorts!

During the time we reviewed homework, Mathilde, Yuzhu and Francisco demonstrated a boxing glove that lights every time it punches someone, Natalie, Katherine and Esther created a LED compatibility test and Lia, Maxwell and Iain built a LED race with pedals.

The class focused on sequential logic and especially what bi-stable states like latches and flip flops are. The main difference between the two is that time matters for flip flop (synchronous) and not for latch (asynchronous). Taylor introduced capacitors and inductors and invited her friend Josh Levine to give a explanations of the two components and how they work if we use the water analogy for the rest of the class. Josh then gave a short lecture on crystals during the lunch break. This class was more about theory than practice so, we didn’t really put our hands to work but next week’s prompt is “make some noise!” which has already inspired a lot of us!

Day 4: Wrapping folder poetry workshop by unwrapping our folder poems

Thursday was the last day of class with Melanie. She introduced her work and her projects before starting the folder poetry workshop. It was inspiring to see how she balances the collectives she is part of, the art she creates and the pedagogy practice she has developed around her interests. It opens her work to a multitude of opportunities with the possibility to never need to do the same things.
During the second part of the class, we first shared our folder poem with the person sitting next to us then we created our very own distributed ‘cloud’ to share our poems with the entire class by using a raspberry pi, dat:// and ssh.

It was mesmerizing to see the different ways people see and understand poetry. Some of us built a choose-your-own-adventure type of poem by twisting the rules and limiting movements using various scripts, some saw the folders tree as a visual poem by itself. What was common between all the poems was the very personal history or messages they were revealing. People put a part of their heart, past experiences and personality into this assignment and we all felt a strong, shared vulnerability within the group.

Later in the day, Iain (a student) taught a workshop about pixel mapping using TouchDesigner. It was a delight to see him in his element with this software that seems to be super complicated at first sight. He guided us through different options and parameters so we learn how to map a projection on a specific and dedicated 2D area. We also celebrated Halloween with great costumes and went to see the Halloween Parade near SFPC!

Day 5: Field trip!

On Friday, Celine organized a field trip to Red Hook! We started with lunch at Defonte’s and their really big (and emblematic) sandwiches and then we all walked to Pioneer Works together.

Tommy Martinez, the Director of Technology at Pioneer Works gave us a walk through of the current exhibition, “You’re at Home” by Jacolby Satterwhite We also had the opportunity to hear from both Tommy and Grayson Earle, a current resident in artist, about the work of the residents and how Pioneer Works’ mission and programs support an artist’s practice in different ways. It was great to have an inside view of both a residency program and an exhibition space. They were very accomidating and encouraging and many of us felt it might be possible to see our work there some day. We’re all looking forward to being able to visit other residencies programs and see how things are different or similar!

And to end this busy week in a perfect way, we celebrated Gia’s birthday on Saturday! Happy Birthday Gia. :)

SFPC Fall 2019 — Week 5 was originally published in Sfpc on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

blog post by Gia Castello & Esther Bouquet. video by Olivia Ross.

Day 1:

The week started after another busy weekend full of events. We went to Radical Networks to support Esther, one of the current students who was showing an installation at the event. We also went to Gowanus Open Studios and Westbeth Open Studios, both of which allow people to see artists work spaces and ask questions.

In Zach’s class, we reviewed Muriel Cooper’s artwork. We were impressed by her talks and quotes and as classwork, we collaboratively compiled her work in a document. We shared some of her images here for you to also enjoy.

We then had a lesson on vectors and learned about John Maeda’s work, who wrote the book Design by Numbers. His works provide a good example to illustrate how vectors are handy to build growable arrays to define shapes. In openFrameworks we utilized the properties of Ofpoint, Ofpolyline and Ofpath.

Day 2: Losing control by abstraction

The critical theory classes ‘Dark Matters’ with American and Tsige go deeper, and deeper. The more context we acquire, the more tools we have to re-think how we build technology. American started talking about the publication we are going to make with our ideas and texts and presented previous students works as references.

In this particular class, we reviewed the story of computation from 1940’s understanding of the post-WWII tech scene, when students began to practice entrepreneurial skills, and founded today’s startup culture. We learned that Xerox built the first personal computer Amiga which cost around $10,000 which was a very high price point thus inaccessible to most consumers. The Amiga however inspired Steve Jobs to build Apple Lisa, the first affordable personal computer.

We discussed the changes throughout the years on how we all interact with computers: from manually switching cables to connect circuits (like an old telephone operator), to using keyboards and mouses, and now, touchscreens. Through these changes, the more abstract tech becomes, the less we understand about it. After class, we had a long debate where we shared our thoughts on how we can make tech more comprehensible for users.

In the evening, a few of us went to see “Waterlicht”, an installation by Daan Roosegaarde at Columbia University. It was a delicious feast of sine waves.

Day 3: A family composed by CN4093 bugs

During the hardware class review this week, we realized that most of us didn’t really understand what transistors are and how to use logic gates. Taylor revisited lessons from the class she gave us last week, talking more about pull up and pull down resistors. These resistors are useful because electricity is floating in the circuit otherwise and can lead to unexpected behavior.

She also tried to simplify the use of logic gates and how to build them by showing us the NAND Schmitt Trigger CN4093. This little bug-looking chip is very helpful because it has built-in NAND gates, also known as universal gates, which can be used to build a NOT gate or an OR gate much easier then doing it from scratch.

Wednesday night we have family dinner, and Lauren cooked for us a delicious pozole.

Day 4: Peer to peer folder poetry

In Code Poetry class, we got intimate with computers with Melanie Hoff. We started our journey by learning Bash as tool for creating a poetry, to feel more comfortable sharing ideas on our computers. We discussed the importance of names and naming conventions, that by naming something, we acknowledge that they exist.

Our class exercise was to build a series of ‘rooms’ (out of folders and text files) using Bash and think about the architecture, the spaces it has, how it is laid out. We talked about centralized, decentralized and distributed networks, and debated about the importance of shared governance of networks.

In the afternoon, our classmate Yuzhu Chai gave a workshop about how to make Zines. We learned a little about the history of self publications, and designed our own. We learned 5 techniques to fold paper, and we also sewed our tiny creations.

Day 5: Showcase your core values

Lauren Gardner, one of the session organizers, gave a quick introduction to the student showcase we will be participating in at the end of the semester on December, 1st & 2nd. She encouraged us to think about our life goals and our values and if we have too many ideas on what to make, measure them against our goals and values to help decide which one to persue. She also recommended thinking about our pieces so far, their documentation, and the feelings we want to provoke.

After that she also told us to imagine these pieces as a work in progress for our next steps as an artist: where do we want to go, and how these pieces are going to help us to get closer to that path.

In the afternoon, Gia Castello gave a workshop about VR storytelling. We learned how to take 360 pictures and prototyped our own 360 stories. We also discussed about how to think stories when there are no frames, learned about different types of triggers to drive users’ attention and created a VR piece with GuriVR openSource tool that we could share and see on our smartphones.

See you in Week 5 next week!

SFPC Fall 2019 — Week 4 was originally published in Sfpc on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.