Always Already Graduating: Poetic Promenade Graduation Remarks

July 10, 2026

Editor’s Note: The following transcript documents remarks delivered by co-directors Todd Anderson, Neta Bomani, alongside valedictorian Amad Ansari at School for Poetic Computation’s Poetic Promenade graduation ceremony, held on June 21, 2026, at Roulette in Brooklyn, New York.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity, readability, and formatting while preserving the spirit, tone, and substance of the original remarks. Minor adjustments include correcting transcription errors, removing verbal repetitions and filler language, and standardizing punctuation.

Listen back to and watch remarks on Vimeo.

Solidarity and Wonder (Todd Anderson)

I want to tell you a little bit about what poetic computation means to me.

I learned to love poetry by writing in my journal every night and seeing if the sounds and meanings could make me feel something.

I learned to love computation by working in ‘the hospital’, that's what we called the area of my high school's IT department where the broken computers lived. I lived for the moment where, with just the right swapping of parts, you could bring a dead machine back to life.

I learned to love poetic computation when, in my search for someplace that could house my nascent multimedia writing practice I googled 'poetry computer' in 2014, and School for Poetic Computation showed up. In the following twelve years I became a student, an assistant teacher, a session organizer, a steering committee member, a lead teacher and now a full-time co-director over the past 12 years. This school and this community has been such an important place for me, in my development as an artist, an intellectual, and a human being.  And the world needs poetic computation now more than ever.

The year is 2026 and technology’s brand is rancid. It is harder than ever to say that you like technology in mixed company. How could you, when what we've chosen to do with technology is accumulate wealth, delete our water supply, spy on each other, steal from each other and kill each other at a distance. Why would a young person, any person, want to be part of that?

And yet what happens if we all walk away? The same vicious cycle continues and the soul of technology continues to corrode until all that's left are omnipresent systems of oppression.

Here at SFPC, we're not ready to give up the fight. We know that what the world needs is people with conscience and will who can shape the future of technology. People anchored by a strong set of uncompromising values that can steer technology towards solidarity and wonder. Because we don’t just need a world that is fair and free from exploitation. We deserve a world where our technology brings us joy, and lets us feel what poetry lets us feel.

Why shouldn't we have a world where, in the words of our teacher Melanie Hoff, all of our technology is made by people who love us? I firmly believe that the graduates here today, and the ones yet to come, are building that world.

I am so proud of these graduates assembled here today. I see among you my students, my teachers and my peers. Here at SFPC we believe in lifelong learning, that there is always something more to learn, and then to teach, and then to learn again. In putting this event together we wondered how to celebrate the learning even when the learning is never finished. In the words of my fellow co-director Neta Bomani, we are “always already graduating” (a reference to Melanie Hoff’s always already programming). To our first group of graduates, I look forward to seeing you back here after you've taken a few more classes, and to our newer students I look forward to handing a circuit board diploma to you in the coming years.

Congratulations graduates, and thank you.

We Believe There is Enough Collective Abundance (Neta Bomani)

I’ve been interested in technology for as long as I can remember—and much of that is because of my father.

He dropped out of college while studying computer science when my mother became pregnant.

But leaving school never ended his relationship to technology.

He always saved for the latest gadgets: Super Nintendos, Game Boys, CRTS, cameras—and somehow always kept the family computer room alive.

What I inherited from him wasn’t just curiosity. It was resourcefulness.

My father protected us from knowing we were poor. He made possibility feel abundant, even when resources were scarce. Looking back, I understand now that access—to tools, to learning, to imagination—does not appear on its own.

Someone decides what gets built.

Someone decides who gets invited in.

Someone decides what is shared and what is withheld.

My father decided that technology would not feel out of reach for us.

My father taught me that someone is always making access possible.

Years later, after graduating with a journalism degree and struggling to find work, I found myself searching for another way into technology—one that wasn’t gated by credentials, prestige, or a corporate pipeline into big tech.

My friend Tara Vancil told me about this strange DIY school in New York City called School for Poetic Computation. Alongside the ethos of Beaker Browser and communities imagining peer-to-peer futures for the web, she encouraged me to apply.

What drew me in wasn’t just that it taught code.

It was that SFPC treated technology as something people could study together—across disciplines, across backgrounds, across levels of experience.

It felt less like being granted entry and more like being invited to build the door together.

SFPC is the reason I moved to New York in 2018.

To my knowledge, I was the only work-study scholarship student in my cohort. The scholarship covered half my tuition. I crowdfunded the other half through GoFundMe with support from my friend Mariame Kaba.

I share that not because my story is exceptional—but because it shouldn’t have to be.

Cost should never be a barrier to education.

This is something SFPC’s founders—Amit Pitaru, Jen Lowe, Taeyoon Choi, and Zach Lieberman—understood when they started the school in 2013 amid the Occupy movement and a growing student debt crisis. They imagined an educational space that treated access as infrastructure instead of charity.

Today, we want to push that vision further.

Our long-term goal is to become a truly pay-what-you-can school.

But there’s a tension there—and we name it openly.

The education our teachers and staff provide is rigorous, relational, and transformative. Their labor deserves more than fair compensation, they deserve competitive compensation. We reject the scarcity logic that tells artists, educators, and nonprofit workers to accept less in the name of public service.

Instead, we believe there is enough wealth, enough generosity, and enough collective abundance to hold both truths at once: to honor the real cost of education and redistribute resources so more people can participate in it.

Since stepping into leadership at SFPC, I'm proud to say we've built on that original commitment to access. What began as a work-study model has evolved into a scholarship model. Today 45 percent of SFPC students receive partial or full scholarships.

Many students pay above tuition to subsidize their peers.

No one at SFPC stands alone in receiving support—and no one should feel shame for needing help to pursue their education.

Today, I’m proud to be able to stand in front of you all and say that: To this date, SFPC has redistributed $1,129,440 in scholarships to 1,392 unique students.

But this is more than a number.

It is every student who almost didn’t apply.

Every teacher who shared what they know.

Every person who needed someone to say:

You belong here.

Today, I say in front of you all that you belong here!

School, Liberation, Community: What Matters to Us (Amad Ansari)

Hi all, my name is Amad, and like many of you in this room, I’ve been an avid user of the computer almost my whole life. My dad made the mistake of giving me his old PC at a very early age. From playing flash games, reading wikipedia pages and music blogs, to downloading torrents of art house films, editing student videos, and building my own websites, that PC and an internet connection became a portal to so many worlds throughout my childhood, and into my teenage years. On one hand a lot of time was wasted on that computer, obviously. On the other hand, it opened me up to histories, subcultures, and creative tools to engage with on my own terms, feeding a curiosity and expressive itch that wasn’t always satisfied in school.

When it came time to start my undergraduate education, I was excited to delve more into the spheres of knowledge I cultivated through my computer use, in a formal educational setting. I pursued a degree in computer science and art in New York City, ready to soak in everything like a sponge, this time IRL. I learned so much and gained a solid foundation at college, but the rigidity of orthodox Computer Science and Art History curriculums, and the pressure and competition among peers to secure a job in industry, had me feeling fatigued and out of place, giving me little space and time to freely experiment with my learning and produce what I wanted. By the time I graduated in a global pandemic in May 2020, I felt squeezed out, and continuing my studies at a formal graduate program felt financially and intellectually unattainable.

A couple years after graduating, I was lucky to have secured and settled into full time employment and stabilized in my early adult life, and slowly began to relocate the early freeform intellectual curiosity that never fully left since being a child on my dad’s old PC. The School For Poetic Computation had been on my radar since before the pandemic, and it felt like a perfect time to revisit their website and class offerings. I applied to Algorithmic Botany, taught by Sean Catangui, Matt Jacobson, and Alex Miller. The class’s structure, rhetoric, and content was a breath of fresh air - Being in what was simultaneously a computing class and an art class with students from different backgrounds and at different technical levels, all learning to build beautiful things that reflected the natural world we live in.

Logistically, it was something I could easily balance with a day job and other commitments, a juggle that’s important yet sparse for many aspiring artists and creatives, esp. in New York City. The compulsory rigor of my previous education wasn’t casting a shadow over me, and even if I missed a class or didn’t finish an assignment on time, the lessons stuck with me, and I could and would often revisit the material through google drive folders and archived zoom calls.

For me, the most valuable thing about SFPC classes is that they generously serve as a place where you are welcomed to bring what matters to you, as well as take away from them what matters to you. In Experiments of Networked Performance, taught by Todd Anderson and Tiri Kananuruk, I met students who had backgrounds in writing, zine-making, building complex shaders, and even puppetry. The class coalesced into a final presentation of diverse live performances at SFPC’s Electronic Cafe for Poetic Computation at Recess, making use of everything from open source tools like p5js and websockets, to hardware controllers created by Morakana.

In Imperfect Pictures taught by Molly Soda, each class’s homework assignment was an open ended but creatively stimulating prompt that students interpreted in a variety of ways, such as taking a screenshot, digitally altering a found image, or creating a social media post that “hacked” the algorithm to intentionally flop. In these assignments, students brought everything from accumulations  of tile wallpapers sorted by color, creating live green screen dance performances within the zoom call window, or building the foundation for much larger web based projects like Traffic Cam Photobooth by Morry Kolman.

Beyond the “School” part of The School for Poetic Computation, the community SFPC has honed has been equally important and motivating to me as a creative, and I can’t thank SFPC enough as a space to grow a practice beyond the classroom, through consistent programming and events, to create what is meaningful to me.

In October 2023, during the beginnings of the Gaza War which escalated into a genocide, I began using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to find and locate early websites created by Palestinians at the turn of the century. Having grown up in a large Palestinian community outside of Chicago, and being directly involved in or tangential to Palestine activism throughout college, my education at SFPC set the groundwork and encouraged the curiosity to trace the digital histories of grassroots Palestinian activism, community, and expression on the internet which were an important and ever present force in my life. In November 2023, I applied to table at SFPC’s Software For Artists Day at Pioneer Works to display my findings on a scrappy setup consisting of about 12 Palestinian websites, from personal geocities pages to online magazines to news websites, downloaded onto a laptop connected to a CRT monitor - calling the installation “Palestine Online”.

The resources and opportunities SFPC gave me to show such a project set the precedent for the digital archival work I continue today. Beyond this initial installation, I’ve been able to continually develop this practice which previously felt unattainable, whether it be through Todd Anderson’s invitations to give a talk on Palestine Online at his event series Wordhack, or connecting with friends of SFPC, receiving financial support from the Processing Foundation to further build the archive, and collaborating with Secret Riso Club to translate the project into a print publication.

Throughout this development, SFPC’s enthusiasm and platforming for this important work has been uniquely affirming within a politically tenuous time in the larger art world, as SFPC was to my knowledge, the first organization in its sphere to endorse PACBI, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, materially upholding and integrating values of justice and liberation within its educational and community goals.

All the while, equally as important as the work on Palestine Online, I found a community within SFPC. As I focus more on my practice, I haven’t enrolled in an SFPC class in two years, but I still feel more part of SFPC every day. my education still continues from the invaluable relationships I’ve made thru the classes and community, whether it in the form of reading groups organized by Isabella Haid on alternative artist video distribution networks, Dave and Busters Dance Dance Revolution sessions with Jackie Liu, tarot readings from Miaoye Que, learning about the early Chinese internet from web archival projects by Kay Zeng, the structure of surveillance networks in New York City from Sim Hafferty, or even histories of Homestuck Fandom from conversations with Kevin Chappelle.

SFPC has brought so many worlds into my life, and even though not all directly inform my practice today, they consistently fuel the underlying and multi-nodal curiosity that is so important to me. I want to thank all of you graduates for contributing to a very special environment of lifelong learning, making it uniquely flexible, amorphous, enthusiastic, and safe. As I continue to engage with other arts and education institutions, I still haven’t been able to find an organization that does what SFPC does, and I’m so excited for what we continue learning from each other in the future.

Creating a Future Together — SFPC's Community Scholarship Fund (Todd Anderson & Neta Bomani)

Scholarships are how we build a future where study, experimentation, and community are not reserved for those with the most resources.

And that future will not arrive on its own. Someone has to make it possible—WE can make it possible.

Poetic Promenade is a celebration AND an act of redistribution. Together, this community has already helped SFPC redistribute more than $1 million in scholarships.

The next chapter is even more ambitious: SFPC’s goal is to redistribute another $1 million in scholarships by Poetic Promenade 2028.

Most of us can point to someone who opened a door for us.

Maybe a teacher, a mentor, a collaborator, a family member, or a friend.

Someone who shared knowledge.

Someone who offered encouragement.

Someone who made access possible when it wasn't guaranteed.

Today, we invite you to become that person for someone else.

Every gift to SFPC's Community Scholarship Fund helps another student become a part of this community.

So if SFPC has mattered to you–or if you believe technology education should belong to artists, organizers, and curious people from every background–

Then we hope you'll join us by making a gift, and helping the next student find their way here.

To make a donation, text POETICPROM to 44-321.

Thank you for being in shared study with us. Cheers to the first of many Poetic Promenades to come!