September 11, 2025 Spring 2025
Section 1’s collaborative-mirrored-cybernetic-sculpture class portrait! A screenshot of a Zoom grid of 18 rectangles, each with different mirrors held up to the camera and reflecting back the Zoom grid!This spring, I had the privilege of working with Melanie Hoff to facilitate Code Societies: Cybernetic Sculpture. Code Societies has been offered at SFPC before, but this spring's iteration was a departure from its previous form. From 2018 to 2020, it was a three-week in-person intensive: participants would spend five days a week together, learning from each other and a plethora of guest lecturers. This spring, we met on Zoom for three hours each week for ten weeks, with a particular focus on moving beyond the screen via cybernetic sculptures. Yet every version of Code Societies has been a unique response to the same prompt: how do code and society inform each other? Throughout our ten weeks together, we revealed the social, digital, and legal codes of different societies we are a part of and worked towards coding and creating the societies we want to live in.
To start off, participants were invited to imagine a speculative liberatory learning society that could “hold [them] and those [they] want to learn with.” Freed from the constraints of the laws of physics and encouraged to break out of the molds of existing learning environments, the societies that participants envisioned were vast and beautiful: a society of never-ending bedrooms and dream circles; a society with mushroom architecture designed for people who are hard of hearing or deaf; a society with living buildings that grow and evolve with their inhabitants and lazy rivers that transported people between spaces; a society that was simply a massive community garden; a society where all of the inhabitants are clouds, mingling and merging their knowledge; a society built “in the way a child orders a sundae”; a society located in an alternative universe where Haiti was not colonized; a society where you can learn from and alongside your ancestors.
As participants were sharing their speculative societies, their utopic visions were cast in a new light when a participant shared that the assignment itself was challenging, as “it [felt] cruel to imagine a world outside of this one.” Instead, this participant reminded us that liberatory learning spaces can be right in front of us: “the quiet focus between papers and bills, the moment of slowness amidst hurry.” This stark contrast, paradoxically enough, made all of the other speculative societies feel more possible. Indeed, as they wrote, “everywhere is a good place to nap and dream.” We can—and we must—start here, wherever it is we find ourselves.
And in this iteration of Code Societies, we found ourselves on Zoom. Perhaps the most salient metaphor for how this space operated and how we learned together is one that a participant, Yiran Guo, articulated in her version of a speculative liberatory learning society: "Can I study like a bouncing ball?" Yiran writes: "Here, you are encouraged, almost forced to stay curious. To bump into something new, to learn without a strict purpose, to meet new people, to learn like a child, to bounce into the wrong place and then bounce forward." Each session, we bounced between different modes of engaging with each other and with the world.
For instance, we had a brief “code societies choir” where we experimented with the digital blending of our voices. We created a playlist, which welcomed us into the Zoom room and provided the soundtrack for our breaks. We created little “pockets” on our Discord channel: one for technical resources, another for collecting inspirational cybernetic artwork. We imagined new objects that could emerge from blending existing technologies. We shared how we organize our files and folders on our computers. We discussed current events and how they relate to social, legal, and digital codes. We stretched together and closed our eyes together. One week, we had everyone bring a mirror to class, and played around with holding up our mirrors to our computers.
Section 2’s collaborative-mirrored-cybernetic-sculpture class portrait! A screenshot of a Zoom grid of 16 rectangles, each with different mirrors held up to the camera and reflecting back the Zoom grid!We reintroduced ourselves to our computers by learning about the terminal and the different spells (or commands) that we can use to interact with it. We learned how to move between different folders, read text files, run scripts, and create text files and folders. Then, participants were invited to translate their visions of a liberatory learning society into a folder poem. Rather than try to explain all of the nuances and mechanisms of these poems, I’ll invite you to download and explore them here! If you’re unfamiliar with the terminal, check out this webzine, which will gently introduce you to all of the commands you need to engage with the folder poems. Below are a few screenshots of the types of things you may encounter in these folder poems…
A screenshot from participant Lars Wahlsten’s folder poem about a speculative liberatory learning society. Lars writes “I was thinking about what it would look like if we could unfold spacetime, to embody many different vessels at once, a collective consciousness tapped into and archived and added to across time, slipping in and out of different portals, skating across planes of being, talking to ghosts, reflections, grass, downloading, uploading ourselves, leaving secret messages for loved ones to find, the time-honored impulse to paint and sing, echoing forever in the waterways, preserved in digital caves, prioritizing care and embracing our plural selves, all of our relations and all of the small magicks and miracles and incomprehensible strangeness and grief and on and on!!”
A screenshot from participant Francesca Tse’s folder poem about a speculative liberatory learning society. Francesca writes “this learning society is a greenhouse, there are many elements of nature, spirituality and community. The greenhouse itself is our classroom, the gardener is our collective consciousness tending to us, we are the flowers or seeds, we are all one but also individual. we can call on ancestral knowledge by visiting an altar and learning which ancestor is relevant to us in the present and then you'd be given an animal. you enter their door and receive a download. you are the student and teacher. there are 3 main curriculums, body, mind and spirit.”
A screenshot from an anonymous participant’s folder poem about a speculative liberatory learning society. This participant writes “I have been gathering knowledge about the body and I think it's very important to listen to the natural cycles to learn.”
A screenshot from participant Austin Guest’s folder poem about a speculative liberatory learning society.We moved from crafting folder poems to generating P.O.E.M.s (Prophetic Oration of Electronic Memories). Participants were invited to create a P.O.E.M. by manipulating, treating, filtering, and/or rearranging a text(s) of their choosing with Python. We then iterated on these P.O.E.M.s multiple times: playing with different Python functions, bringing them beyond the screen and into the physical world through sculpture, and creating homes for them on the internet with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Photographs of participant Fabio Zucchetto’s sculptural P.O.E.M., which he brought into the physical world using fridge magnets!
A photograph of participant Aftan Sethia’s sculptural P.O.E.M. The text was generated using Python from a text file of poems by Rumi.As we neared the end of our 10 weeks together, participants were invited to spend time working on a project in response to the following prompts: code a society you live in & want to continue living in, or reveal how a society you live in is already coded. For our final session, we had an intimate showcase where participants shared something with everyone. This could be the project in response to the final prompts, but it could also be reflections / learnings / questions / conversations inspired by the course.
A screenshot of certain sections of the JavaScript code of participant Kevin Chappelle’s project “Compiler Buddha.” You can view the full project here: https://kvnchpl.com/projects/compiler-buddhaOne participant shared a bunch of photographs from his camera roll, giving us context for the various societies he is a part of. There was something so familiar about this act, and he later described it as simply "catching up with a friend you haven't seen in a while." The through line of the presentation was that this participant had curated it. This mode of sharing reminded me of the idea of “starting wherever you are” that emerged out of the speculative liberatory learning society prompt. We are all capable of creating / encoding / re-coding the societies that “breathe with us, that open us up instead of closing us down.” And maybe it just starts by offering some of the photographs from your camera roll with others. After all, these are the things that some part of you deemed compelling enough to capture. Perhaps these are the first pieces of the unique society you can bring into the world.
For instance, we had a brief “code societies choir” where we experimented with the digital blending of our voices. We created a playlist, which welcomed us into the Zoom room and provided the soundtrack for our breaks. We created little “pockets” on our Discord channel: one for technical resources, another for collecting inspirational cybernetic artwork. We imagined new objects that could emerge from blending existing technologies. We shared how we organize our files and folders on our computers. We discussed current events and how they relate to social, legal, and digital codes. We stretched together and closed our eyes together. One week, we had everyone bring a mirror to class, and played around with holding up our mirrors to our computers.
And in this iteration of Code Societies, we found ourselves on Zoom. Perhaps the most salient metaphor for how this space operated and how we learned together is one that a participant, Yiran Guo, articulated in her version of a speculative liberatory learning society: "Can I study like a bouncing ball?" Yiran writes: "Here, you are encouraged, almost forced to stay curious. To bump into something new, to learn without a strict purpose, to meet new people, to learn like a child, to bounce into the wrong place and then bounce forward." Each session, we bounced between different modes of engaging with each other and with the world.
As participants were sharing their speculative societies, their utopic visions were cast in a new light when a participant shared that the assignment itself was challenging, as “it [felt] cruel to imagine a world outside of this one.” Instead, this participant reminded us that liberatory learning spaces can be right in front of us: “the quiet focus between papers and bills, the moment of slowness amidst hurry.” This stark contrast, paradoxically enough, made all of the other speculative societies feel more possible. Indeed, as they wrote, “everywhere is a good place to nap and dream.” We can—and we must—start here, wherever it is we find ourselves.
To start off, participants were invited to imagine a speculative liberatory learning society that could “hold [them] and those [they] want to learn with.” Freed from the constraints of the laws of physics and encouraged to break out of the molds of existing learning environments, the societies that participants envisioned were vast and beautiful: a society of never-ending bedrooms and dream circles; a society with mushroom architecture designed for people who are hard of hearing or deaf; a society with living buildings that grow and evolve with their inhabitants and lazy rivers that transported people between spaces; a society that was simply a massive community garden; a society where all of the inhabitants are clouds, mingling and merging their knowledge; a society built “in the way a child orders a sundae”; a society located in an alternative universe where Haiti was not colonized; a society where you can learn from and alongside your ancestors.
This spring, I had the privilege of working with Melanie Hoff to facilitate Code Societies: Cybernetic Sculpture. Code Societies has been offered at SFPC before, but this spring's iteration was a departure from its previous form. From 2018 to 2020, it was a three-week in-person intensive: participants would spend five days a week together, learning from each other and a plethora of guest lecturers. This spring, we met on Zoom for three hours each week for ten weeks, with a particular focus on moving beyond the screen via cybernetic sculptures. Yet every version of Code Societies has been a unique response to the same prompt: how do code and society inform each other? Throughout our ten weeks together, we revealed the social, digital, and legal codes of different societies we are a part of and worked towards coding and creating the societies we want to live in.