Announcing new classes, and notes from SFPC Stewards

October 8, 2021 Fall/Winter 2021-22

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

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