February 6, 2025 Fall 2024
It was our first time together. We all sat around and shared the origin story of our names on the first day of class. The oral histories of our own given or self-created names compelled Melanie to read off an improvised poem:
“In this room, in this specific society of learning among all possible, autonomous, temporary societies we could be, we have names that represent what others want for us, whether that’s our parents, or our friends. We have names that are about what we want for us, like guitars that we want. We have names that our older sisters gave us, that our parents gave us, what our grandparents gave us. We have names that are refusal of patrilineal naming systems. We have names that are refusal of colonization. We have names that are different for those who love us, we have names that are different for the government. We have names that are based on when we were born. We have names that are based on how our names sound in the mouth. We have names that are one generation solutions. We have names from spite. We have names that mean rock, skies, grace, that mean numbers, trees, and also everything. We have names that are for institutional recognition. We have names that tell a story of immigration. We have names that have been our names from before we were born. We have names that have been our names for the last thirty minutes. We have names for when we were reborn. We have biblical names and we have names from soldiers. Thank you all so much for sharing your name.”
From Left to Right: (1) Desktop, Folder, File as Ocean, Oyster, Pearl. (2) Desktop, Folder, File as Snowman, Snowball, Snowflake. (3) Desktop, Folder, File as Body, Bone, Blood. (4)Desktop, Folder, File as Garden, Seed, Flower. (5) Desktop, Folder, File as Language, Words, Letters. Artwork by Alexa Ann Bonomo.Melanie expressed, “The hardest thing about programming is knowing what to name things, like folder names, variables, or functions.” Like variables that pass through arguments of a function, values are always changing, and so are we. For 10 weeks, we explored the question, “What if technology was created by people who love us?” The theme of this season of Digital Love Languages was “falling, failing, feeling, freeing.”
Speculative Liberatory Learning Environment
“I did a brainstorm on paper as if I were imagining a university located in my idea of a sci-fi utopia. I transferred these thoughts to a digital image to create a snapshot of where I landed on at this moment in time. I hope it evolves, many times forever!” – Myla WhiteTo begin our explorations, everyone was invited to imagine a place to fall in, a place to fail in, a place to feel in, a place to set free – a love letter to a speculative liberatory learning environment. What would an ideal place to learn look like, even if you could break the laws of physics?
Folder Poetry
“ i wanted to explore the storyline of my favorite poem, the great blue heron of dunbar road, by ada limón. i started with testing out a structure that was more like a choose-your-own-adventure game, and then my feelings took over and it tumbled into a more accurate depiction of the closing section of the poem. whenever i think of my angry, confused parts, i think of the end of that poem - how seeing someone i love softens my face, how it reminds me to keep hoping, keep wishing. even if it takes some looking, some trying. i would like to try this again with the letter to learning, because i think it would work well with the layers of knowledge theme i was exploring.” – Jess HerreraIn our second and third weeks, we delved into repurposing the common practice of computer folder organization as a new kind of poetic form. Through the use of simple use of the command line, you can traverse the inner makeup of your computer. Melanie taught simple bash commands to visualize folder structure in the form of poetic computational symphonies. During that same week, our guest speaker, Mindy Seu, gifted us a performative lecture about the history of sex and technology. We all turned off our cameras as Mindy guided us through a special history of technology otherwise seen as forbidden knowledge. Everyone had assigned lines from the lecture to read aloud, the timing of each phrase deviating ever so slightly from one another, forming a cacophony of voices reciting one unified timeline.
Passing Notes
I was inspired by sharing music as a digital love language, so i asked my partner to create a spotify "blend" with me, where spotify compares our music taste and makes a playlist that both of us would enjoy. i used python to retrieve our playlist by using the spotify library to access the api and storying the data in a dictionary. then i used that data to retrieve the urls of the song lyrics on genius.com, and added those to the dictionary. i parsed through the web pages of lyrics using the beautifulsoup library and also stored them in the playlist data dictionary. from there, i used randomness to compose a 10 line poem using lines of lyrics from songs in our playlist. i formatted it with some spacing and emojis to make it look prettier. i then exported the poem to a text file and emailed it to my partner. i could see the project evolving to better find the urls to the song lyrics and better filter the song lyrics, because sometimes i would run into the urls being not what i was looking for (a couple were articles instead of lyric pages) and some of the lines of lyrics were blank or one character. – Joanna BaumannBy our fourth week, Melanie's code word spells presentation gave way to begin learning how to write poetry with python scripts. We took to jupyter notebooks and dissected a new coding language to construct our next prompt, passing notes!
Website as a Gift
“I made a website as a love letter to my younger selves. On the home page are some screenshots of texts from friends, to represent my outer self; and on the console log are some private thoughts from my journal and locked socials, to represent my inner self. I've always been a big fan of marginalia and wanted the console log to feel like thoughts/annotations on a page.” – Melicia ZainiAfter weeks five and six, we developed a sense of interactivity for creating websites. Having Sidney as a guest teacher was a joy to have around to teach an intro to javascript. We took to gift giving in the form of a website and shared them with our loved ones.
Consensual Hacking
Screenshot of a terminal For our ninth class before the final day, Melanie guided us through a consensual hacking experience. Framing the experiences as “remote login as astral projection,” Melanie lit a candle to commence the occasion. We were then guided through various bash commands and given a special passcode to login to a separate computer belonging to Melanie. The computer was placed in front of the webcam for all of us to view. A waterfall of .txt files started to appear on the desktop. Someone even hacked into the computer enough to manage opening the browser to a music video on youtube.
The Final Farewell
It was a touching last day for both sessions as we collectively shared the outcomes from our time together. Websites were lent to each other as symbols of gratitude, enamourment, and wonder. Signaling love from one network to the next. Websites for friends, family members, and the self. Secrets hidden in Markov chain love letters and vulnerable notes as hypertext. The class came to a close and we all said goodbye to what someone described as an ephemeral world we all entered to learn with one another separate from all our respective lives. We will cherish the short-lived time we shared. Our self-created digital love languages will continue to circulate both into the web and into the hearts of those with whom we all connect.
Screenshot of the Zoom during the Tuesday section of the class
Screenshot of the Zoom during the Thursday section of the class