An offering of questions from the Interrogating Computational Approaches to Art class

June 18, 2024 Spring 2024

Interrogating Computational Approaches to Art was a 5-week class taught by Omayeli Arenyeka with assistant teacher Neta Bomani.

When thinking critically of poetic computation, we found ourselves asking more questions than we could answer. The computational art object is simultaneously illusive yet knowable in our ability to name its characteristics and the inadequacy of language to describe its affects.

If poetic computation is defined in two parts as first, the poetics of code (poetry within the code from syntax to machine processing), and second, the poetic affect of code (instructions leading to a beautiful moment or common understanding), we offer you the following questions:

• What is happening? What do we see?
• What can you do? What can’t you do?
• What are its associations? What does this remind me of? Where does it take me?
• What do you feel, what are you able to understand?
• What are the social and material conditions that make this piece of work possible?
• How do you read the violent history of computation into playful or generative pieces of poetic computation or computational art?
• What does your computational art make of the viewer? Who do they become when they look/interact with it? What kinds of decisions does your work ask of the person interacting with it?
• What perspective, enterprise, cultures, society, political and/or economic regime is this compatible with?
• What elements doesn’t poetic computation share with older media forms?
• If we’re going from an image or text to a website or an installation…what is it that we’re gaining that’s unique to poetic computation or new media?
• What elements does it (poetic computation) share (with older media forms)?
• What does the technology you’re using bring with it? Can there be serious work that utilizes the body tracker? Or does it just start to feel like dance? Can you bypass the awe of implementation? Can you escape the medium and what it brings with it?
• Can we compare approaches, political repercussions, and contexts for technological artifacts in one framework and the same framework with which we are thinking and talking about art?