Alumni Profile: Nneka Sobers

June 2, 2025

SFPC Alumni Profiles is a series featuring students who are practicing poetic computation in their communities and work

Where are you from and where are you living now?

Nneka Sobers: I grew up in multiple places, so I’ve never felt rooted in a single hometown. But my parents live near Virginia Beach, so it’s a place I return to often. I’ve been living in New York City for the past six years—it’s one of the few places I’ve lived that I feel deeply attached to.

When did you study at SFPC?

NS: I took Instruments of the Black Gooey Universe from January to March 2024—my first SFPC course! It blended “Dark Matters” by American Artist and Zainab Aliyu and “Poetic Hardware” by CW&T (Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy), examining the surveillance of Blackness and the racialized aesthetics of neutrality in computation. This course gave me a language—and a practice—for interrogating technology through intimacy, resistance, and speculative reimagining.

How would you describe your work or practice?

NS: I’m an urban designer and civic technologist, which means I spend my time building tools and experiences that help everyday people shape city systems. I currently serve as Deputy Director of NYC’s Innovation Team, where we design programs that make city services more equitable and begin to rebuild trust between residents and government. At its core, my work helps people who’ve been left out of decision-making gain more agency in shaping their city.

Can you share about a project you made while studying at SFPC?

NS: During the Instruments of the Black Gooey Universe class, I began exploring how bureaucracy and algorithmic systems co-produce precarity. One of my projects was the Squatters’ Scale, a speculative device deployed across NYC’s 150,000+ vacant properties to help unhoused residents establish legal tenancy through collective physical presence—pressing their hands to a networked scale that accelerates the 30-day threshold required to gain housing rights under local law. It translated David Harvey’s “Right to the City” into an embodied instrument for housing justice, exposing the dissonance between the many vacant apartments in NYC and the high volume of people who need housing that is secure and affordable.

What are some other projects you have worked on before or after your time at SFPC?

NS: In November 2024, I was invited—alongside a few other artists—to participate in Black Metal, a flash art experience organized by Afrotechtopia (s/o Ari Melenciano), responding to their new publication on space travel and inner navigation. I developed an immersive, game-like installation inspired by control rooms like NASA’s Mission Control and Project Cybersyn—reenvisioning community-led decision-making in a future where civic action is guided not by top-down rules, but by empathy, lived experience, and the trust that emerges from relationships of mutual understanding.

How do you define poetic computation?

NS: A loving yet critical examination of the invisible forces shaping our digitized world—through tools, gestures, and frameworks that make those forces visible, graspable, and open to reinvention.

What is something you learned at SFPC that has stayed with you in your practice?

NS: SFPC gave me a new entry point into urban design and civic technology—one rooted not in bureaucracy or technical specs, but in sensation, culture, and critique. It helped me name the missing dimension in my work: the need for emotional, artistic, and cultural entry points into city systems that too often feel distant or illegible. That insight is now shaping “Public Domain”, a creative studio I’m building to explore how urban technology can become a site of civic imagination. I haven’t launched it publicly yet, but you can find updates soon at nneka.substack.com.

Who is an artist, scholar, political organizer, scientist or leader who inspires you?

NS: Theaster Gates taught me that structures like housing, land, and ownership can be sculpted—that real estate is not fixed, but a malleable medium that can reflect the memory, spirit, and needs of the communities it touches. Lately, I’ve been immersed in the work of Ruha Benjamin and Kate Crawford, who reveal how data and design encode ideology—and how resisting those logics requires more than critique. It demands new cultural frameworks that are rigorous, poetic, and rooted in participation.