Somewhat Against Interpretation

December 23, 2025 Fall 2025

It takes me a few minutes usually but it tends to be easy for me to articulate why a book or a movie gave me the ick. I talk about the plot, the pacing, who was given time and space on the page or the screen and who wasn’t. The critiques flow out of me unimpeded.

When it came to my work, a work of “poetic computation” –meaning to me, an art piece made with or through computation that was trying to say something – that I showcased at the SFPC showcase in 2018, I was tongue-tied. How would I go about critiquing a work of poetic computation? With what language could I articulate why it wasn’t working? Through what means and what features could I find meaning?

Approaches to reading into and from a work of poetic computation

I could start by thinking of the work in three dimensions. The artifact itself which is made up of an amalgamation of my decisions and choices. The container, interface and other built-ins that come with the medium or technology. And then society, everything outside the interface.

These three dimensions all boil down to:

What can I choose/control? What can’t I choose/control?

“The idea that every program is inside a program. A user that is restrained by the possibilities of a software. A software that is restricted by the possibilities of an operational system. An OS that is limited by binary code. Binary code that is limited by tech companies.. and so on. Life is a big program at the end.” - Vilem Flusser via Junior, ICAA learner.

“...I’d like to think all mediums are malleable even though I know that’s technically not true? - Jupi, ICAA Learner

“Depending on what you use to make art, there's already inherent ideas of what the people are even called in these systems, whether they're users, players, participants, spectators. There's already these ideas and naming conventions that start to be applied once you start using different technologies.” - Ren Burch, ICAA Guest Teacher

If you accept ____ you also accept ____

While a work of poetic computation differs from a strictly technological artifact (like a bodycam used by the police), it’s still bound by the possibilities, affordances and baggage of the technology it’s built upon.

For example, when you use a Kinect sensor for an interactive installation, the sensor is bringing into the art piece its ideas of what a body looks and moves like. In “Glitch Is Remix” from Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism, the researcher  Simone C. Niquille talks about the program Fuse that is part of Adobe Creative Cloud suite.

“Designed to create 3D models and animated characters…. Fuse presents the user with body segments to be assembled into new forms; to do this the program itself is set up with a series of embedded assumptions about what a body should look like, how pieces of it should fit together, and what makes a body whole or even human.”

The baggage a technology brings can be in the rules and algorithms embedded in it – e.g what is and isn’t read as a body, what is or isn’t included in a training dataset, what human biases seep through – but it can also be in the means and costs of production.

Inspired by the line in Langdon Winner’s Do Artifacts Have Politics?, “If you accept nuclear power plants, you also accept a techno-scientific-industrial-military elite. Without these people in charge, you could not have nuclear power.’’ We did an exercise about what comes along with certain technologies.

If you accept the internet you also accept

MIC

servers

knowledge

submarine cables

to be a data supply node and information sink of the machine

If you accept surveillance art your also accept

genocide

mines in congo

If you accept AI you also accept

Bias

Isolation

Legions of data annotators

Descaling human creativity

Data privacy or the lack of it

Possibility

If you accept painting you also accept fumes

patience

legacy

static 2D

If you accept VR you also accept distance

dissociation

“I just thought of this example from the [Ruha] Benjamin text which speaks about phones and the set of infrastructure that exposes the Congolese people to toxic particles and child labor. [That] influences the creation of that object.” - Audrey, ICAA Learner

“I'm thinking about the amount of mined minerals and processing that goes into making solar panels and how solar panels are something that is not recyclable at all, also how they use up lots of land area and volume to produce barely enough power we need to run things like servers and things. Also how the elements used in solar panels are concentrated in specific geographic locations which are being exploited extensively.” - ICAA Learner

Means of Production / Organization

“Because large sailing vessels by their very nature need to be steered with a firm hand, sailors must yield to their captain's commands; no reasonable person believes that ships can be run democratically. Plato goes on to suggest that governing a state is rather like being captain of a ship or like practicing medicine as a physician. Much the same conditions that require central rule and decisive action in organized technical activity also create this need in government.” - Langdon Winner, Do Artifacts Have Politics?

More questions came up from the “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” text, around what “social or material conditions” are necessary for certain work to exist, and how that work can then reinforce those conditions.

“It reminds me of the quote I pointed out from Engels in the text ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’...Engels finds that, far from being an idiosyncrasy of capitalist social organization, relationships of authority and subordination arise ‘independently of all social organization, [and] are imposed upon us together with the material conditions under which we produce and make products circulate.’ (I don't like it, but I guess is important to understand some things about social-fordism) - ICAA Learner

Are relationships of authority and subordination necessary?

EMILY

I’m curious about this binary in the arts–models of production in the arts: A film set, a broadway rigging (ship) captain analogy, a performance methodology? Commissions, fabrication labor & material, compounds, factories, authorship, notes & stakeholders.  When does the system of production factor into the meaning of the creative work ? Intentionally / unintentionally? When is the culture of production a conceptual component? When are they not considered variables in the work—when do we accept practical or profitable efficiencies as fixed inevitabilities?  How are resistance or counter models classified as "idealistic," and irrelevant. How are efforts to reform models made obsolete by designating them moral or intellectually elite in nature?

EMILY

In our own models of production.  Can you vacillate between these two [authoritarian or democratic]? Are they as strictly binary as presented? Can you in a democratic way choose to enter the hierarchical mode for safety or is it an illusion of safety or efficiency or then leave it? And when people experiment with that model is that a part of the work? If they introduce chance like a John Cage kind of compositional model or you know any questioning of direct director or a tourism or authorship.

YELI

I'm thinking about different ways of creating AI models. There are small scale intimate models where people come together and then they share data that is their own data and that data is fed into the model. Thinking of that vs you know like what [Ruha] Benjamin talks about in her piece which is the way of creating a model that's just about extracting anything everywhere, any information you have access to is being fed into this mass scale model. Thinking of those varying forms of collection. Workers owned cooperatives versus conglomerates.

EMILY

I can't really help it when I see a project that's using AI. I'm curious about what the model looked like and how the model was constructed because that for me does impact the meaning of the piece. Creating a model that you're feeding yourself with your own data or your own paintings seems like a very different process from you know this model has extracted like every book of literature that has ever been created. It’s interesting to me…the idea of moving in between in and out of rules (self-imposed rules) in a collaborative work. You would you democratically agree to it or then back out. I'm always curious about what was the model behind the artifact generated. What was the labor structure here?

The Winner text brought up the question “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” which was quickly answered. Of course they do! Their politics lie in:

• Who created them and why?
• If they support or subvert an existing system
• Who has access and who doesn’t?
• How they impact society

We did an exercise to explore what kind of world or user follows the ubiquity of a certain technology/advancement:

“When the author started talking about prediction markets it made me think of ways that type of phenomena is adversely changing human relational behavior. Specifically in the sense that like people are starting to think with the mind of marketers, people think everyone else is their ad demographic. People think based on what you own, what you look like what platform you’re on, they try to make up your story which is basically what these algorithms are doing to sell you stuff” - Jupi

After interactive installations in museums: curious, playful, engaged learning After generative content online: doubt if anything online is ‘real’ After smartphones:  Less cards, keys, physical currency, and other common daily objects -> all activities concentrated in one place After drones: people that can access formerly difficult to reach places, new forms of war, new forms of resistance After AI image generation: “imagination” as something optional, everything could possibly be previsualized After feeds: numb, endless scrolling, expect everything to cater to them, impatient

Then we moved toward the question of if artifacts can be divorced from the dominant politics through which they were created (e.g the internet from its military origins).

If we can imagine new ways of being for proliferating technologies. If we can usurp them for our own ends.

I feel the internet as a space to be reclaimed - Junior

While fiddling around with the idea of data privacy and security as a creative topic and medium, I built a website which brought aggregated insecure camera feeds into a communal viewing experience based on the IP address location of the most recently connected visitor. Built with an intent to accessibly share what I knew and felt about poorly configured networked video systems, I learned from the reaction of my peers that I unleashed greater risk to those already made vulnerable by the mechanism and infringed upon the boundaries of my audience without meaningfully doing much to combat such harms. I felt that I pushed away my audience with the sheer creepiness and risk posed by the presentation.

We faced the idea of exposing the harmful capabilities of certain technologies, through creative work, as a way to generate awareness and spark discourse. We tried to gauge the tradeoff between comfort and useful communication around oppressive technologies, discussing the generation of productive distress as a tool for encapsulating the gravity of such systems.

“I’m thinking of [a] possible world in which a self-reproducing / self-sustaining “artificial intelligence” can emerge? But that would radically alter the definition from what we currently think of as AI” -  ICAA Learner

We talked about small AI, ancestral AI,  baby LLMs, AIs that use solar as energy sources and AIs that are trained on handmade or communal datasets that attempt to bypass the issues of consent, ownership, resource use and low-paid, crowdsourced tagging work that powers most AI models today.

We visited the seminal Amiri Baraka text “Technology & Ethos” and Paul Soulellis’ “Feed Time” as we discussed aesthetics and visual forms. Souleillis’ work introduced us to the idea of “ultimate smooth flow”: the condition of  “endless feeds and streams that serve up enormous accumulations of information in real time” and algorithms that keep us "continuously engaged so that our data resources can be mined.”

By incorporating friction and glitch into our work, making people wait or struggle,  resisting the urge for smooth, easeful interactions, we can encourage and foreground other modes of interacting. A case study for this was Queering the Map, a website whose action possibilities and impossibilities (no search bar, no scrolling only dragging) make the experience much more time consuming and glitchy.

“To see a glitch is a reminder of that [that a human is behind it even if it’s mediated by technology”] - Sim, ICAA Assistant Teacher

In the context of the Baraka piece, it was enough to say: “Nothing has to look or function the way it does.”

Awe of Implementation

The ubiquity of certain technologies can play a role in interaction and reception.

“I think about in galleries, exhibitions, interactive/new media is still relatively exceptional in those spaces. Often I think the viewer is not in the headspace to engage deeply. Curiosity [is the main feeling]. This is the one thing in the space I’m allowed to touch. That I’m allowed to interact with directly. Space itself is a political artifact.” - Audrey, ICAA Learner

“Can there be serious work that utilizes the body tracker? Or does it always start to feel to the user like dancing or playing?” - Yeli, ICAA Teacher

What can computational art afford that other mediums can’t? What are its possibilities and limits?

“Interactivity allows me to suggest ways that I want bodies to exist in space and relate to one another.” - Ren Burch

“TouchDesigner has been a really instrumental tool in my practice to visualize and understand the nature and logic of what I'm doing. The node based, live preview environment has helped me grasp mathematical concepts that flew over my head in highschool and the non linear nature of the software really helps sometimes to think creatively and not to be bound in a box” - ICAA Learner

“My own attraction to computational network art and film and lens based media is because you can do it at home where you know especially for neuro-divergent folks and [people] not very comfortable in spaces of art. You're just allowed you're forced into a different form of engagement because you can do it at home.” - Audrey, ICAA Learner

“The appeal of games as a medium is that you can feel like your labor is being rewarded in a world where it's not. But also that can feel regressive if it’s not looking inwards while it’s doing that.” - Nirvan, ICAA Learner

We talked about the ability to “set the stage” and how that differs across mediums; to curate the environment the user interacts with to engage with a piece. With computational work, we may not have as much control because the access point –  how a user interacts with the work– is outside our control.

EMILY

It's also principles of ritual, right? Or induction of ritual. There's some quality of that in a museum. It's really theatrical for me like what light cues create a container for entering a piece. Sometimes I feel like that's missing with computational or interactive installations that you just sort of stumble upon. You didn't exactly know that it began. What I actually like about the internet is that theatrical process – like you've arrived to a site and there are sets of cues to create ritual engagement and an end.”

YELI

I think it can go either way. There's so much noise on the internet that people are used to a certain kind of interaction: scrolling really fast, clicking through quickly. And so when you get to a “poetic websites” (a website that’s also an art piece), are you able to just drop all of those innate ways of being on the internet, the  interactions that you have with like literally every other kind of website and like actually interact with the website on the basis of it as an art piece?

We talked about different forms of interactivity across different mediums:

“What about mediums not traditionally seen as interactive (like video art)? can they also acquire an interactive dimension? somehow (a bit random comment….maybe next week)” - Dora, ICAA Learner

“I feel like interaction gets talked about in the context of museums/installations/exhibits, and at home in personal computers... For anyone, where do you feel are other settings that would be worth bringing this lens into? (noting that interaction is in anything and everything, and that we're likely just used to talking about /these/ settings and not others)” - Kat, ICAA Learner

KAT

comedy, crowdwork

LEE

I think of tabletop games! which are very close to theater lol

KAT

i can also think of architecture & psychology, of how spaces are made to facilitate certain behaviors

We talked about the terms we use. What even is “old” and “new” media? What is a medium and what is a tool?

“It is funny how the rise of photography and cinema were seen as cataclysmic for art (and politics) —they were the “new” media of the time, and marginalized in context of “fine” art … and now they are our “old” media 😅” - Audrey, ICAA Learner

“My take (very personal!) of AI is that it's simultaneously a data-collection tool, and a tool for digital visual production.... but not a medium of its own? I would consider it a tool for an existing medium” - Kat, ICAA Learner

“thinking about the Kodak Charmera camera: a keychain camera that feels very retro and people assumed was vintage when it came onto the market, but actually is so new that it’s only available for preorder. what makes something feel like old media vs. new media can be very untethered from chronological time” - Lee, ICAA Assistant Teacher

EMILY

“I was just thinking that new media is also a political term within cinema. Because it was a union distinction, new media wasn't covered work for a long time or then it had its own contract included and YouTube lived in that for a long long time and then they dissolved the new media because it was still considered cinematic labor, the same job roles. So there's similar things I think happening now with AI as you mentioned like is that new media or is it cinema and there's this whole other place where that's debated for different reasons of labor rights and I just think it's interesting because it remains contentious is like a way of disqualifying a professional legitimacy from a corporate perspective.”

YELI

“So, the term new media was, "Oh, this kind of work doesn't require as much and so we're going to…”

EMILY

“Yeah, it doesn't qualify as cinematic labor. If you're a grip or boom operator making something that's screened on YouTube or YouTube Red, you didn't have the same established labor rights as somebody doing the same exact work on Law and Order. Then it had its own contract. So it was less pay. And then that was dissolved in this last strike as a separate category.”

Representation

“If art has a duty, it is to render visible the conditions in the world which are ubiquitous but otherwise invisible. If you want to make an artwork depicting a person, you would do well to use oil paint, a technology that, like human flesh, absorbs and refracts light, and can be pulled taut across the canvas or else left to hang goopy and liquid across it. If you wanted to make an artwork depicting the dominant conditions in which that person exists (that is to say, platform capitalism and the crisis of agency), you would do well to use a technology which is also capable of molding and circumscribing human agency. In other words: games. An art game helps us to think about how we express our agency. An art game helps us identify the boundaries of our agency. An art game helps us think about what external factors are shaping that agency. It can do all these things because game technology creates homologous representations of the world.” - How Art Games work

“I learned recently that unlocking mount rushmore in one of the civilization games (maybe civ 4)? requires fascism... as games become more and more complex they embed users in their systems.” - ICAA Learner

We talked about the idea, from Alexander Galloway’s The Interface Effect, that computers are our guide into the unrepresentable. That is, computation can help us uniquely represent our current world and speculate on a future one. Poetic computation can be a form of prefigurative politics, a way to already see and live the world we want to see into existence.

The project Native Land, maps indigenous territories and in doing so, sets forth a different vision for a map, where shapes are translucent and layered, where the land and waters aren’t reduced to borders or lines.

And Nora Al-Badri’s The Post-Truth Museum (2021–23) uses AI (deep fake videos) to create alternate political scenarios, a version of reality where the heads of European art institutions make statements acknowledging the complicity of their institutions in colonialism and make amends for that complicity. In one of the videos, the president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation says “We have realized that the Humboldt Forum is ethically indefensible” and then decides to “return the stolen objects and turn over the museum for accommodation for refugees.”

Role Of Art

Lastly we riffed on what roles art and poetic computation could take. And what we want to do with the work we create.

Using the ubiquitous ways we interact with technology to engender emotion and affect like Jackie Liu’s I Feel So Much Shame and Omayeli Arenyeka’s Grief Found Me.

• Mimicking an existing object of interaction to draw attention to specific features or social dynamics
• Evoking or representing a certain emotion…

• Asking questions about or drawing attention to an issue.

Deliberate “misuse” or distortion of existing tools i.e projects that appropriated from other established technological infrastructures, such as open cameras, public data, police radio.

Speculative/Imaginative: “Helping us to understand new ways of being in relation to technology…discover new modes of seeing, of relating, and of being” e.g Spencer Chang's Everyday, Frog Chorus.

We approached a recording of Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste’s Y’all Don’t Wanna Hear Me (You Just Wanna Dance), in which the artist refashions an acoustic weapon known as Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), typically used in mass policing at protests and other public gatherings, as a tool for performance. Using the device to play catchy music and deliver a lecture on a critical history of sonic policing, the original purpose of the device is voided, at least for the time being.

In bringing a tool used for policing, specifically separating groups of people in public, into a creative space and enabling it for purposes of collective enjoyment and learning through dance and conversation, the original purpose is rendered defunct while still being subject to scrutiny and dissection as an object of speculation.

Rhetorical Software | Arte Util: an intervention that is both an artwork and a tool. Projects that can intervene directly on the systems themselves, that deal with the consequences.

“Something that is coming up for me is influence vs control. So in all the artifacts that we named in the beginning [e.g anti-homeless architecture], I noticed they were all hostile and kind of controlling rather than just merely influencing. And it makes me think about maybe the toothlessness relatively of left leaning–for lack of a better term– or more liberatory minded artistic or technological interventions compared to that. These artifacts that control and restrict for example the way that you can fare evade or enforce the volunteering of only your legal name and nothing else. So I'm thinking about maybe all of these things that we're discussing in the interactive web-based media –I mean besides maybe Bail Bloc but I don't see it as controlling either– and maybe that's part of the point. That liberatory pieces of technology aren't going to seek to control. That isn't the intention of the artwork. That isn't what the art tries to evoke, but like influence at most.” - Jadira, ICAA Learner

Where we left off & remain

How we digest a computational artwork is shaped by the technical, aesthetic, and social contexts we attach to it. The affordances, limits of the medium and our relationship to it. The unique ability of creative work to subvert such conditions. What we expect to happen, what we understand as appropriate use cases, interactions, realities.

Faced with the impossibility of a singular interpretation, we stay with our questions and extend our concerns beyond the realm of the confines of the created object and in return to the conditions of its creation.