August 30, 2022 Fall 2022
Kameelah Janan Rasheed teaching a workshop called The Unfinished Sentence at Code Societies.The SFPC programming team would like to introduce Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Sam Lavigne and Todd Anderson, our teachers of the Fall 2022 session!
Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Kameelah Janan Rasheed is the teacher of Teaching and Learning as “PRIMITIVE HYPERTEXT.” Kameelah is a never-finished artist, learner, teacher, archivist, compiler, writer, and poet. We are admirers of Kameelah’s statement of “Ethos” from her website, a piece of writing that began as an artist statement and ended up as a written and visual essay on process, approach, comprehension… it’s such an inspiring document! Read it on her website here.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed teaching a workshop called The Unfinished Sentence at Code Societies.Kameelah has taught in high schools, universities, art institutions, and outside of these structures. In 2019 she taught a workshop called The Unfinished Sentence at Code Societies and a workshop called “DO NOT PERCEIVE ME: The Poetics of Dirty Data and Embedded Stellar Clusters” in the Reading, Writing & Compiling workshop series that was a part of our summer COCOON session in 2021. Kameelah has had a profound impact on shaping the critical pedagogy at SFPC. We’re honored to have her back at the school!
A billboard that stands tall in an ever clear sky and reads, “What have you (un)learned today?” It is installed in Little Rock, Arkansas as part of the 2020 Awakening project organized by For Freedoms.Kameelah’s work ends up in so many formats in the world, from exhibitions, to workshops, to publications, film, and more. To hear Kameelah speak about her own work, check out a documentary on her practice from Art21.
“otherwise,” 2021Sam Lavigne
Sam Lavigne is the teacher of this fall’s Scrapism class. Sam is an “artist and educator whose work deals with data, surveillance, cops, natural language processing, and automation.” Sam has taught Scrapism at SFPC since 2019, among other classes like “Code Poetry” in 2017 and “Automating Video” in 2016.
A screenshot of a Fox News article with the headline “Anti-Trump professor thwarted in bid to share ICE employee data” next to an image of Sam gesturing a thumbs up in front of a hammer and sickle sculpture.We admire Sam’s sharp sense of humor and commitment to a rigorous anti-capitalist politic. Some of our favorite projects by Sam include and The Capitalist Gene, an art project and social commentary on how capitalism is presumed by some to be a product of “human nature”; 45 Library, “a speculative proposal for the 45th presidential library;” and Patent Generator, a program that generates literary texts into patent applications.
A screenshot from the capitalistgene.com website.In 2021, Sam wrote an article titled "Gaslighting Your Boss: Creative: Experiments in Digital Sabotage” for Pioneer Works, in which he defined sabotage as “the practice of interfering with profit as political action. […] In order to fuck with profit, you have to understand your own role in the circulation of capital. You have to confront how profit is produced. In this way, sabotage reveals where value comes from; it reveals that value comes from the worker.”
A data visualization of an estimated total of 700,000 American cops guarding the fictional 45th presidential library.Scrapism is a type of digital sabotage and art practice that Sam has developed and shared with the SFPC community. Students have interpreted the ways in which data-driven systems effect workers, labor, and other social phenomena in their own ways, which is documented in the Scrapism Archive project by Aldon Chen.
Screenshot of the Scrapism Archive project by Aldon Chen.Todd Anderson
Todd Anderson is the teacher of An Artist’s History of Computer Viruses and Malware this fall, a course that looks at the history of computer viruses and malware both from an analytical perspective and an aesthetic perspective. Todd is a digital poet, software artist, educator, and co-director at SFPC.
Todd teaching in our old classroom at Westbeth. Todd has been organizing programs at our school since 2015. Code Poetry (Summer 2015), Code Subversions (Summer 2016), Code Narratives (Summer 2017) and Code Words (Summer 2018), the Fall 2019 session, and Experiments in Networked Performance (Summer 2022) are some of the programs Todd has organized and taught in at SFPC. We admire Todd’s sense of humor and his approach to experimental software art and education. We’re thankful for the ways in which Todd has expanded SFPC’s code poetry curriculum over the years, and are excited to see what comes of this new curriculum on malware art and computer history at SFPC!
Todd performing, playing an instrument alongside others, with very colorful projections onto the performance.Recently, Todd, alongside Tiri Kananuruk, organized a program at SFPC this past summer called Experiments in Networked Performance. The session explored the ways technology can create new, less passive forms of audienceship and how that role can extend beyond a single physical space.
Experiments in Networked Performance showcase.Todd has been making experimental software art for over 10 years. Hotwriting is a live interactive poetry project that not only erases the line between author and audience, but between book, instrument, and game.
Cover of Hotwriting.Outside of SFPC, Todd also organizes WordHack, a monthly presentation series at Babycastles in NYC centered around the intersection of language and technology. In the WordHack Anthology (2014-2019) five years of projects (poetry generators, games, songs, installations, illustrations, videos, powerpoint decks, academic papers, poems, stories, experimental performances and more) and documentation from the series are presented.
Screenshots from WordHack Anthology.