School
for
Poetic
Computation
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This fall we bring five classes which ask: How do practices of genetic sampling and biotechnology enact the logistics of surveillance under the guise of public policy? What role do zines play in subcultures? What does data reveal about the world if we engage with it on a human-scale? How can code and automation help us see and manipulate large collections of videos in new ways? How can emerging web technologies inspire new, and more connected musical experiences? From approaching data on a human scale through biomonitoring or tracking our daily experiences, to experimenting with zine formats, browsing through video archives with machine learning techniques, and creating new interactive musical experiences, we’re ready to follow the path lit by the brightest moon of the year, come and gather for the harvest!
Fall 2023
is
organized by
Zainab Aliyu
Zainab "Zai" Aliyu is an artist and cultural worker whose work is about the material affect of the "immaterial." She contextualizes the cybernetic and temporal entanglement embedded within societal dynamics to understand how all sociotechnological systems of control are interconnected, and how we are all implicated through time. She often dreams, experiments and inquires through built virtual environments, printed matter, video, archives, writing, installation and community-participatory (un)learning. Zai is currently a 2022 fellow at NYU Tisch's Future Imagination Collaboratory, design director for the African Film Festival at the Film at Lincoln Center in NYC and a co-director of the School for Poetic Computation.
Neta Bomani
Neta Bomani is a learner and educator who is interested in understanding the practice of reading and parsing information as a collaborative process between human and non-human computers. Neta’s work combines social practices, workshops, archives, oral histories, computation, printmaking, zines, and publishing, to create artifacts that engage abolitionist, black feminist, and do-it-yourself philosophies. Neta received a graduate degree in Interactive Telecommunications from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Neta has taught at the School for Poetic Computation, the New School, New York University, Princeton University, the University of Texas, and in the after school program at P.S. 15 Magnet School of the Arts in Brooklyn, NY. Neta has studied under American Artist, Fred Moten, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Mariame Kaba, Ruha Benjamin, Simone Browne, and many others who inform Neta’s work. Neta’s work has appeared at the Queens Museum, the Barnard Zine Library, The Kitchen, and the Met Library. Neta is one of seven co-directors at the School for Poetic Computation, and one of two co-directors at Sojourners for Justice Press, an imprint of Haymarket Books.
Galen Macdonald
Galen Macdonald is an artist and arts organizer based in Tkaronto/Toronto whose work currently straddles hand craft, kinetic sculpture, poetry, and new media. He uses whatever tools are available to make delicate and limited tools for communication.
Melanie Hoff
As an artist, educator, and organizer, Melanie studies the role that technology plays in social organization and in reinforcing hegemonic structures. They are co-director of the School for Poetic Computation and a founding member of Hex House and the Cybernetics Library. Melanie strives to cultivate spaces of learning and feeling that encourage honesty and reconciliation for the ways we are shaped by systems of gender, racialization, class, and the trauma these systems inscribe upon our bodies.
Todd Anderson
Todd Anderson is a digital poet, software artist and educator based in New York City. He has been making experimental software art for over 10 years including the live interactive poetry project Hotwriting, the Chrome Extension ARG 'An Experience', the performance-inside-the-browser extension HitchHiker, and multiple plays and performances with the multidisciplinary group H0t Club. He is perhaps best known as the host and curator of WordHack, the monthly language+technology talk series in NYC running every third Thursday since 2014.
and
Tyler Yin
Tyler Yin is an artist and technologist currently residing in Brooklyn, NY. His work layers themes of perception, obfuscation, and labor into various forms—including zines, processed imagery, and interactive media. He is also a cofounder and organizer for Tiny Tech Zines, a QTPOC-led tech zine fair & collective centering the ways marginalized communities relate to technology. Tyler holds a BA in Design | Media Arts from UCLA, and has taught in the Parsons Design and Technology program at The New School. His work has appeared at the Brooklyn Art Book Fair, Moving Zine Fair, L.A. Zine Fest, and CultureHub NYC. .
It includes classes with
Neta Bomani
Neta Bomani is a learner and educator who is interested in understanding the practice of reading and parsing information as a collaborative process between human and non-human computers. Neta’s work combines social practices, workshops, archives, oral histories, computation, printmaking, zines, and publishing, to create artifacts that engage abolitionist, black feminist, and do-it-yourself philosophies. Neta received a graduate degree in Interactive Telecommunications from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Neta has taught at the School for Poetic Computation, the New School, New York University, Princeton University, the University of Texas, and in the after school program at P.S. 15 Magnet School of the Arts in Brooklyn, NY. Neta has studied under American Artist, Fred Moten, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Mariame Kaba, Ruha Benjamin, Simone Browne, and many others who inform Neta’s work. Neta’s work has appeared at the Queens Museum, the Barnard Zine Library, The Kitchen, and the Met Library. Neta is one of seven co-directors at the School for Poetic Computation, and one of two co-directors at Sojourners for Justice Press, an imprint of Haymarket Books.
Sam Lavigne
Sam Lavigne is an artist and educator whose work deals with data, surveillance, cops, natural language processing, and automation. He has exhibited work at Lincoln Center, SFMOMA, Pioneer Works, DIS, Ars Electronica, The New Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and his work has been covered in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Guardian, Motherboard, Wired, the Atlantic, Forbes, NPR, the San Francisco Chronicle, the World Almanac, the Ellen Degeneres Show and elsewhere.
He has taught at ITP/NYU, The New School, and the School for Poetic Computation, and was formerly Magic Grant fellow at the Brown Institute at Columbia University, and Special Projects editor at the New Inquiry Magazine. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Design at UT Austin.
Ilona Brand
Ilona is an artist, extrovert, teacher and technologist who sees their work as love notes to themself, the world, and others. They work across mediums using music, poetry, code, drawing, and their jewish practice as tools of expression both publicly and privately. These days they are particularly interested in trans narratives of liberation, judaism as a site of ritual, visibility on and offline, and how we present ourselves and our work to the world.
Meghna Dholakia
Meghna Dholakia is a designer and artist fascinated by individual, collective, and geologic narratives of transformation. She enjoys long walks and collecting interesting looking leaves.
Fields Harrington
fields harrington is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He works across disciplines and media to investigate the social and political dimensions of race, value, and the complex history of science. fields studied at San Antonio Community College and received his BFA from the University of North Texas and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program (2019-2020). He has presented solo exhibitions at David Salkin Gallery (2020), and Y2K Group (2021). He has also exhibited in group shows at Parsons School of Design, Recycled Artist In Residence, 52-07 Flushing Avenue, and Automat Gallery. fields harrington was a L.A.B. researcher in residence at The Kitchen in collaboration with The School for Poetic Computation (2023) and participated in the research residency Site to be Seen at RAIR (2021), and teaches at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School, Parsons School of Design, and The Cooper Union.
Tommy Martinez
Tommy is a musician, programmer, and organizer investigating algorithmic approaches to sound composition, simulations, and manifestations of identity, tradition and history in electronic culture. He has lectured on computer music and media art and is a professor at School of Visual Arts. Tommy is the co-editor of Software for Artists Book: Untethering the Web (Pioneer Works Press, 2022), and currently a Brooklyn College Sonic Arts MFA candidate.
Chloe Alexandra Thompson
Thompson is a Cree, Canadian, interdisciplinary artist and sound designer. Thompson approaches sound as a mode of connection—embracing the kinesthetic agency of sound to compose abstract feats of spatialized audio recording and synthesis. Her work engages tactics of material minimalism to create site-specific installations that sculpt droning, maximalist experiences out of space and sound. Using audio programming software, computational processing, and acoustic instruments, Thompson’s work seeks to create connection by guiding audience participants through these augmented experiences.
Shen-Shen Wu
Shen-Shen is a futurist who cares about the wellness of people, communities, and ecosystems. Artist-Activist. Coder-Curator. Photographer-Writer. Taiwanese-Canadian. She was destined to be a hyphenate. She is driven by her love of adventure, curiosity about consciousness, and respect for both science and spirituality. She believes that everything is connected, and so, the best creation lies at the intersection of art and technology. She has an open mind, clear vision, and fire in her heart. She’s here to make the world a better place.
Jonathan W. Y. Gray
Jonathan W. Y. Gray (jwyg) is Director of the Centre for Digital Culture and Senior Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London; Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). His research explores the role of digital data, methods and infrastructures in the “composition of collective life”. More about his work can be found at ,jonathangray.org, and at @jwyg.
Lia Coleman
Lia Coleman is a Chinese-American artist and AI researcher based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. Coleman’s work centers on the interplay of AI technology, art & design, coding, and ethics. They actively conduct research on creative AI at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute and publish guides for artists to responsibly use machine learning. Coleman’s artwork explores themes of collective memory and loss. In assembling datasets, they attempt to record and archive the past– a process which is inherently never complete. They embrace the unpredictability of neural networks, as a reflection of their own experience of grappling with the elusive nature of truth and the past. Coleman is an alum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the School For Poetic Computation. They have also served as an adjunct professor at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Their work has been shown internationally in Dubai, Germany, Malta, Saudi Arabia, Canada, and the United States, and has been featured by Vox, Wired, Tribeca Film Festival, Mozilla Festival, Science Gallery Detroit, New York University, the NeurIPS Conference, and Gray Area. Their writing on AI art has been published by Princeton Architectural Press, DISEÑA, and Neocha Magazine.
and
Aliyah Blackmore
Aliyah Blackmore is an Afro-Caribbean writer, researcher, and zine maker based in New York. Through their research, writing, and art making, Aliyah engages with the multi-dimensional threads, narratives, and histories that run through Caribbean and Black Diasporic experiences. She seeks to deepen her understanding of how our modes of cultural production foster and activate spaces of resistance and recovery. Aliyah’s zine making practice is a site to uncover and thread together Caribbean Diasporic histories while moving across various thematic crossroads—matrilineal histories, refusal, and the spaces of recovery and rejuvenation made by Afro-Caribbean women. She is the founder and lead writer for a zine project, Bright Spots Zine. This project unravels Black Bajan and Caribbean Diasporic histories through free printed material, bibliographies, and resource lists. .
Applications closed.
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