School
for
Poetic
Computation
Drawing data by hand is a way to attune our eyes to the hidden and so-plain-as-to-be-unseen dimensions of our world. In this course we will 'sketch' data as a way to engage with data concerning us, our communities, and the greater world. We might plot our fears, map our neighborhoods, graph our love lives, and chart the impact of our experiences. We will focus on the handmade, quirky, human-scale data that we can gather, clean, manage, and visualize without expert use of technology. As we develop our personal practices, we also enter the murky world of data as a text. Data is entangled in a knot-work of relationships. Work involving data cannot be divorced from the way that data is collected, stored, manipulated, bought, sold, and stolen by organizations, governments, and other entities. So, as we experiment with data as a tool for artistic curiosity and understanding we will ask questions about the materiality of data, its uses in surveillance, the positions of subject and collector, and the glories and dangers of classification.
Images courtesy of teachers.
Class 1: Thinking about thinking about data
Class 2: Observing & Collecting
Class 3: Organizing & Classifying
Class 4: Retrieval, Access, Storage
Class 5: Making Meaning
Class 6: Forms
Class 7: Visual Craft
Class 8: Jam Session/Workshop Day
Class 9: Critique & Discussion
Class 10: Celebration & Sharing
This class may be for you if:
This class may NOT be for you if:
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.
she/her
· website
· twitter
· instagram
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.
they/them
· website
· twitter
· instagram
Our programs are conducted in spoken English with audiovisual materials such as slides, code examples and video. Online programs are held over Zoom.
Please take care and be well. We hope you are comfortable in your housing, living, and working situation in general. Never hesitate to ask us for advice and reach out if you have accessibility requests or need any assistance during your time at SFPC. We will work closely with you towards co-creating the most accommodating learning environment for your needs.
Is there data that should never be collected? What is it and why?
Applications open until Applications closed on August 13, 2023.
You can expect to hear back from us about the status of your application on August 25, 2023. Please email us at admissions@sfpc.study with any questions you have.
For 10 classes, it costs $1200 + processing fees, for a one-time payment. We also offer payment plans. Participants can schedule weekly or monthly payments of the same amount. First and last payments must be made before the start and end of class. *Processing fees apply for each payment.
SFPC processes all payments via Withfriends and Stripe. Please email admissions@sfpc.study if these payment options don't work for you.
Upon payment, your space in the class will be reserved. We offer scholarships for those who cannot pay full tuition. Read more about scholarships below.
If you can’t pay full tuition, we really still want you to apply. Our application will ask you how much you can pay. We will offer subsidized positions in all of our classes, once each one has enough participants enrolled that we’re able to do so.
We have also started a scholarship fund, and we will be offering additional scholarships as community members redistribute their wealth through SFPC. We direct scholarship funds towards participants who are low-income, Black, Indigenous, racialized, gendered, disabled, Queer, trans, oppressed, historicially excluded and underrepresented.
Right now, tuition is SFPC’s main source of income, and that is a problem. It means that we can only pay teachers, pay for space, and organize programs when participants pay full tuition to attend. Tuition is a huge barrier to entry into the SFPC community, and it disproportionately limits Black participants, indigenous participants, queer and trans participants, and other people who are marginalized, from participating. Scholarships are not a long term solution for us, but in the short and medium term we hope to offer them more while we work towards transforming SFPC’s financial model.
For SFPC to be the kind of place the community has always meant it to be, it needs to become a platform for wealth redistribution. If you are a former participant, prospective participant, or friend of the school, and you have the financial privilege to do so, please donate generously. There is enough wealth in this community to make sure no one is ever rejected because of their inability to pay, and becoming that school will make SFPC the impactful, imaginative, transformative center of poetry and justice that we know it can be.
Interested in more learning opportunities at the School for Poetic Computation? Join our newsletter to stay up to date on future sessions and events, and follow us on Instagram and Twitter. Support our programming through scholarships. Get in touch over email.