School
for
Poetic
Computation
What happens to your data after you die?, The Digital Will: Making, Sorting, and Memorializing Our Data, examines how we navigate the personal and collective dimensions of digital death — from inherited archives to posthumous platform presence. Students will explore questions of data ownership, deletion, and the treatment of intimate digital records through contemporary death customs and critical methodologies. Drawing from art, tools, and alternative practices, we will sift through our own data to craft a digital estate and define the legacy we want to leave behind.
Images courtesy of teachers and guests.
The class will engage with themes around death regularly, including personal reflections on death and the spectacle of viewership of death online.
We dedicate a large portion of our lives to generating meaningful and inadvertent abundance of data imbued with memories. From archived secret Pinterest boards to forgotten drafts of half-written novels, our digital footprint holds and shares so much about the user. This comes with the caveat that data can only be deciphered and made meaningful by users themselves. In Digital Death, Stacey Pitsillides writes: “Digital death can be seen as either the death of a living being and the way it affects the digital world, or the death of a digital object and the way it affects a living being.”
The Digital Will examines personal and collective data sorting, inheriting, and mourning to prepare for one’s posthumous digital self. Students will learn about contemporary considerations of death customs and how they can be applied to digital death through personal meaning-making. We will explore questions surrounding ownership of data and deletion, process and treatment of intimate archives, and digital death on platforms. By drawing inspiration from alternative practices for claiming data through art, tools, and critical methodologies, we will sift through our data to create our own digital estates and answer the question, "What digital legacy do I want to leave behind?”
This class may be for you if you:
This class may NOT be for you if you:
Eileen Ahn is a Korean-American designer, writer, and artist activated by inquiries rooted in web autonomy and alternative appropriations and interpretations of digital tools and systems. With a penchant for schema-building across the online and offline, her art and research practice concerns the digital-physical porosity of a user’s personhood in relation to the web and data. Her work can be found in places such as The Internet Phone Book, Gray Area, thehtml.review, and more.
She/Her
Ada Zhou is a researcher, facilitator, and librarian. They’re focused on the scaling & grooves of social/political/cultural systems. They live in San Francisco.
I am a queer and anxious artist, curator, researcher, storyteller, and technician working in as many mediums as will have me. I enjoy exploring themes of technology, labor, bodies, and pain. In my making and iterative process, I often need to move both quickly and carefully, in a race against time as my own chronically pain-ridden body shuts down. My physical process of making mimics the daily pain of working and labor: warping, distorting, grinding and wearing down. My pieces are both critical of and dependent on technology, mirroring the ways technology can be a solution to my chronic pain, and the source of the pain itself.
I am currently teaching at the Interactive Media Arts and Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. My research often materializes as objects and performances which have been performed at the likes of Pioneer Works, La Mama’s CultureHub, Wordhack at Babycastles, theBlanc and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I have been mentioned in publications like PARtake, The Scotsman, USA Today, The Guardian, NYTimes, etc.
Any
Jordan Metz is an interdisciplinary artist and designer using creative coding, performance, and sculpture to explore digital identity. They create interactive computer vision systems as a way to generate embodied relationships with technology. Their practice involves 3D scanning, ceramics, and audiovisual programming as a means of forging connections between the real and virtual worlds. Jordan’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at CultureHub, Gray Area, Stove Works, Boston Cyberarts, The Intersection of Art and Technology, and Sister’s Room in Tbilisi, Georgia. They were an inaugural resident of Mozilla Foundation’s Creative Futures Counterstructures Residency. Their interactive thesis installation at the Rhode Island School of Design Digital+Media MFA program, ,The Me I’ve Made For You,, was shortlisted in the Artsthread x Gucci Global Design Graduate Show. They are currently a member at The Compound Gallery in Emeryville, CA and a member of the Gray Area Cultural Incubator cohort.
she/they
Applications open until Applications closed on August 10, 2026.
You can expect to hear back from us about the status of your application on . 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 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.
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