School
for
Poetic
Computation
Zine Making for the Web examines how independent publishing practices translate into digital environments. Combining zine culture, creative coding, and experimental design, students will develop online publications using accessible web technologies while exploring the histories and politics of self-publishing. The class supports organizers, artists, writers, and educators interested in creating expressive, unconventional forms of publishing for the internet.
Images courtesy of teachers and guests.
Zines have long been tools for independent publishing, informal knowledge-sharing, and critical dissent — spaces where people circulate ideas outside institutional permission. From radical pamphlets and artist books to PDFs, blogs, and personal websites, independent publishing continues to evolve alongside shifts in media and technology.
Zine Making for the Web is an intermediate studio class exploring how the aesthetics, politics, and material qualities of zines can translate into digital space. Combining critical discussions, technical workshops, publishing experiments, and collaborative critique, students will learn how to create web-based zines using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript alongside accessible digital publishing tools.
Together, students will examine histories of independent publishing and internet culture while developing their own online zines that experiment with layout, hypertext, interactivity, collage, archiving, and nonlinear storytelling. Students will engage with both physical and digital publishing practices, learning how the web can function not only as a platform for distribution, but also as a creative medium for experimentation and collective memory. Throughout the class, students will create iterative publishing studies culminating in a final web zine to be featured in a public showcase.
Basic familiarity with zines and/or HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is required. This class will not cover all technical foundations.
This class may be for you if you:
This class may NOT be for you if you:
Neta Bomani is a community publisher. She is co-director of School for Poetic Computation—an experimental school convening art, computation, hardware, and critical theory to study the social and political conditions of technology and rehearse other ways of knowing, making, and living together—and co-director of Sojourners for Justice Press, an abolitionist Black feminist imprint of Haymarket Books behind the Black Zine Fair. Her work—including the moving image zine Dark Matter Objects—meditates on the entanglements of race, gender, computation, and power, tending to the ways technical systems organize perception, relation, and possibility while cultivating collective practices that co-create liberatory systems. Her work has been exhibited or collected by Brooklyn Museum, Barnard Zine Library, The Kitchen, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Metropolitan Museum of Art Library, and San Francisco Center for the Book. Neta received a graduate degree in Interactive Telecommunications from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.
she/they
Cree Renee is a Black, genderqueer, multi-skilled artist, abolitionist, liberationist, and lovemonger. They have an artistic background in digital media creation, ranging from digital illustration, design, 3D modeling, animation, and, of course, digital zine and flipbook creation, among other notable skills. They have created and collaborated on digital media for a handful of liberation-oriented organizations and projects. Their artistic practice and community work are and aspire to be life-affirming love letters to the power of personal and collective transformation and empowerment.
they/any
Irawo ‘Star’ Ajasin (they/them) is a designer, technologist, and research-based artist from Atlanta, GA, based in Brooklyn, NY. Their work investigates the poetry and politics of digital infrastructure, seeking to design counter-imaginaries of the internet rooted in resilience. Experimenting across a range of media, including cyberethnography, web-based works, interactive installations, workshops, and print-making, Star aims to encourage collective inquiry around how technology as a socio-political object mediates our modern lives.
they/them
Tega Brain is an Australian artist and environmental engineer, born when
atmospheric CO₂ levels were below 350 ppm. Her work examines ecology,
data, automation, and infrastructure. She is an Industry Associate
Professor of Integrated Design and Media at New York University and her
first book, ,Code as Creative Medium ,was published by MIT Press.
she/her
Lee Tusman is a New York-based artist working with computational media. He makes installations, games, net art, sound art, and tools for collective organizing. His practice evolves at the intersection of individual expression and collective action, proposing alternative models for digital culture that prioritize sustainability, accessibility, and community self-determination. Recent exhibitions and residencies include ZK/U Berlin - Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik, Pioneerworks (Brooklyn), Signal Culture (New York), Bangkok Art and Culture Center (Thailand), and ARoS Museum (Denmark). His work has been featured in The New York Times, NPR, Hyperallergic, and The Smithsonian, among other publications. He has an MFA in Design Media Arts from UCLA and a BA in Sociology from Brandeis University. He is Associate Professor of New Media and Computer Science at Purchase College. Tusman is an artist member of Flux Factory in Queens, New York, and hosts the podcast Artists and Hackers.
he/him
Mariame Kaba, is an organizer, educator, librarian/archivist, curator, zinemaker and prison industrial complex (PIC) abolitionist who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. Kaba co-leads ,Interrupting Criminalization,, an organization she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in 2018. She is the author of the New York Times Bestseller, ,We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, (Haymarket Books, 2021) & the National Bestseller ,Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care, with Kelly Hayes (Haymarket, 2023) among several other books that offer support and tools for repair, transformation, and moving toward a future without incarceration and policing. Mariame has founded and co-founded a number of projects and organizations including the ,Education for Liberation Network,, ,Chicago Freedom School,, ,Sojourners for Justice Press,, the ,NYC Public Library Action Network, (PLAN). Mariame has taught courses at Northeastern Illinois University, Northwestern University, Columbia University, American University and CUNY.
she/her
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.
SFPC processes all payments via Withfriends and Stripe. Please email admissions@sfpc.study if these payment options don't work for you.
For more information about what we look for in applicants, scholarships, and other frequently asked questions, please visit our applicant FAQ.
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