School
for
Poetic
Computation
The School for Poetic Computation proudly presents, SFPC: Sex Ed, a pleasure and queer centered experiment in shared study and epistemic empowerment. At SFPC: Sex Ed, we believe pleasure is knowledge and its study is sacred. Like the School for Poetic Computation, SFPC: Sex Ed is about unlearning harmful social programming of traditional educational environments as much as it is about art and code. We welcome you to participate in a program unlike any other. This program is a direct response to creating the kinds of educational spaces we never had, but always sought. Many of us would benefit from actively determining our own sex education outside of systemic governing bodies like the state, public and private schools, or legal guardians, as well as interpersonal relationships like the person(s) who you're having sex with. Everyone deserves non-sexual, platonic and friendly spaces to learn and explore sexuality and pleasure informed by cultural understandings of sex, gender, class and race and how our identities relate to sexual desires, practices and kink.
Images courtesy of teachers, participants, class documentarians and guests.
SFPC: Sex Ed is an invitation to study the power and poetry of erotic arts, and to imagine new ways of choreographing sexual energy into your life now and into the future. Classes are designed to raise more questions than they answer. SFPC: Sex Ed is not a cruising space–look elsewhere if this is what you seek.
Through a balanced, interwoven study of gender, sexuality, consent, power play, feminist theory, sexual health, pregnancy, and sex work, participants will engage in open discussion, movement workshops, drawing and dreaming exercises, resource sharing, and collective knowledge building. Anonymity of all participants will be protected without explicit consent given. Stigma surrounding sex is real and will be discussed.
We will work together to create boundaries that make it easier for everyone involved to feel as safe and comfortable as possible throughout the session. SFPC: Sex Ed studies the very systems that create barriers to safety, pleasure, and healing. The process of direct confrontation with these barriers can feel uncomfortable. As with pleasure, we understand safety is relative and in constant negotiation. We also distinguish safety from discomfort, as there is no such thing as a never uncomfortable space (we learned this from the NYC Transformative Justice Hub). A special Community Agreement designed for SFPC: Sex Ed will be activated on the first day of session to hold our space.
Through conversation, education, consent, and play, we hope to explore pleasure studies with you.
Classes will be hosted by two incredible NYC venues, Performance Space and Amant Foundation. Weekly classes will take place in the evenings from 6-9pm with a break in the middle. There will always be two organizers present in every class to support participants and teachers. There will be an afternoon class gathering from 1-4pm on August 13th. Classes will culminate in a final showcase at a date to be determined in the near future. After the program ends, participants will have an optional 1 week residency from August 15-19 at Performance Space. The Sex Ed syllabus includes the following:
Participants will be expected to:
Participants will NOT be expected to:
Participants will be invited to:
This session may be for you if you:
The session may NOT be for you if you:
Over the last 4 decades, Performance Space New York (formerly Performance Space 122) has been propelling cultural, theoretical, and political discourse forward. Founded in 1980, Performance Space became a haven for many queer and radical voices shut out by a repressive, monocultural mainstream and conservative government whose neglect exacerbated the emerging AIDS epidemic’s devastation. Carrying forward the multitudinous visions of these artists who wielded the political momentum of self-expression amidst the intensifying American culture wars, Performance Space is one of the birthplaces of contemporary performance as it is known today. Together with artists and communities, they have been presenting interdisciplinary works that dissolve the borders of performance art, dance, theater, music, visual art, poetry and prose, ritual, nightlife, food, film, and technology.
Accessibility: Performance Space New York is ADA compliant with a no step entry at 150 1st Avenue. They have level access from the sidewalk and an elevator that leads to the fourth floor spaces. Public restrooms are located on the same floor as the performance spaces and are multi-stall, gender neutral, and wheelchair accessible with handrails on the left side. Assisted Listening Devices are available on the ground floor at the Box Office. Service Animals are gladly welcomed.
Amant is a non-profit arts organization in Brooklyn, New York City founded in 2019. They are a non-collecting institution that fosters experimentation and dialogue through exhibitions, public programs, and artist residencies.
Accessibility: Amant’s entry at 315 Maujer Street is step-free and suitable for wheelchair users. Their galleries, bookstore, and restroom facilities are also wheelchair accessible.
Participants will be required to provide proof of up-to-date vaccination status (including boosters) to attend. Participants, teachers and staff are expected to be masked during class. Before the first day of class and final showcase, all participants will be expected to show a negative result on a Covid test.
Melanie Hoff is an artist, organizer, and educator. At School for Poetic Computation and Hex House, they strive to cultivate spaces of learning and feeling that encourage honesty, poetry, and reconciliation for the ways we are shaped by intersecting systems of classification and power. Melanie engages hacking and performance to express the absurdities of these systems while revealing the encoded ways in which they influence how we choose to live and what choices have been made for us. They teach about sex, technology, and social cybernetics at the School for Poetic Computation, Yale University, New York University, and have shown work at the New Museum, the Queens Museum, and elsewhere.
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Elizabeth is a mother, multidisciplinary designer and educator interested in the confluence of motherhood, world-building, and the possibilities of design. She is currently a Part Time Faculty Member at Parsons School of Design and completing a postdoctoral fellowship at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program where she earned her master’s. Elizabeth lives and loves in Brooklyn, NY with her son.
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DaemonumX is a femme leatherdyke passionate about educating queer people on deviant sexualities and alternate relationship structures. She is a polyamory and BDSM coach offering accessible resources to the queer community. DaemonumX hosts several Leather and sex parties in Brooklyn, NY. Her words on BDSM and polyamory can be found in Them, Autostraddle, Logo, and via her zines Fist and Linked.
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Venus Cuffs, an esteemed Nightlife Producer, seamlessly merges her prowess in business, finance, and pleasure to craft unforgettable adult-centric experiences, such as dance parties, seated shows, salons, workshops, and tantalizing events like burlesque nights. As a magnetic Master of Ceremonies, Cuffs fosters a welcoming environment and nurtures community for all, including first-time attendees, seasoned regulars, the curious, and the professionals. Her high-profile nightclub events, bustling with vibrant dance parties and engaging performance-centered shows, invite attendees to connect with their deepest pleasure-seeking selves, championing safety and freedom. Cuffs promotes discovery in both event and educational class settings, spaces she has owned and operated for years. Skilled in all aspects of event curation, Cuffs constructs the ideal corporate-immersive experience for all comfort levels. Venus Cuffs, a nightlife "jack of all trades," eschews singularity in event curation, opting to infuse her distinctive brand into event spaces and esteemed venues across New York City. As a former Dominatrix, Venus Cuffs has established herself as a respected authority in specialized alternative cultures and lifestyles, sought-after as an expert consultant and contributor. As a dedicated full-time Nightlife Producer, Venus Cuffs is devoted to creating safe, inclusive, sexy, and fun spaces across platforms. To delve deeper into her acclaimed nightlife productions, follow her journey on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok at @venuscuffs, and sign up for future events on ,venuscuffs.com,.
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Born in Indonesia of Chinese/Indonesian descent and now based in NYC, Belinda Adam (she/they) is a queer immigrant performing artist, erotic energy worker, tantra and kink practitioner. As a multidisciplinary artist, their work draws from a queer immigrant woman perspective aiming to manifest the unconditioned truths in all bodies towards collective healing and liberation. They are a 2022 Gallim Moving Artist Residency Award recipient, 2022 Stephen Petronio Residency Award Recipient, and a 2020 Artist of Exceptional Merit from The Asian American Arts Alliance. Upon moving to NYC in 2015, Adam worked with BitterSuite UK at BAM and Designated Movement Company, featured in NYTimes. They have appeared in commercials of VICE-iD, THINX, MILK Makeup, Refinery29 and performed for Women’s March and TEDx. Adam was a dance artist of a femme identifying contemporary dance theater company, MICHIYAYA DANCE, and recently became the creative advisor for their latest work. A multidimensional artist, Adam has taught and performed at venues and institutions like Yale University, Brooklyn Museum, Andy Warhol Museum, The Theater at 14th St Y, NYU Jack Crystal Theater, Baruch Performing Arts Center and Gibney Dance Center among others.
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Sophie Lewis is a writer, para-academic and utopian living in Philadelphia, lecturing widely and teaching courses at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, online. Sophie is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso Books, 2019) and Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (forthcoming, October 4). Their essays on octopus documentaries and other queer subjects have appeared in n+1, the London Review of Books and The New York Times.
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Nahee Kim(She/They) is an artist and programmer who explores the possibility of computational representation of sexual experiences and contemporary family institutions as biopolitical technology to control human reproduction. nahee.app is Kim's virtual persona to share their playful speculation about computer programs to organize past sexual relationships and help sexual communication to enhance love and satisfaction. As nahee.app, Kim creates code poems about sex, visual documentation about speculative sex toys and networks, web applications hosting machine-recognized sexual movements. Recently Kim focuses on her family programming project, <Daddy Residency> to delve into the truth of normative family structure. In <Daddy Residency>, Kim will have a baby by herself with donated sperm and raise the baby with multiple Daddy residents who will be recruited from the open call process of the project. By sharing this with the public as an art project, she tries to reveal and investigate her own and people’s discomforted feelings and responses towards the realization of the unconventional family planning project. She is based in Seoul and New York. She is a member of South Korean artist collective eobchae, was a resident of MassMOCA and a member of NEWINC, and will be a resident at Pioneer Works in Fall 2022.
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Es is a second-gen, mixed race non-binary femme has had the privilege of dreaming & building in queer/trans, disabled movement spaces in NYC for the last decade-and-a-half. Es has also worked as a social worker for the last ten of those years utilizing their tendency for encyclopedic nerdism to build an extensive rolodex of accessible & queer-affirming programs, services, and community spaces throughout the city. Es has experience facilitating many'a community workshop; ranging from abolitionist sex education programming to art-alchemy empowerment groups. Es is a fervent believer in the power of human connection, resilience, & the sacred art of oral story-telling.
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Zainab "Zai'' Aliyu is a Nigerian-American artist and cultural worker living in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY). Her work contextualizes the cybernetic and temporal entanglement embedded within societal dynamics to understand how all socio-technological systems of control are interconnected, and how we are all materially implicated through time. She draws upon her body as a corporeal archive and site of ancestral memory to craft counter-narratives through sculpture, video, installation, built virtual environments, printed matter, archives, and community-participatory (un)learning. Zai is currently a co-director of the School for Poetic Computation, design director for the African Film Festival at the Film at Lincoln Center in NYC and a 2023-24 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow. Her work has been shown at Film at Lincoln Center (NYC), Museum of Modern Art Library (NYC), Miller ICA (Pittsburgh), the Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (Hong Kong), Casa do Povo (São Paulo, Brazil), Aktuelle Architektur der Kulturimages (Murcia, Spain), Pocoapoco (Oaxaca, Mexico) among others.
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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.
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Our programs are conducted in spoken English with audiovisual materials such as slides, code examples and video.
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.
Applications open until Applications closed on July 1, 2022.
You can expect to hear back from us about the status of your application on July 15, 2022. Please email us at admissions@sfpc.study with any questions you have.
For 10 classes, it costs $1400 + 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.