School
for
Poetic
Computation
Digital Love Languages: Communion, Consent, Refusal, Renewal was a class for reframing our relationship to computing [in relations with others]. Digital Love Languages is based on the premise that there is a world where all our software is made by people who love us. Digital Love Languages is an experiment in communion disguised as a class. In this class, we learned about things as a proxy to learn about other things. We learned about digital consent to learn about sexual consent. We learned about digital coding to learn how we’re socially coded. We learned about network protocols to learn about sharing. We learned about naming to learn about knowing. We learned about learning to learn about living. Together, we built small, personal software for affirming one another across physical distance while making and sharing digital space with each other. We engaged with code as a craft capable of expressing a full range of feeling and desire while looking to the love letter as form, from the quill to the sext. We explored social and digital consent and asked: How are they interwoven? Through a series of educational encounters, we built poetic structures for digital touching and practice a re-examination of personal and networked computing. This was a call to action for expanding computation’s capacity for fostering interdependence and feeling among the immense personal and collective transformations brought on by COVID-19, collapse, and renewal.
Images courtesy of teachers.
Things you will need for this class include:
This class may be for you if:
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.
they/them
· website
· twitter
· instagram
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
Max Fowler is an artist and programmer working with offline-first software, mycology and community infrastructure. They are a contributor to PeachCloud, software that makes hosting peer to peer software on local low-power hardware more accessible. They are also a co-founder of KiezPilz (kiezpilz.de), a communal fungi cultivation group based in Berlin. They were a student at the School For Poetic Computation in 2016, and later a TA. They are one of the admins of sunbeam.city, and are interested in foraging, flip-phones, rust and html.
they/them
· website
· twitter
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.
What would technology feel like if it were designed by people who love us? How would the world be different? Who do you wish would make it for you? Who would you make it for?
Applications open until Applications closed on February 25, 2022.
You can expect to hear back from us about the status of your application on March 7, 2022. 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.