School
for
Poetic
Computation
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This Spring, we brought five classes which asked: Who owns and benefits from network infrastructure? How can we refigure the music of the modern internet? What constitutes a story? How does a computer understand the patterns of nature? What does it mean to teach and learn? Starting in March, five classes came together with our preconceived notions and collective imaginations, ready to upend old understandings and assemble something anew. From network infrastructure and mutual aid, to science fiction and the fluidity of teaching and learning — the ice was cracking, we gathered for the thaw!
Spring 2023
was
organized by
Zainab Aliyu
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.
Neta Bomani
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.
Galen Macdonald
Galen Macdonald is an artist and arts organizer based in Tkaronto/Toronto whose work currently straddles hand craft, kinetic sculpture, poetry, and new media. He uses whatever tools are available to make delicate and limited tools for communication.
Melanie Hoff
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.
and
Todd Anderson
Todd Anderson is a digital poet, software artist and educator based in New York City. He has been making experimental software art for over 10 years including the live interactive poetry project Hotwriting, the Chrome Extension ARG 'An Experience', the performance-inside-the-browser extension HitchHiker, and multiple plays and performances with the multidisciplinary group H0t Club. He is perhaps best known as the host and curator of WordHack, the monthly language+technology talk series in NYC running every third Thursday since 2014. .
It included classes with
Kameelah Janan Rasheed
A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed (she/they), grapples with the poetics-pleasures-politics of Black knowledge production, information technologies, [un]learning, and belief formation. They are a recipient of a 2022 Creative Capital Award and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Rasheed is the author of three artist’s books: An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019), No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019), and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021). Their writing, has appeared in Triple Canopy, The New Inquiry, Shift Space, Active Cultures, and The Believer.
Max Fowler
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.
Elizabeth Perez
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.
Mark A Hernandez Motaghy
Mark Anthony Hernandez Motaghy is an artist and cultural worker. They live in the occupied territory of the Naumkeag, Pawtucket, and Massachusett tribe. Operating with mediums such as experimental video, as well as installation, books, and oral histories, Mark's current practice is exploring sites of commoning, care-based economies, and sociotechnical imaginaries. They were previously a researcher at The Poetic Justice Group at MIT Media Lab, where Mark investigated decentralized story-telling models and community-driven sculptures. In addition, Mark is the compiler of the zine-book Rehearsing Solidarity: Learning from Mutual Aid, published by Thick Press, documenting mutual aid experiments in response to state failings and the social and digital infrastructures created for communities to fight back.
Tommy Martinez
Tommy is a musician, programmer, and organizer investigating algorithmic approaches to sound composition, simulations, and manifestations of identity, tradition and history in electronic culture. He has lectured on computer music and media art and is a professor at School of Visual Arts. Tommy is the co-editor of Software for Artists Book: Untethering the Web (Pioneer Works Press, 2022), and currently a Brooklyn College Sonic Arts MFA candidate.
Alice Yuan Zhang
Alice Yuan Zhang 张元 is a Chinese-American media artist, researcher, and cultural organizer based in Los Angeles. Her transdisciplinary practice operates on cyclical and intergenerational time. Along the peripheries of colonialist imagination, she works to bring technology down to earth by devising collective experiments in ancestral remembering, interspecies pedagogy, and networked solidarity.
Chloe Alexandra Thompson
Thompson is a Cree, Canadian, interdisciplinary artist and sound designer. Thompson approaches sound as a mode of connection—embracing the kinesthetic agency of sound to compose abstract feats of spatialized audio recording and synthesis. Her work engages tactics of material minimalism to create site-specific installations that sculpt droning, maximalist experiences out of space and sound. Using audio programming software, computational processing, and acoustic instruments, Thompson’s work seeks to create connection by guiding audience participants through these augmented experiences.
Yadira Sanchez
Yadira Sanchez is a creative technologist working on justice and community-based technological co-creation. Organising and researching to stand against the use of violent tech.
April Soetarman
April Soetarman (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and writer who creates public art, immersive installations, games, and weird side projects. Her site-responsive works play with the language of everyday objects and speculative institutions to explore complex human emotions. Her installations have been supported by the Seattle Art Museum, the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and CultureHub, among others, as well as anonymously installed in dozens of public spaces across the country. April was also known for WeirdSideProjects.com, her previously-anonymous series of ongoing experiments in code, text, and street art. Her most notable projects include The Museum of Almost Realities (2017), The Department of Emotional Labor (2019), and The End of the Day (2020). April has a BA in architecture and music from UC Berkeley and was an Experiential Design Founding Fellow at Experience Institute.
Murilo Polese
My name is Murilo, I am a Brazilian technologist (or a full stack developer if you prefer) profoundly interested in learning experiences and technology but also music, microscope and drawing machines.
and
Lee Beckwith
Lee 소라 Beckwith teaches computer science and environmental humanities at Miss Porter's School. They are currently pursuing their M.S.Ed through the University of Pennsylvania. These days, they are grateful for cyanotypes, eucalyptus candles, and literary magazines. .
Applications closed.
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