School
for
Poetic
Computation
Teaching and Learning as "PRIMITIVE HYPERTEXT" uses texts authored by Octavia Estelle Butler as a starting point to explore teaching as a relational practice that builds networks between all organisms and knowledges. In this course, while we will start with Butler, you will be introduced to a range of other texts that expand our "aperture" (Zaretta Hammond) of our practices as both teachers and learners. How might the 1998 interview between Samuel Delany and Butler invite us think about choreography and storytelling methods in our teaching practice? How might Butler's 1989 essay "Positive Obsession" and her 1991 interview with Randall Kenan in Callaloo help us think about the role of trance, possession, and the ecstatic during the learning process? What does Butler's archive of handwritten notes reveal to us about the importance of revision, ritual, and "failure" in learning? After exploring the role of Lauren Olamina in Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993), what can we learn about interdisciplinarity, interdependence, improvisation, and intuition in our teaching practice? What does it mean to teach for liberation? What is possible within institutions?
Images courtesy of teachers, participants and class documentarians.
The only prerequisite is that you have either taught a class and wished you had a different approach or you've sat in a class and wished the instructor had a different approach :)
A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed grapples with the poetics of Black knowledge production, information technologies, [un]learning, and belief formation. Most recently, she is a recipient of a 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research; a 2022 Creative Capital Award; a 2022 Betty Parsons Fellow – Artists2Artists Art Matters Award; a 2022 Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants - Experiments with Google; and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Rasheed is the author of five artist's books: in the coherence, we weep (KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2023); i am not done yet (Mousse Publishing, 2022); 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). Her writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, The New Inquiry, Shift Space, Active Cultures, and The Believer. She is an adjunct instructor at the Cooper Union, a Critic at Yale School of Art, Sculpture, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation. Rasheed is represented by NOME Gallery in Berlin, Germany.
she/her
· website
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· instagram
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.
she/her
· website
· twitter
· instagram
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 was your favorite learning experience? What was your least favorite learning experience?
Applications open until Applications closed on February 12, 2023.
You can expect to hear back from us about the status of your application on February 24, 2023. Please email us at admissions@sfpc.study with any questions you have.
For 5 classes, it costs $750 + 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.