School
for
Poetic
Computation
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While the passing winter should have been about turning inward, easing into hibernation, digesting teas and soups, restoring our bodies, tucking ourselves in, and drifting off into our dreams; many of us found ourselves awoken by a cacophony of compounding catastrophes where thousands upon millions of us are being denied not just the rituals of a season, but the rights of life.
We mustn’t turn away. Turn towards community: the remedy against the silence and suffering and apathy and indifference that follows devastation. Alone we are powerless. Together, we are an unruly force of nature. Perhaps a resolute gust of wind marking the first day of spring. And with the spring air comes cumulus clouds—fluffy, alabaster, and full of possibilities. Imagine the world you want to live in. What kind of life does it support? Together, we’ll breathe new life into the clouds. We can look to the sky for a reminder of the life-giving beauty we are capable of.
This spring, we offer five classes and a special intensive that prompt us to reconnect with the possibility that technology can be a tool for wonder and excitement rather than a tool of violence and dispossession: What does inquiring about the past tell us about the future? How can we transmute the trauma associated with learning about a particular subject? How does our relationship to computation impact our consumption of media and art? What does the waywardness of our communication reveal? How can our mistakes help us find a new beginning? What questions do we not know, but need to ask in order to get us to the world we want to live in?
Spring 2024
is
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.
Melanie Hoff
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.
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.
Celine Wong Katzman
Celine Wong Katzman is Curator at Rhizome and serves as one of seven co-directors at the School for Poetic Computation. Previously she was a NYSCA Curatorial Fellow at the Queens Museum. Celine is committed to supporting creative practitioners experimenting with new media, particularly those who engage in a thoughtful and community-oriented approach. Her writing appears in publications such as The Nation, Art in America, Rhizome, as well as in the New Museum's exhibition catalog, The Art Happens Here: Net Art's Archival Poetics and Paper Monument's Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the arts. She holds a B.A. in Visual Art with honors from Brown University.
and
Tyler Yin
Tyler Yin is an artist and technologist currently residing in Brooklyn, NY. His work layers themes of perception, obfuscation, and labor into various forms—including zines, processed imagery, and interactive media. He is also a cofounder and organizer for Tiny Tech Zines, a QTPOC-led tech zine fair & collective centering the ways marginalized communities relate to technology. Tyler holds a BA in Design | Media Arts from UCLA, and has taught in the Parsons Design and Technology program at The New School. His work has appeared at the Brooklyn Art Book Fair, Moving Zine Fair, L.A. Zine Fest, and CultureHub NYC. .
It includes classes with
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.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed
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.
Nabil Hassein
Nabil Hassein is a technologist, researcher, and educator who previously worked as a high school math teacher, a software developer, and a freelancer, and is currently a PhD candidate in New York University's Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, writing a dissertation on Arabic-based programming languages and their associated communities. Nabil is an alum of SFPC's previous full time program, and has previously worked for SFPC as a teaching assistant in the critical theory of technology course and co-organizer of Code Ecologies and Mathematics as a Religious Experience, besides previous iterations teaching Learning to Love Mathematics.
Tiri Kananuruk
Bangkok-born, New York-based Tiri Kananuruk is a performance artist and educator. Her works focus on the manipulation of sound, the disruption of time. How technologies change the meaning and the ways we communicate. She utilizes mistakes, both human and machine, as means of improvisation. She holds a BA in Exhibition Design from Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, and a Master in Interactive Telecommunications from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Tiri has lectured at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and the School for Poetic Computation. She is currently an adjunct professor at Collaborative Arts, New York University. She was a new media artist resident at Mana Contemporary (2019), CultureHub New York (2020), Barnard Movement Lab (NUUM)(2020), and Media Art Exploration (NUUM)(2021). She is a NEW INC Member in the Creative Science track. She is a founding member of NUUM collective. She is a co-founder of MORAKANA along with Sebastián Morales.
Carey J. Flack
Carey Flack is a creative technologist, researcher, writer, and archivist living on the Muscogee Nation Reservation [Tulsa, OK]. As a 7th generation Oklahoman and experimental archivist, Carey documents Black Southern and Afro-Native land relationships through her IG blog @pressed.roots. Her work explores land and ancestral memory, time, diasporic experiences, language and culture preservation, and personal narrative. She’s passionate about designing that work that gently helps people intimately witness the interlocking oppressions and dreams within and around them.
Omayeli Arenyeka
Yeli is a Nigerian artist, writer, and technologist based in Brooklyn. She primarily makes things that live on the internet. She is interested in the creative and critical possibilities of the web and data: its potentials for personal expression, solidarity and fostering disillusionment.
Ashley Jane Lewis
Ashley Jane Lewis is a new media artist with a focus on afrofuturism, bio art, social justice and speculative design. Her artistic practice explores black cultures of the past, present and future through computational and analog mediums including coding and machine learning, data weaving, microorganisms and live performance. Listed in the top 100 Black Women to Watch in Canada, her award winning work on empowered futures for marginalized groups has exhibited in both Canada and the US, most notably featured on the White House website during the Obama presidency. Her practice is tied to science and actively incorporates living organisms like slime mould and food cultures (kombucha and sourdough starters) to explore ways of decentralizing humans and imagine collective, multi species survival. Ashley is currently an Artist in Residence at Culture Hub NYC as well as part of the Culture Futures Track in the NEW INC year 7 cohort, an art, design and technology incubator run within the New Museum.
Kenia Hale
Kenia Hale (she/her) is a writer and technologist from Cleveland, Ohio. A grandchild of the great migration (via Mississippi, Arkansas, and Georgia), Kenia graduated with distinction from Yale University, where she majored in Computing and the Arts (Architecture Concentration). She has worked as an Emerging Scholar at the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy and the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, where she researched liberatory technologies, digital marronage, and critical technology ecologies, and presented her research at conferences around the world including 4S in Cholula, Mexico, Data 4 Public Good, and the United Nations “Artificial Intelligence to support Collective Intelligence for Sustainable Development” conference in Doha, Qatar. She has also served as an Environmental Justice in Tech fellow at Earth Hacks, co-head teacher at The Octavia Project, and is a founding editor of Porch Water Press (,porchwaterpress.com,), a Black Queer publishing press based in Lenapehoking. Kenia also maintains her own creative practices, including writing award-winning speculative fiction, coding video games with her friends, and playing bass in her all BIPOC punk band, Speakeasy (@speakeasy_nb). Her research interests examine the intersection between technology, environmental justice, and racial justice. You can learn more about her work at ,keniahale.com,.
Shiraz Abdullahi Gallab
Shiraz Abdullahi Gallab is a designer, educator and publisher who was born but not raised in Khartoum, Sudan. She is interested in language, form and specificity, alongside media, Black studies and popular culture.
Adelle Lin
Adelle Lin Yingxi is a Malaysian artist, activist, and technologist based in Brooklyn. They produce interactive and playful experiences that visualize hidden connections and extend the body. These works take the form of crafted objects, responsive wearables, immersive installations, and intentional happenings. Adelle draws inspiration from Toni Cade Bambara's teachings of using ‘sister as a verb’, their work encourages collective research, conversation, and social interaction to address issues of division, marginalization, climate justice, and women's rights.
and
Margot Armbruster
Margot Armbruster is a poet and SFPC alum in Brooklyn, NY. Margot has worked as a writer, researcher, educator, community organizer, and musician at The Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice, the National Humanities Center, Yale University Press, and elsewhere. They currently research higher education at a New York-based media company. Margot’s creative work appears in The Guardian, USA Today, Belt Magazine, and The Adroit Journal, among other outlets. They are interested in music, math, linguistics, conversation, and prayer, and practice each of these in earnest imperfection. Margot earned a B.A. in English and Political Theory at Duke University, where they picked figs and took long autumn walks in the campus gardens. .
Applications closed.
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