School
for
Poetic
Computation
“All organizing is science fiction. We are bending the future, together, into something we have never experienced. a world where everyone experiences abundance, access, pleasure, human rights, dignity, freedom, transformative justice, peace. We long for this, we believe it is possible.” —adrienne maree brown “We are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological ruination. Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival. It is time to pay attention to mushroom picking. Not that this will save us—but it might open our imaginations.” ― Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins It cannot be overstated how important the role reading and writing plays in opening up portals to new ways of being together. When we read and write stories about ourselves and society, we make new worlds, write new structures and set new principles of living. As with centuries of folklore traditions, stories of the speculative future are visceral technologies that contain instructions for political ideologies that terraform worlds we can learn a lot from.
Reading into the Past / Writing into the Future is one of two classes that SFPC is fundraising for in our Community Fundraiser. SFPC has not raised enough money to offer this class tuition free as of January 9, 2024. We will continue to accept donations towards the scholarship fund for this class. Donate to help us offer this class for free.
If this sounds like you, then YES!:
This class may NOT be for you if:
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.
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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.
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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,.
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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.
Imagining the year is 2124, which cultural practice will maintain to exist? What might be the same or different about it at that point in the future?
Applications open until Applications closed on February 5, 2024.
You can expect to hear back from us about the status of your application on February 19, 2024. 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.
