School
for
Poetic
Computation
Sex Ed is a three-week intensive designed to create the sex education we never had, but always sought. Participants will unlearn the harmful social programming of sex education environments governed by a culture of control and extraction in a platonic space informed by cultural understandings of queerness, gender, class and race, and how our identities relate to sexual desires, preferences and kinks. At Sex Ed, we believe pleasure is knowledge and its study is sacred.
Sex Ed is a tuition free program thanks to the Art for Justice Fund, a sponsored project of the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.
Sex Ed is an invitation to study the power and poetry of erotics and to imagine new ways of choreographing sexual energy into your life. Classes are designed to raise more questions than they answer.
Through a balanced, interwoven study of gender, fantasy, sexuality, queering consent, power play, surveillance and sex work, participants will engage in open discussion, movement workshops, drawing and dreaming exercises, resource sharing, and collective knowledge building. Anonymity of all participants will be protected without explicit consent given. Stigma surrounding sex is real and will be discussed.
Sex Ed studies the very systems that create barriers to safety, pleasure, and healing. The process of direct confrontation with these barriers can feel uncomfortable. We will work together to create boundaries that make it easier for everyone involved to feel as safe and comfortable as possible throughout the session. A special Community Agreement designed for Sex Ed will be activated on the first day of session to hold our space.
Through conversation, education, consent, and play, we hope to explore pleasure studies with you.
In order to further reduce financial barriers to participation, we are offering support funds on a sliding scale ($0-400 per participant). This $1200 fund is intended to support the participation of Low Income/Working Class People of Color and Queer/Trans People.
Throughout the session there will be a mental health counselor available for participants to book individual counseling sessions with. There will always be two organizers present in every class to support participants and teachers with their learning.
Classes will be hosted by two incredible NYC venues, Creative Time and Hex House. Daily classes will take place in the evenings from 6:30-9:30pm with a break in the middle May 13-24. The third week will be an optional residency week hosted at Hex House with informal workshops led by guests and participants themselves. The session will culminate in a final showcase at a date to be determined in the near future.
Topics covered on the syllabus include:
Participants will be expected to:
Participants will NOT be expected to:
Participants will be invited to:
This session may be for you if you:
The session may NOT be for you if you:
Participants will be required to provide proof of up-to-date vaccination status (including boosters) to attend. Participants, teachers and staff are expected to test twice a week and be masked during class. Before the first day of class and final showcase, all participants will be expected to show a negative result on a Covid test.
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.
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DaemonumX is a femme leatherdyke passionate about educating queer people on deviant sexualities and alternate relationship structures. She is a polyamory and BDSM coach offering accessible resources to the queer community. DaemonumX hosts several Leather and sex parties in Brooklyn, NY. Her words on BDSM and polyamory can be found in Them, Autostraddle, Logo, and via her zines Fist and Linked.
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Venus Cuffs, an esteemed Nightlife Producer, seamlessly merges her prowess in business, finance, and pleasure to craft unforgettable adult-centric experiences, such as dance parties, seated shows, salons, workshops, and tantalizing events like burlesque nights. As a magnetic Master of Ceremonies, Cuffs fosters a welcoming environment and nurtures community for all, including first-time attendees, seasoned regulars, the curious, and the professionals. Her high-profile nightclub events, bustling with vibrant dance parties and engaging performance-centered shows, invite attendees to connect with their deepest pleasure-seeking selves, championing safety and freedom. Cuffs promotes discovery in both event and educational class settings, spaces she has owned and operated for years. Skilled in all aspects of event curation, Cuffs constructs the ideal corporate-immersive experience for all comfort levels. Venus Cuffs, a nightlife "jack of all trades," eschews singularity in event curation, opting to infuse her distinctive brand into event spaces and esteemed venues across New York City. As a former Dominatrix, Venus Cuffs has established herself as a respected authority in specialized alternative cultures and lifestyles, sought-after as an expert consultant and contributor. As a dedicated full-time Nightlife Producer, Venus Cuffs is devoted to creating safe, inclusive, sexy, and fun spaces across platforms. To delve deeper into her acclaimed nightlife productions, follow her journey on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok at @venuscuffs, and sign up for future events on ,venuscuffs.com,.
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Gabriella Garcia is a creative researcher with over a decade of experience of sharing stories about networked subcultures and technologically-enabled intimacy. She is the director of Decoding Stigma, where she works toward prioritizing erotic labor as a necessary ethics question for futurists. As part of NewINC’s Y10 cohort, she is evolving Decoding Stigma into a space that uses speculative fiction and magical realism to gather sex workers together over designing potential futures toward potential real-world solutions. Her expanded practice includes techno-feminist research, community-centered archiving, multimedia performance art, and poetic technology. She has presented work at the NYU Institute for Public Knowledge, Parsons Cloud Salon, Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, New Museum, Gray Area SF, Hacking//Hustling, Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, Decriminalized Future's Ladies of the Night School, and Museum of Sex.
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Tina Horn is a writer, educatrix, and media-maker. Her book of fetish cultural criticism based on her long-running indie podcast Why Are People Into That?! will be out in June 2024 from Hachette. Tina is the creator/writer of the sci-fi sex-rebel comic book series Safe Sex (Image), and the cult detective thriller Deprog; she was also the host/cowriter of the phone sex podcast Operator (Wondery). Her reporting on sexual subcultures has appeared in Rolling Stone, Playboy, Hazlitt, Glamour, Jezebel and elsewhere; she is the author of two nonfiction books and has contributed to numerous anthologies including We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival, which she also coedited. Tina has lectured on adult entertainment politics and queer BDSM identities at universities and community centers all over North America, and works as an on-set consultant for theater, film, and television including the dominatrix scenes of Pose. She is a LAMBDA Literary Fellow, an AVN nominee, the recipient of two Feminist Porn Awards, and holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence. You can follower her on Twitter and Instagram @TinaHornsAss and visit ,TinaHorn.net
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Ericka Hart (pronouns: she/they) is a Black queer non-binary femme writer and award-winning sexuality educator with a Master’s of Education in Human Sexuality from Widener University. Ericka’s voice is rooted in leading edge thought around human sexual expression as inextricable to overall human health and its intersections with race, gender, chronic illness and disability. Both radical and relatable, she continues to push well beyond the threshold of sex positivity. They have taught sexuality education for elementary aged youth to adults across New York City for over 15 years, including for 4 years at Columbia University’s School of Social work and the CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College. They are currently an adjunct faculty member at Widener University’s Center for Human Sexuality, a bratty switchy Sagittarius service bottom and misses Whitney more than you.
they/she
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Ayanna Dozier is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker-artist and writer. Across performance, experimental film, writing, and photography, her work remixes personal memory to examine power, trauma, death, and sex within interpersonal relationships and by the state. She is currently an assistant professor of communication, with an emphasis on film, at the University Massachusetts, Amherst and is the author of Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope (2020). Her visual art is represented by Microscope Gallery.
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cosima bee concordia is a femme leatherdyke based in Portland, Oregon who can generally be found around the internet as bimbo theory. In past lives she’s been a bookseller, an English teacher, a philosophy student, and a limp-wristed sissy, but these days she’s a writer of horror, essays, theory, and weird experimental fragments as well as a co-host for a show about religious eroticism, anti-fascism, and queer perversion called Drunk Church. Her whole thing is pushing the boundaries of body and self in both her intimacy and art, and for the past year post-covid she’s been settling into her chronically ill girl rot era.
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Monica Mirabile (B. Clearwater, Florida in 1988) is an artist, choreographer and facilitator living in NYC. Her work is multi- process: converging performance, installation and audio composition that explores how power, support and spirit operate within the body. Her choreographic productions as well as her workshops present performance as behavior, are often collaborative and have a focus on therapeutic practice. Mirabile is one half of the performance duo Fluct exhibiting performances nationally and internationally. She has choreographed and movement directed various musicians including SOPHIE, Mitski, Yaeji, Zsela & Maggie Rogers. She founded Otion Front Studio, a performance rehearsal space in Brooklyn, New York in 2014, Co-Founded 'This Is A Performance School' in 2023 and currently organizes the Open Movement program at Performance Space New York in the East Village.
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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.
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Our programs are conducted in spoken English with audiovisual materials such as slides, code examples and video.
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.
Applications open until Applications closed on March 18, 2024.
You can expect to hear back from us about the status of your application on . Please email us at admissions@sfpc.study with any questions you have.
This class is free / pay-what-you-want through the support of external funding.
At SFPC we believe that no one should be denied an educational opportunity because of their inability to pay. Through the support of funders and community donors, we are able to subsidize tuition-free classes and provide scholarships for participants.
Our scholarships directly redistribute wealth to those who might otherwise be unable to participate in our program. Scholarships are a critical resource on our way towards creating a more comprehensive free or donation-based model in the future.
We know this future is possible through the generous help of current, former and future participants, community members, and friends of the school on WithFriends. Please become a member to help us become a beautiful school that can offer free and low cost classes and events in the future.
This class is made possible by a grant from Art for Justice Fund, a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. Through this grant, we offer tuition-free classes that interrogate the role technology plays in the carceral system through the study of critical theory, computation, visual art and poetry.
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.
