School
for
Poetic
Computation
Born-digital artworks erode as the systems that sustain them deteriorate. They often survive as fragments: expired dependencies, incompatible formats, and missing documentation. Digital Decay & Afterlives is a beginner-friendly class in which students will explore digital curation and preservation through archival case studies, experimental documentation, and metadata creation, culminating in a small artistic archive on the web.
Images courtesy of teachers.
Digital Decay & Afterlives asks how can absence, erosion, or obsolescence become part of an artwork’s cultural meaning? What are the ethics of reconstructing a work whose afterlife no longer matches its original circulation? Can AI be used to catalog what is not present?
Through archival case studies, experimental documentation practices, critical writing, and metadata creation, students will develop frameworks for collecting and exhibiting fragmented digital materials from their own practice or a selected collection. Students will work with basic HTML and CSS, build a small database, 3D scan artworks, and publish materials online.
We will look at various techniques for digital curation and preservation as well as strategies for collecting metadata. Students may bring their own archives to work with, or use material collected online. Throughout the class, students will build out a group digital archive of everyone’s respective collections as an online work of art.
No prior coding experience is required. Students should be comfortable experimenting with unfamiliar tools. Projects combine writing, digital media, and light web-based work (HTML/CSS).
This class may be for you if you:
Alexa Ann Bonomo is a tech artist and scholar with a deep interest in methods in preservation and archiving who holds an extensive skillset in creative technology. Her creative work primarily lives on the internet and other ephemeral settings in the form of net art, creative writing and other worldbuilding projects. She is currently crafting lore and researching real time motion capture, simulated memory, and narrative dialog for performance based art in the World Engines Lab. Alexa curates programming and teaches with Index, works on archiving and conserving new media works with Leonardo, and is an adjunct professor at University of San Francisco.
she/her
· website
· instagram
Ivan Zhao is a designer, writer, & words artist based in San Francisco. His artistic work reckons with digital, diasporic, and queer identity through nonlinear narratives, forms, and mechanics. His current practice includes poetry, typography, book objects, websites, and games. His work interrogates questions, such as: how do humans interrogate computational and individual agency, or the language and visualization of translation, characters, and silences? Who defines access for legibility, and the permanence and materiality of language? His poetry can be found in places such as Prism, Foglifter, Michigan Quarterly Review, thehtml.review and elsewhere, and his work has been graciously supported by Community of Writers and Brooklyn Poetry.
he/him
· website
· instagram
Applications open until Applications closed on February 9, 2026.
You can expect to hear back from us about the status of your application on February 25, 2026. 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 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.
For more information about what we look for in applicants, scholarships, and other frequently asked questions, please visit our applicant FAQ.
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