School
for
Poetic
Computation
As our daily activities and closest relationships become increasingly bound up with corporate systems of surveillance and exploitation, let’s explore and cultivate code as a love language that can be gentle, healing, and intimate. How do we want to live in a post COVID-19 world, and what role do we want technology to play? Digital Love Languages: Codes of Affirmation is a class about building poetic tools for online communion through a re-introduction to computers. This class is also a call to action for expanding computation’s capacity for fostering interdependence and emotive expression. Together we will build small and personal software for affirming one another across physical distance. Technology will be unpacked as a social process, not only a logic or material, regarding code as a craft and medium capable of expressing the full range of feeling and desire. This class owes a great deal to the works of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Olia Lialina, Cory Arcangel, Lauren McCarthy, and Allison Parrish. This class is also deeply inspired by BUFU & China Residencies where a group discussion in a Cloud9 workshop called Queering Zoom led by Tate Benson inspired the title of this class.
This course will be in two parts. The first four weeks will be focused on getting comfortable with the building blocks of programming and natural language processing using Python. We will look to the history of the love letter as a form, from the quill to the sext.
The last four weeks will be an investigation of the browser as a fertile site for ambient and playful communication. Through code and the browser we can facilitate the kind of care that happens in the small moments of routine. In this part of the course we will get comfortable with the building blocks of the web and make browser extensions using javascript.
We will learn:
No prior coding experience is necessary, as this class is oriented towards new programmers. We are committed to co-creating with participants an anti-racist, anti-sexist, and environmentally conscious theory of computation. The code of conduct will be co-written by and upheld by all participants. SFPC is a school organized by people who are committed to making space for people who exist at the intersections of oppressed identities, including but not limited to those who are queer, trans, people of color, or disabled. The pedagogy of this class draws on the lead teacher Melanie Hoff’s experience as a programmer, artist, and organizer of Code Societies, a three week intensive event at the School for Poetic Computation. In Code Societies, we engaged with code and the ways code acts on our bodies and networks, equally as subject and as medium. Both Code Societies and Digital Love Languages approach learning a technical thing as inseparable from learning a social history of that thing.
This class is intended for beginners without much experience in coding. If you have experience with coding, we recommend other classes offered at SFPC.
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.
any
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Max Fowler is an artist and programmer working with offline-first software, mycology and community infrastructure. They are a contributor to PeachCloud, software that makes hosting peer to peer software on local low-power hardware more accessible. They are also a co-founder of KiezPilz (kiezpilz.de), a communal fungi cultivation group based in Berlin. They were a student at the School For Poetic Computation in 2016, and later a TA. They are one of the admins of sunbeam.city, and are interested in foraging, flip-phones, rust and html.
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Adina Glickstein is a writer and editor interested in the social implications of emerging technology. Her work focuses on labor and language in view of new media. She has edited books and magazines for the international art press centered on subjects like Web3, AI, and digital intersubjectivity, and previously wrote a monthly column about "internet culture" for Spike Art Magazine.
she/they
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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.
any pronouns
· website
· twitter
· instagram
Emma Rae Bruml practices writing and teaching. She is an artist and a scholar who studies the history of the computer mouse. In other words, Emma studies the space between humans and computers
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.
Applications open until Applications closed on June 1, 2020.
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.
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.