School
for
Poetic
Computation
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As the summer heated up, we thought about play. How can play help us express our many selves and redefine our relationships? Participants joined us this summer season to study play through the lenses of poetry, video games and math.
Summer 2022
was
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.
Galen Macdonald
Galen Macdonald is an artist and arts organizer based in Tkaronto/Toronto whose work currently straddles hand craft, kinetic sculpture, poetry, and new media. He uses whatever tools are available to make delicate and limited tools for communication.
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.
and
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. .
It included classes with
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.
Lara Okafor
Lara Okafor (they/them) is a writer and coder with an interest in digital security and the liberatory power of speculative fiction. They hold bachelor's and master's degrees in Computer Science from the University of Oslo and are an SFPC alum. Lara has many years of organising behind them, such as the digital Cutie.BIPoC Festival 2020 and the documentary project 'Loud & Proud: A Celebration Of Queer Black Voices'.
Sidony O'Neal
sidony o’neal is a conceptual artist and writer with a focus on postdigital and synthetic methods for the development of works. Engaging philosophies of translation, mathematics, and computing, o’neal’s approach prioritizes research, intuition, and interface among many types of objects and environments. o’neal’s work has been presented with Veronica, SculptureCenter, and Fourteen30 Contemporary. Performances as a part of non-band DT have been presented with Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Volksbühne Berlin, and Performance Space New York. o’neal is a co-founder of INFANT design company. o’neal’s writing has been published at Arts.Black and the journal of Women & Performance among others. o’neal is the author of the chapbook LYFE IN A BOTTLE TREE BOTTLE (House House Press, 2020). o’neal is a 2022-2023 Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University.
Blake Andrews
Blake Andrews is a game designer, illustrator, animator, and instructor living in New York. They have taught game design at both Bloomfield College and Pratt Institute. Since graduating from New York University’s Game Design MFA program, Blake has been involved with installations and events at Babycastles, Wonderville, and Red Parry. The Babycastles installation, Ribbit’s Frog World, involved several large indoor pits of mud.
Blake’s games are confrontational both mechanically and narratively. They frequently use a distinct low fidelity, crude, cartoon style. Their hundreds of small games are hosted on websites like Glorious Trainwrecks and itch.io.
Outside of digital games and art, Blake shows an enthusiasm for alternative controllers. One of their collaborations with Frank DeMarco, Scrapeboard, has the player scraping a real skateboard, without wheels, on metal pads in order to defeat enemies like Kool Man. Scrapeboard has been featured at alt.ctrl.gdc, a Puma release party, a LilyPichu video, and in The New Yorker.
Lawra Clark
LAWRA SUITS CLARK is a videogames artist, designer, and educator living in New York, and a co-founder of Babycastles Gallery, a 501c3 Non-Profit dedicated to showcasing contemporary independent videogames and other media by marginalized creators. Babycastles is an internationally active volunteer run arts organization based in Manhattan, and plays host to a wide array of events, workshops, and exhibitions.
Lawra's personal work involves climate fiction, absurdist futures, death positivity, ambient play, and game mechanic as poetic device. They are currently an instructor of game design and development at NYU Tisch and NYU Tandon.
and
Gabrielle Octavia Rucker
Gabrielle Octavia Rucker is a poetic practitioner, writer, editor and teaching artist from the Great Lakes currently living on the Gulf Coast. Their work reflects on the complexities of inheriting not only only the unfinished business of past generations but also the silent, often overlooked burdens, such as languages and histories lost to colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. A poet of Black American and Mexican descent, Rucker uses explorative, ritual poetics and asemic writing—a form of wordless script that suggests meaning without linguistic structure—to transcend the constraints of English, a language that is both violent (forced upon her) and limiting (not their mother tongue) in its ability to fully express their poetic intent. Their work considers the dormant and unsayable, reanimating the intangible elements that shape one’s capacity for and understanding of legibility, myth, inheritance and ritual. Rucker is a 2020 Poetry Project Fellow, a 2016 Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, and the founder of the The Seminary of Ecstatic Poetics, a non-traditional learning space for the poetically inclined. Her debut poetry collection, Dereliction (2022) is currently available via The Song Cave. .
Applications closed.
Session promotion design by Sam Seurynck.
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