School
for
Poetic
Computation
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The School for Poetic Computation welcomed a new winter session of classes. This season, we were found physically hibernating in cozy dwellings where, as usual, we brought our collective study with us. Since rest comes with reflection and dreams, we found ourselves contemplating the very philosophical matters that brought us here. How do we commune with plants, machines, ancestors, or the universe? Three new classes approached these questions with critical, scientific, political, and artistic inquiry that merged logical and intuitive formulations, so that we could emerge on the other side of winter ready to take root for the vernal equinox.
Winter 2023
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
As an artist, educator, and organizer, Melanie studies the role that technology plays in social organization and in reinforcing hegemonic structures. They are co-director of the School for Poetic Computation and a founding member of Hex House and the Cybernetics Library. Melanie strives to cultivate spaces of learning and feeling that encourage honesty and reconciliation for the ways we are shaped by systems of gender, racialization, class, and the trauma these systems inscribe upon our bodies.
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
Sean Catangui
Sean Catangui is a graphics editor at the New York Times, a lecturer at the New School, and an SFPC alum. He combines code, design, and art direction in service of visual storytelling.
Kendra Krueger
Kendra is an intersectional scientist, educator, artist and woman of color on many edges. Raised by artists, educated as an electrical engineer (BS Renssaeler Polytechnic Institute, MS CU Boulder) she is also trained in anti-oppression facilitation, theater, mindfulness and permaculture/social ecology. Her work and research is a convergence of these many waters. She founded 4LoveandScience in 2014 as a platform to teach transformative science throughout the country. She frequently collaborates with artist to curate and produce multi-media installations and immersive performances around themes of psyche and science. She currently works as a science educator at CUNY's Advanced Science Research Center where she has founded The Community Sensor Lab as a space for DIY community science and advocacy.
Sherri Wasserman
Sherri Wasserman is a designer, writer/researcher, and multidisciplinary collaborator who constructs experiences at the intersections of physical, multimedia, and informational landscapes. She makes things for print, digital, and architectural/environmental spaces, creating content-rich exhibitions, installations, publications, websites, and mobile apps for wide-ranging audiences. In addition to her experience on projects ranging from individual artist partnerships to initiatives for major institutions, she has a background in visual art and history (Oberlin College), design and programming for emerging technologies (ITP at NYU), and science and technology studies (ASU’s Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology PhD program). Her work increasingly focuses on expanding collective survivability through engagement with complex systems, sustainability and environmental justice principles, ethical documentary and design practices, and futures methods.
Zahra Hassan
Zahra is an interdisciplinary scholar from Vienna with roots in Iraq.
With a background in journalism and media, they are now dedicated to environmental studies and creative writing within NYU’s Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement program. Recently, their work has been revolving around Iraqi orange trees, and what it means to come into their senses when conducting research. They are currently writing a piece of speculative fiction about environmental disaster. It looks at sandstorms, droughts, floods, and how we can move closer together to create alliances beyond disciplines, borders, and species.
Jace Clayton
Jace Clayton is an artist and writer based in New York, also known for his work as DJ /rupture. He is the author of 'Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture' (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Clayton is currently an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts and Interim Director of Columbia University’s Sound Art MFA Program.
and
Matt Jacobson
Matt Jacobson is a recreational mathematician, educator, and generative artist based in New York City. Working with algorithms and plotters his work focuses on mathematical aesthetics and how they can help us explore and expose the often obfuscated rules that guide the world around us. .
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