School
for
Poetic
Computation
All software programs contain “machine language” — the low-level digital code to which machines can respond directly. This course seeks to expand our critical and creative understandings of how communications with machines occur, and to create agency to influence or redirect how these interactions shape our comprehension of ourselves, each other, and our worlds. Over 10 weeks, we’ll frame our examinations through four lenses: quantization, computation, assembly, and hardware dependency. In what ways does constant interfacing with a multiplicity of machines contour our sensory perceptions, informational structures, and bodily abilities? How do we identify and interrogate our sociotechnical imaginaries in ways which recognize our entangled relationships? How might we better understand the machine languages that surround us, and how might we start to build alternatives? Weekly readings, in-class discussion, example projects, and creative prompts will all be used as we explore our personal and collective relationship to machine language.
Images courtesy of teachers, participants and class documentarians.
This class is for you if:
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.
she/her
· website
· twitter
· instagram
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.
he/him
· website
· twitter
· instagram
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.
Tell us about a beautiful or frustrating experience you had communicating with a machine.
Applications open until Applications closed on December 2, 2022.
You can expect to hear back from us about the status of your application on December 16, 2022. Please email us at admissions@sfpc.study with any questions you have.
For 10 classes, it costs $1200 + $39.24 in 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.