School
for
Poetic
Computation
Experiences with archives, their gaps and harms, can be both painful and fruitful for people of color, as despite themselves, these materials offer glimpses into possible pasts and futures. In this class we will use creative means like Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, interactive historical fiction, 3D and photographic worldbuilding, and multisensory immersion to develop relationships with possible ancestors, using archival records as building materials. We will explore techniques for weaving ancestral spaces into our lives, while learning about the work of artists, writers, poets, and game designers who have written themselves into their own pasts in many different ways.
Images courtesy of teachers.
This class may be for you if:
This class may NOT be for you if:
Jeffrey Yoo Warren (he/him) is a Korean American artist-educator, community scientist, illustrator, and researcher in Providence, RI, who collaboratively creates community science projects which decenter dominant culture in environmental knowledge production. His recent work combines ancestral craft practices and creative work with diasporic memory through virtual collaborative worldbuilding. Jeff is an educator with Movement Education Outdoors and AS220, and part of the New Old art collective with Aisha Jandosova, hosting art-making and storytelling events with older adults; he is also the 2023 Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress.
His current artistic practice investigates how people build identity and strength through their interactions with artifacts and histories, and the ways that objects can tell stories that people can be part of in the present.
he/him
· website
· twitter
· instagram
Dri Chiu Tattersfield experiments with zines, games, and speculative fiction towards futures that hold everyone they love. They are interested in connecting with alternative histories of science and ancestral ways of knowing, both as a high school physics educator and in their (inter)personal art practice. He dreams about memory, zines as altars, and altars as portals. Dri’s friends joke that he thinks everything is a zine, which he does. They are a member of NEW INC Year 10 in the Creative Science Track and a fellow of the 2023 Lambda Literary Writers Retreat in the Speculative Fiction cohort. Dri lives in Taipei, Taiwan.
they/he
· 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.
What’s an encoded message your ancestors might have sent you, and how might you receive it? Think of: a song, a flavor, a habit, an artifact?
Applications open until Applications closed on November 22, 2023.
You can expect to hear back from us about the status of your application on December 11, 2023. 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.