As the heat of the summer cools down, a sense of urgency lingers into fall after we’ve surpassed the boiling point of compounding crises: political and environmental, internal and external. What does it mean to go back to school—back to normal—back to anything while disaster remains? We offer six classes to inspire us to take to the streets, remain present in the face of global violations against life and liberation, speculate new possibilities, cultivate new rituals, and prefigure worlds in which we want to not only live, but thrive in, too. The energy of the first day of school is filled with both anxiety and excitement for the future ahead. New beginnings are the essence of revolution. Channel that revolutionary spirit in everything from the mundane to the extraordinary—whether decorating a new notebook to make it your own, or reclaiming our streets with the people’s propaganda.
Fall 2024
is
organized by
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.
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.
Celine Wong Katzman
Celine Wong Katzman is Curator at Rhizome and serves as one of seven co-directors at the School for Poetic Computation. Previously she was a NYSCA Curatorial Fellow at the Queens Museum. Celine is committed to supporting creative practitioners experimenting with new media, particularly those who engage in a thoughtful and community-oriented approach. Her writing appears in publications such as The Nation, Art in America, Rhizome, as well as in the New Museum's exhibition catalog, The Art Happens Here: Net Art's Archival Poetics and Paper Monument's Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the arts. She holds a B.A. in Visual Art with honors from Brown University.
and
Tyler Yin
Tyler Yin is an artist and technologist currently residing in Brooklyn, NY. His work layers themes of perception, obfuscation, and labor into various forms—including websites, zines, and interactive media. He is also a cofounder and organizer for Tiny Tech Zines, a QTPOC-led tech zine fair & collective centering the ways marginalized communities relate to technology. Tyler holds a BA in Design | Media Arts from UCLA, and has taught in the Parsons Design and Technology program at The New School. His work has appeared at the NY Art Book Fair, LA Art Book Fair, East Village Zine Fair, Brooklyn Art Book Fair, Moving Zine Fair, L.A. Zine Fest, and CultureHub NYC. .
It includes classes with
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.
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.
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.
Lee Beckwith
Lee 소라 Beckwith is sometimes an educator but always a learner. They currently teach high schoolers computer science, math, and creative writing on Lenape land (Bronx, NY). Their recent research centers on rethinking classroom power dynamics through curriculum negotiation. These days, they are thinking a lot about fractals and film scores.
Amina Ross
Amina Ross is an artist whose practice scrutinizes the subtle workings of systems of power and their influence on sense perception and behavior. Ross' creative output spans video, sound, sculpture and installation, emphasizing nonlinear storytelling, free association and plural meaning. Recent exhibition venues include MoMA PS1, Someday gallery, the Hessel Museum of Art and the Tang Teaching Museum. Ross is a recent Macdowell Fellow and was a featured artist at the 68th annual Flaherty Film Seminar: Queer World Mending. They hold a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Yale School of Art, where they received the Fannie B. Pardee Prize in sculpture. Ross lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Margot Armbruster
Margot Armbruster is a writer, editor, educator, and SFPC alum based in Brooklyn. Margot has worked as a researcher, writer, community organizer, and musician at The Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice, the National Humanities Center, Yale University Press, SFPC, and elsewhere, most recently at a Manhattan-based educational media company. Margot's writing appears in The Guardian, USA Today, Belt Magazine, and The Adroit Journal, among other outlets, and focuses on music, math, linguistics, philosophy, disability, and prayer. Margot earned a B.A. in English and Political Theory at Duke University, where they picked figs and took long walks in the campus gardens.
Aarati Akkapeddi
Aarati Akkapeddi is a cross-disciplinary artist, coder, and educator based in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY). They often use personal and institutional archival materials, combining computational and analog techniques like machine learning & printmaking to create artwork that investigates overlooked relationships and histories. Their creative work has been supported by institutions such as The Photographers' Gallery, ETOPIA Center for Art & Technology, and LES Printshop. They work at The Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network, creating digital spaces and tools.
Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo
Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo is an artist, abolitionist, educator and person of multitudes. Through a practice based in the printed multiple, community-based work, performance and installation building, they invite the viewer to recall and share their own lived narratives, offering power and weight to the creation of a larger dialogue around the telling of Black, Indigenous, Queer, Trans, People of color’s stories. Their work has been included in exhibitions and performances at MOCA Cleveland, Konsthall C, EFA Project Space, San Francisco Arts Commission, Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, and L’Internationale Online, amongst others. Their artist books and printed editions have been published by Endless Editions, Childish Books, Ghost Proposal, Press Press, Center for Liberatory Practice & Poetry, Printed Matter Inc and Wendy’s Subway. They are a practitioner of global liberation movements, protest tactics, tools & strategies, handmade paper and flight!
Sarah Al-Yahya
Sarah Al Yahya is a researcher and interactive media artist based between New York and Amman. She’s currently pursuing an MA in Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College. She experiments with multiple mediums including software art, AR, writing, UX/UI design and physical computing. Her research interests center on digital and internet cultures in Palestine and the SWANA region, open source intelligence, and the decolonial and other sociopolitical potential of new media technologies.
Paige Fulton
Paige Fulton is a multidisciplinary artist. She makes psychedelic black power zines with a focus on chaotic storytelling, light, time, and the ancestors. You can her writing and dreaming at ,dahologram.com
Viktor Timofeev
Viktor Timofeev is an artist based in New York. Timofeev’s multidisciplinary practice is informed by personal experiences, speculative imaginings and everything in between. Working across game-engines, video, painting, installation and sound, Timofeev combines these mediums to create semi-fictional environments in which narratives related to immigration, mental health and technology unfold.
Alexa Ann Bonomo
Alexa Ann Bonomo is a tech artist and scholar with a deep interest in methods in preservation and archiving who holds an extensive skillset in creative technology. Her creative work primarily lives on the internet and other ephemeral settings in the form of net art, creative writing and other worldbuilding projects. She is currently crafting lore and researching real time motion capture, simulated memory, and narrative dialog for performance based art in the World Engines Lab. Alexa curates programming and teaches with Index, works on archiving and conserving new media works with Leonardo, and is an adjunct professor at University of San Francisco.
Erica Kermani
Erica Kermani (b. 1983, Los Angeles) is a Brooklyn-based transdisciplinary artist dedicated to movement building and collective liberation through art and media, technological sovereignty, and Iranian, Jewish, and queer mysticism. Her artwork utilizes scholarship, memory and archive to produce video, installation, and speculative fiction that interrogate and unsettle dominant narratives, towards healing of self, community, and Earth. Erica has presented her work nationally and internationally, at Mona Bismarck American Center (Paris), the Science Gallery Dublin, Musée des Arts Decoratif, the International Center of Photography Museum, and Frameline San Francisco.
Erica serves as technologist and educator for Community Tech New York and as adjunct faculty at Parsons The New School where she teaches about ancestral and emerging technologies. Erica is a worker-owner of the QTBIPOC- and immigrant-led cooperative Shadow Work Media focused on transformative storytelling. Previously she organized the festival Radical Networks (2015-2019) which she co-founded. Erica has developed curriculum, public programs and published research at organizations including Digital Equity Lab, Data & Society, and Eyebeam (as Director of Community Engagement). She is a member of the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective and Feminists4Jina NYC. She holds a BA in Visual Arts (Media/Computing) and Political Science at the University of California, San Diego and an MFA in Design and Technology from the Parsons School for Design (NYC/Paris).
and
Hiba Ali
Hiba Ali is an Afrasian worldbuilder and digital somatics practitioner and shares their digital art in the form of immersive digital environments, sculpture-based installations, moving images, garments, and sound. They developed the term, digital somatics, to embody the body-mind-spirit connection to the principles of game design and narrative storytelling. They use virtual reality, 3D animation and augmented reality to slow down time and create portals of solace and care and consider the digital portal as a liminal space where they call forth more loving and healing into our world. .
Applications closed.
