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Digital Love Languages: Communion Consent Refusal Renewal

Teachers
Melanie Hoff, Meghna Dholakia, Max Fowler
Date
March 17, 2022 to May 20, 2022 (10 classes)
Time
Section 1: Thursdays 5-8pm ET Section 2: Fridays 12-3pm ET
Location
Online (Zoom)
Cost
$1200 Scholarships available learn more...
Deadline
Applications closed on February 25, 2022

Apply Now

Description

Digital Love Languages: Communion, Consent, Refusal, Renewal is a class for reframing your relationship to computing [in relations with others]. Digital Love Languages is based on the premise that there is a world where all our software is made by people who love us. Digital Love Languages is an experiment in communion disguised as a class. In this class, we will learn about things as a proxy to learn about other things. Learn about digital consent to learn about sexual consent. Learn about digital coding to learn how we’re socially coded. Learn about network protocols to learn about sharing. Learn about naming to learn about knowing. Learn about learning to learn about living. Together, we will build small, personal software for affirming one another across physical distance while making and sharing digital space with each other. We will engage with code as a craft capable of expressing a full range of feeling and desire while looking to the love letter as form, from the quill to the sext. We will explore social and digital consent and ask: How are they interwoven? Through a series of educational encounters, we will build poetic structures for digital touching and practice a re-examination of personal and networked computing. This is a call to action for expanding computation’s capacity for fostering interdependence and feeling among the immense personal and collective transformations brought on by COVID-19, collapse, and renewal.

Outcomes

Course of Study

  • Writing code as a love letter.
  • Writing a social contract as a love letter.
  • Building blocks of programming and natural language processing using Python & Javascript in the browser. Networks of people and computers become fertile sites for ambient and playful communication.
  • Navigating file paths fluently using the terminal, an application that allows you to control your computer with text commands.
  • Writing folder poetry in the terminal.
  • The internet is a folder poem.
  • Building blocks of the web and networking.
  • Fundamentals of frontend (HTML, CSS, JS).

Expectations

Things you will need for this class include:

  • Computer made in the last 6 years + access to admin password.
  • The willingness to create a space within yourself where you are open to becoming intimate with computers and writing poetry with their logic.
  • The willingness to question what schooling, computing, and learning can be.
  • The willingness to explore logic, structure, and desire as a source of inspiration and poetry.
  • The willingness to question what it means to responsibly give and take access and control to our most intimate digital spaces.

Is this class for me?

This class may be for you if:

  • You think of yourself as "not a computer person.
  • You are ready to reframe your relationship with computing, networking, and digital intimacy.
  • You desire to define the boundaries that contain and free you.

Meet the Teachers

teacher

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.

any · website · twitter · instagram

teacher

Meghna Dholakia

Meghna Dholakia is a designer and artist fascinated by individual, collective, and geologic narratives of transformation. She enjoys long walks and collecting interesting looking leaves.

she/her · website · twitter · instagram

teacher

Max Fowler

Max Fowler is an artist and programmer working with offline-first software, mycology and community infrastructure. They are a contributor to PeachCloud, software that makes hosting peer to peer software on local low-power hardware more accessible. They are also a co-founder of KiezPilz (kiezpilz.de), a communal fungi cultivation group based in Berlin. They were a student at the School For Poetic Computation in 2016, and later a TA. They are one of the admins of sunbeam.city, and are interested in foraging, flip-phones, rust and html.

they/them · website · twitter

How do I apply?

Apply Now

Applications open until Applications closed on February 25, 2022.

You can expect to hear back from us about the status of your application on March 7, 2022. Please email us at admissions@sfpc.study with any questions you have.

How much does it cost to attend?

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.

Applicant FAQ

For more information about what we look for in applicants, scholarships, and other frequently asked questions, please visit our applicant FAQ.

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.