School
for
Poetic
Computation
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What if a system could unmake itself? Not in collapse, but in quiet refusal—a graceful glitch, a pause, a rewilding. What if destruction wasn’t a breakdown, but an opening—cracks where light peers through, roots unfastening the pavement, a network rerouting itself toward something unexpected? The heart of refusal is the desire for something new.
This summer at School for Poetic Computation, we embrace the season of overgrowth—wild roots threading through asphalt, rigid structures softening in heat, bodies swaying under the weight of long days and longer nights. Summer brings the riots. Riots invite drift, recalibration, defiance. What is scripted doesn’t have to be followed. What is structured doesn’t have to hold.
What if interruption is an invitation? A quick errand in the East Village turns into a wayward encounter with a distant friend, a fleeting moment that spirals into an unexpected conversation. Before you can name it, a quiet revolution has seeded. You are not the same person you were before. Unmaking, remaking, slipping between forms—erasure reveals, interference illuminates, a subtle shift unravels the immovable.
Like mycelium overtaking old circuits, these programs invite slowness, subversion, and speculative reassembly. Maybe it’s time old code returns to soil, fertilizing what’s taking root. The reset is already happening. Will you linger long enough to notice? Will you let it pass you by? Or will you step in and shape what comes next?
…
Trace the after image of a digital icon in Seeking Mavis Beacon, feeling for the absences and erasures that shape our interfaces. Question the impulse to capture every moment with aesthetic precision in Imperfect Pictures, where compression, distortion, and digital debris reveal the mundanity of images. Print motion onto the page in Riso Animation Workshop, looping past into present, layering color into new narrative pathways. Bend the web into a stage in Becoming Hypertext, where presence dissolves and pixelates in digital space. Listen to the algorithms of improvisation in Decoding Tendencies in Live Coding, weaving patterns into new rhythms of being. Unspool the web as an infinite text in HTTPoetics, a recursive world where stories rewrite themselves. Find poetry in the mundane in Page Against the Machine—pixels, prompts, passwords—the language of everyday humming beneath the surface. Turn cityscapes into sites of quiet insurrection in TO THE STREETS!, where art and infrastructure blur. Reconsider access and agency in Consensual Hacking, where opting out is necessary resistance.
Summer 2025
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.
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.
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.
Tyler Yin
Tyler Yin is an artist, designer, and technologist based in Brooklyn, NY. His practice weaves text, image, and code together into browser poems and publications. He writes instructions for both human and computer interpretation, as the blurry distinctions between user and software continue to unravel.
Molly Soda
Molly Soda is an artist based in New York. Her work predominantly exists online, evolving, interacting (and decaying) within its networked ecosystems. Her interdisciplinary practice incorporates performance, video, photography, websites, and installation. Soda is an avatar, a flattened 2D version of herself entering an infinite sea of content, refreshing with each new upload. She is a file to be looked at, swiped past, downloaded, forgotten about, printed out, or discarded.
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!
Roxanne Harris
Roxanne Harris “alsoknownasrox” is a new media artist-researcher and musician-programmer working between New York City and Los Angeles. Embracing programming as an artistic medium, she parameterizes on-the-fly, pushing the boundaries of improvisational dexterity within computational limitations. Her work invites audiences to engage the creative process as it unfolds, embracing vulnerability and exploring speculative futures through algorithmic transparency. Roxanne holds a B.A. in Computer Science and Music from Yale University and is pursuing an M.F.A. in Design Media Arts at UCLA. She has presented at the International Conference on Live Coding, Open Source Arts Contributors’ Conference, South by Southwest, and Dweller Festival. She has mentored for NEW INC and received the Processing Foundation Fellowship. Her work has been featured in Office Magazine and Alternative Press and performed at venues such as WSA, MoMA PS1 and the Getty Center.
Chia Amisola
Chia Amisola is devoted to the ambiences of the internet and its loss, love, labor, and liberation. Their offline/online work explores the intimacies of infrastructures, the labor of tools, and the poetics of machines from the domestic to the divine. They make websites, performances, and games that construct agencies and atmospheres as their 'internet ambient' practice. Chia founded and stewards Developh and the Philippine Internet Archive, communities of practices dedicated towards archipelagic internets. They are based between San Francisco and Manila.
Ariel Yelen
Ariel Yelen is the author of the book of poems I Was Working (Princeton University Press), selected by the New York Public Library as a Top Ten Book of 2024. Her poems can be found in the Baffler, Social Text, BOMB, and elsewhere. She received a 2023-2024 Creative & Performing Arts Fulbright to Greece. She's taught poetry and interdisciplinary courses for Poetry Society of America, Columbia School of the Arts, Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers New Brunswick, and elsewhere. As a former editor for the NYC-based publishing collaborative Futurepoem Books, she founded their digital space futurefeed. She lives and works in New York City.
and
Kelli Anderson
Kelli Anderson is a design alchemist blurring the lines between design, publishing, and technology, creating interactive projects such as ,This Book Is a Camera,, which transforms into a working camera; ,This Book Is a Planetarium,, which houses paper devices, including a planetarium; and ,Alphabet in Motion,, her upcoming book about typography. Anderson’s other projects include a viral paper record player and a ,New York Times, imagining a utopian future with activist group, The Yes Men. Anderson’s design work features clients like NPR, MoMA, and Apple, while her Tinybop Human Body app changed nonverbal medical communication. An educator and artist, Anderson has taught at NYU, Parsons, Pratt, SFPC and Cooper Union, inspiring students to see design as a tool for connection and wonder. Her projects, supported by institutions like the Japan Foundation and the Exploratorium, invite us to reimagine the potential of everyday objects. .
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