My experience at SFPC — 1st week
This week I started studying at the School for Poetic Computation — aka SFPC— , a punky space located in New York’s Westbeth Artists Residence where curious people can come and learn what is or what is not the boundary between technology and arts — the Poetic Computation. It’s been a week full of new emotions, meeting new people and discovering new things that I’ll try to describe as best as I can.
New York is a place where you can find new amazing stuff in every street, bar or school, as well as new amazing people. That’s exactly what happened to me when meeting my peers at school: we are a surprising mix of many kinds of humans beings, composed by 18 people. My peers come from different disciplines and have different backgrounds — designers, artists, musicians, mathematicians, engineers — as well as they come from different places. I won’t describe them one by one but to know who they are SFPC’s blog can be visited.
Anyway, I’m very surprised and thankful of the awesome kind of people around me at this time and in this place, because it’s so nice to find people who are looking for similar things than me or at least people who have similar trascendental questions I have. Sincerely, I thought that coming to one of the most developed cities in arts I was going to be the most lost student in my class. But it’s cool to realize that in SFPC all of us are in a similar search and we’ll work together in order to explore and discover how to find a sustainable way to be an artist without dying in the process.
An overwhelming place, that’s what I expected NCY to be the first time I came and that’s how my first week at SFPC has been. The ‘onboarding week’ is a kind of students reception leaded by SFPC’s staff, in which they told us as much as possible about the school. It is though as a period when new students can meet each other by talking and matching our backgrounds, and when new students and staff can meet and learn what is expected of each other. The first week was leaded by Taeyoon Choi — who will teach Electronics — , zach lieberman — who will teach Code — and Lauren Gardner as SFPC staff, by Morehshin Allahyari who will teach Critical Theory, and by our TAs Melanie Hoff, Max Fowler and Robby Kraft.
An importan idea of this first week was that we could realize how many questions do we had at the beginning of the program — questions related with our careers, with the meaning of being an artist, and many questions we don’t even know we had —, and realize of course that we won’t be able to answer many of them. What I concluded is that the most importan goal of the next ten weeks will be the process we’ll experiment by trying to understand those questions and the process of discovering every single new questions we will find in the road.
The thing I liked the most of this first week at SFPC was the respectful and horizontal relationship between each other proposed by the staff. This idea is based on the concept that educational relationships within an education institution must be horizontal but with a hierarchical structure which can assign roles to every person. In that sense SFPC is an educational institution but at the same time is a self-supported community trying to explore the poetry behind the code, where everyone is always available to help each other. Horizontality is so embedded in SFPC’s structure that the Code of Conduct of this season was built by the whole group.
Other interesting thing that blew up my mind is that — as I told — SFPC operates in the Westbeth Artist building which is located in the former New York Bell Lab’s. The amazing story tells that in Bell Labs was developed the first point-contact transistor — which was the first solid state transistor. But it wasn’t developed in New York but in New Jersey’s Bell Lab — as many people think. Anyway, this so important development was publicly announced at NY Bell Labs, which is the exact place were SFPC is settled.
As I think, the above is a poetical coincidence because transistor was the most important invent of 20th century which has made possible every single technology creation after it, including — of course — computers. Therefore is a huge motivation to be part of a community of people trying to deconstruct the computational technology — and trying to find the poetic behind it — in the same place where transistor was announced to the world.
Finally, as a community SFPC organizes at the beginning of every season an event called ‘SFPC Salon’ were artists come to the school to present their recent work and their artistic practice, how they do it, who they work with and how they become what they are now. SFPC Salon was ver inspiring because everybody was opened to talk to the other participants. It was opened to the entire SFPC community — students, alumni, teachers and friends.
This year SFPC Salon had 7 talks of a broad different kind of artists. Every speaker has very interesting thing to tell. There was a guy from a design studio who worked with fonts animation, people who work with virtual reality and an interesting work of visualization of biological data at MIT Media Lab. But the thing attracted me the most was how everyone was so opened to talk and how motivated they were to know who we are and what we are interested in. With that good vibe and motivational words SFPC 2017 fall semester kicked off, with many questions and new opportunities for every one of us.
Appendix — SFPC Salon Speakers
- Claire Hentschker
- DIA studio
- CWT
- TOTOYUYUMOMO (Tom Galle / Moises Sanabria / John Yuyi)
- Kevin Slavin
- Ursula Endlicher
- James Clar
