blog post by Gia Castello & Esther Bouquet. video by Olivia Ross.
Day 1: Hello world & conditional creative drawings
First day of class! After some of us had some trouble to sleep the night before, we were all very excited for the semester to begin! It was a real delight to enter the room and to see new smiling faces already talking to each other with a lot of passion and excitement. Lauren and Zach introduced themselves. We followed with our introductions, based on three questions: what brought you to this room? What do you want to teach? What do you want to learn? The questions were the same for all of us and our answers couldn’t be more different. It was a very emotional moment but also a surprising one regarding how amazing the profiles are different from others, always with a lot of sensitivity. If you want to have a glimpse of all the amazing people in the cohort, you can read the medium post here.
Through the day we had several exercises that allowed interactions between each other, like writing down all the questions we may have during our time at SFPC. We then split into groups to categorize those questions and talk about them. We found out that despite not having the same backgrounds, we had almost all the same categories and same need to know about them.
The second part of the day was focused on conditional creative drawings and automatic drawings to better learn how to communicate and share the space. We also did a fax machine exercise where we had to design a communication system to give drawing instructions.
Zach told us at the end of the day how raw data can “speak” to us in different forms. For example, if we open a raw photoshop file with audacity, we will be able to decode that information through audio. And actually listen to what we have drawn in the first place. It was surprisingly enthusiastic to understand how the same piece of raw information is portrayed and takes different shapes, between sound and picture.
Day 2: Binary encodings and scavenger’s hunt
Zach Lieberman gave a lecture about Binary Encoding, with several examples of visual representations of binary aesthetics. He started with examples of poetic performances as signaling codes, like Hannah Weiner’s Code Poems. He also introduced us to rotary encoding patterns, which is a graphical and spatial representation of how binary encodings look like.
We also understood the binary concept as a permutation not only between numbers (I/0) but between graphics, where black & white bits illustrated images and sounds.
After the session, we split into groups, and we built our own non-digital tool to explain a binary concept. We came up with five projects which ranged from binary water fountains to binary plastic hats. We also had a binary knitting encoder, a musical glass xylophone performance and finally, we went outside to enjoy the bright morning doing a “bitness test”, moving around a human-computer wheel. These projects helped us understand physically the fundamentals of binary theory: how to describe it, count with it, calculate it and illustrate it.
The second part of the day we went on a Scavenger’s Hunt around the School. This helped us to get to know better our neighborhood, and also each other by exchanging personal anecdotes. During the walk, we were supposed to find the person who has lived the longest in the area or to ask around the neighbors’ spoken languages. We also had to find the shortest street in the hood, and the cheapest and the highest item for sale. This activity not only triggered our interactions with our fellow nearby residents but also among ourselves.
Day 3: about flowers, dance and history class
This was a very emotional day and it was amazing to see how quickly we allowed ourselves to be vulnerable with people we didn’t know two days before. Taeyoon introduced himself more formally as well as the class he will be teaching during the semester, Drawing drawings. When we entered the classroom, we saw that he brought flowers and they were smelling really good. He explained that he wanted each of us to explore one of the plants with the eyes closed for a couple of minutes and then draw the sensations and feelings that the plant gave us. I thought it was kind of hard because the time of exploration was limited and it was maybe too short for me to be able to translate what I felt into a drawing. I also felt a lot of pressure from myself during this exercise and was not able to focus on something else. When we were done drawing, Taeyoon gave us a second exercise that seemed way more complicated but had so many interesting results. He asked us to draw and explore the plant at the same time with our eyes closed. On the opposite of the first drawing he asked us to do, I felt like I had no responsibility in this upcoming drawing because of my eyes closed and the pressure disappeared by itself.
When we talked about the feelings we had, the difficulties we encountered during the feedback, it was incredible to hear about everyone’s experience.
Max said that the eucalyptus he chose immediately reminded him about where he lived, even if he had never really paid attention to the flowers before. Natalie shared with us that she felt like she learned a lot about her mind: “I had this very strong feeling that we were dears. I was connected to people, feeling attuned but balanced.” Olivia had a completely different approach: “I was like, ok, time to gather the data, time to record the plant. I had a hard time to keep my eyes closed for ten minutes so sometimes I would blink.”
After the lunch break, Taeyoon introduced us to Cori Kresge who came at SFPC to visit us and do a workshop with us. During her workshop, we mixed writing and moving in the space, first without any prompt and then, while thinking about the word “maintenance”. As a feedback to the workshop, she asked us how we were feeling and Gia had a very insightful answer: “Some of us feel lighter, some of us feel heavier, we all process differently and it is amazing”. Cori helped us to reflect on our practice with a quote by John Cage “try not to create and evaluate at the same time”.
What was also amazing to see at the end of the exercise is that we were all very focused and more aware of the space but also aware of our movements and thoughts.
Day 4: Instruction drawings & electronic crickets
On Thursday, we spent the day with Zach! He offered us a new drawing exercise during which we first wrote instructions on a sheet of paper, then gave those instructions to someone who had to draw according to the instructions. The first instructions were put aside and then we gave the drawing we just drew to someone else so they could write instructions based on their understanding of the drawing. The drawing was then put aside and we gave the new instructions to someone else who then had to draw a new drawing based on the second set of instructions. At the end of the exercise, we had a moment during which we gathered the first set of instructions, the first drawing, the second set of instructions and the second drawing. Some drawings were very similar from the beginning to the end without a lot of variations and some others were completely different, showing how humans perceive and understand details differently, and how humans do not focus on the same thing like a machine would. We also noticed how the length of the instructions tended to double or triple between the first and second time. At the end, the most interesting ones showed how someone, a human, (mis)intrepeted something.
To keep understanding how humans can interfere and find their place again in a computer regulated world, Zach asked us to think about our own programming language and how it would work. One group created a programming language that tries to delete the hierarchy/master-slave relationship between the human and the computer by adding vocabulary like « thank you » or « please » every time the person wants to delete/kill a variable that takes place in the memory. It was a simple but yet smart idea to show more empathy in the way we speak to a machine and in the relationships we create with it.
Another group imagined a passive-aggressive language for which you also have to say thank you and please when you want the machine to execute an order to redefine these relationships. But their programming language would also change part of the code without notifying the person, in order, for instance, to save some energy by reducing the limit of a loop from 100 to 10.
Another group also pointed out that most of the programming languages are in English and imagined a “déception language”. The idea was to use identical words in French and English but which has a totally different meaning to create surprise but also misunderstanding in the way the language works. For instance, “déception” in French means “disappointment” whereas “deception” in English means “tromperie”, the idea of the act of hiding the truth, especially to get an advantage.
During the second part of the day, Galen Macdonald, an SFPC alumni and TA during this semester, gave a workshop to create our own relay cricket using small electronics components after a short introduction on how electromagnetic relays were invented and work. We learned how to solder, how some elements are polarized or some others are not. We were all very enthusiastic about hearing our cricket sing and when some resistors happened to be broken for some of us, we could feel some disappointment. It was not a big electronic project but the materiality of the cricket, the time we put in soldering the pieces together, the time we used to understand how it would work made it more precious. We also thought about the other electronic components that were then useless whereas they require a lot of earth and human energy. After a few students pointing out the waste in the tech industry and in objects of our daily life, Galen gave us a talk about invasive species that resonated with how humans invade places to mine rare minerals for components for computers and smartphones.
Day 5: Logistics and SFPC salon
On Friday, we talked more about the logistics of the space with Lauren. She showed us around Westbeth, the large artists’ community building where SFPC is located, where we were able to see (for once on an American building!) the historic layers and some stills from the former high line. We also established our code of conduct in order to better share the space and to set the rules for studying for ten weeks together. We revisited the questions we wrote on the first day, in order to order them but also to extract some goals from them. This helped us to summarize what we wanted to learn but also what we wanted to teach.
We then prepared the space for the Salon, the first public event of our session, featuring speakers David Reinfurt, the collective BUFU and Edel Rodriguez. The three guest presenters covered topics ranging from graphic design, teaching methods, co-creation of experimental models of organizing to the art of making simple illustrations about a complicated story or a contemporary problem. You can watch the video of the event here:
Bonus Track: Meet the students event
Exceptionally, we worked on Sunday too! The last day of the week saw the Meet the Student event happening. This event was an opportunity for us to show what we have done before coming to SFPC, what we are interested in and what we wanted to do during the 10-week program.
We all learned new things about each other during the 5-minute long presentations and it was amazing to see the students talking with a lot of excitement to the people who came and share common interests.
And even though Gia had to go back to Argentina for the weekend, she was still able to introduce herself! You can see the whole event here:
