Blog Posting by ann (SFPC Fall 2017)
Time does a funny thing at SFPC. Even though it’s only been one week since the fall semester officially began, it feels like we’ve known each other a lot longer. From day 1, the SFPC team created an atmosphere of trust so that students felt comfortable diving straight into discussions of their art practice and hopes for the program, their thoughts on the responsibility of activist artists, and the philosophy of technology.
“Art creates a tiny tornado in your heart.” — Taeyoon Choi
Day 1: Introductions, hopes for SFPC, and transmitting code through sound
Day 1 opened with introductory lectures by founders Taeyoon Choi and Zach Lieberman. Students listed all the questions they had for their time at SFPC, and broke into small groups to discuss and categorize the questions.
Next, the class played the Human Fax Machine Experiment. Students created an aural system for transmitting and receiving code. The room filled with beeps, boops, and laughter as students tried transmitting instructions for simple line drawings across a makeshift barrier. Afterwards, the group discussed what they discovered was necessary for the sender to transmit (turn left, go forward) as well as the receiver (message received, send again!).
The day ended with a scavenger hunt around the West Village.
Day 2: Critical Thinking and Pedagogy
The students began the day with Morehshin Allahyari who is teaching critical theory in her class titled, The Radical Outside. She opened the day’s lecture with an introduction to digital colonialism, additivism, and her work. Morehshin asked students to reexamine the stories that are told about how objects and information are created and shared, and by whom they are owned.
“It matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts. Mathematically, visually, and narratively, it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems.” - Donna Haraway
Morehshin shared her project, Material Speculation: ISIS, in which she recreated as 3D printed objects 12 original artworks (statues from the Roman period city of Hatra and Assyrian artifacts from Nineveh) that were destroyed by ISIS in 2015. Material Speculation was one example of a philosophy she’s coined as additivism, which aims “to transmute digital forms through the material world into human scale actions and effects.”
Melanie Hoff, who is TAing Morehshin’s class, also gave an introduction to her work. She discussed three projects, Partisan Thesaurus, Small Data Squad, and Dopplecam from two perspectives. First, she talked about how her work exposes the hidden biases within information, language, and social convention. She then exposed the biases in her own work, highlighting decisions such as which texts she chose to train her thesaurus and which search engine she chose for dopplecam. Melanie’s dual-approach presentation was a direct response to Morehshin’s earlier lecture, in which she invited students to question the motivations and politics of those who create systems and technologies.
After their critical theory lecture, Taeyoon led students through an activity and discussion on pedagogy. Taeyoon talked about “teaching is a gift for learning,” and how learning is creating habits and teaching is creating habitat that need to be practiced and nurtured.
Day 3: Binary, Teaching and Learning, and SFPC Salon Part I
Zach Lieberman kicked off day 3 with a lecture on binary. He explained that computers are a “giant illusion machine”, and “files and folders and different kinds of datas are illusions created by computer programmers.”
Next, TAs Max Fowler and Robby Kraft, who are both alums of SFPC, introduced themselves and their work. Max showed his minimalist, text-only maps of cities around the world, and Robby shared his origami art.
Afterwards, students created simple systems to develop an intuitive understanding of binary. Projects ranged from a math-based game to demonstrate bit-shifting, to a color-by-binary-numbers chart, to a binary turntable.
Day 3 ended with the first night of the SFPC salon. The room quickly filled to capacity as students, alumni, and community members came together to hear artist talks by DIA, Claire Hentschker, and CWalonT. Though each artist’s approach and medium was completely different (DIA — typography, Claire — VR, CWT — hardware), their passion and energy came through clearly in their talks and was reflected back by the audience.
Day 4: Games, exploring Westbeth, and SFPC Salon Part II
On the final day of their first week, students met with SFPC co-organizer Lauren Gardner for their first lecture of the day. Lauren is a game creator, educator, and community builder. After falling in love with broadcast journalism in grade school, Lauren went on to build enterprise software for companies including Turner, Time Warner, and Thomson Reuters. More recently, she has focused on bringing people together and supporting underrepresented artists as a co-owner of babycastles, a co-organizer at SFPC, and the Associate Director of Education at Eyebeam.
After her introduction, Lauren lead students on a tour of the Westbeth Artists Community Complex, which has been home to SFPC since 2013. Westbeth was the original site of Bell Labs, where it was a world-leading research center and the site where the first TV broadcast and the first binary computer were demonstrated. After Bell Labs relocated, Westbeth was reimagined as a live-work space for artists and their families. It has housed a number of iconic cultural institutions such as The Martha Graham Center for Contemporary Dance and Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, the first LGBT synagogue in New York.
After the tour, students returned to the classroom for a lecture and activity on programming languages with Zach. Students broke into groups to work on designing their own programming languages guided by three questions:
- What are programming languages built out of?
- What does a programming language mean?
- What does it mean to learn to code?
Finally, the group reconvened and discussed how programming languages are intensely personal and political creations that have encoded within them the biases, frustrations, desires of their creators. One group, in trying to create a language based on cooking, got into a heated debate on whether a knife is a variable or a function.
After a break for dinner, students gathered for day 2 of the SFPC Salon. Once again, the space filled with alumni, artists, and community members eager for the second round of presentations. The room filled with laughter and introductions, though quickly fell silent when the presentations began. The night began with TOTOYUYUMOMO’s (Tom Galle / Moises / johnyuyi) viral meme art, followed by James Clar’s thoughtful installations, and Kevin Slavin’s search for microorganisms, and ended with Ursula Endlicher’s tongue-in-cheek performances.
Overall, it was a packed first week for the fall semester at SFPC!
To read more, check out current student Guillermo Montecinos’ post about his first week at SFPC!
