We are thrilled to announce the Fall 2019 Students of SPFC! For the next 10 weeks, these students will take part in daily classes covering topics including hardware, software and critical theory in an immersive program that is part school and part residency.
Please join us in welcoming the students during a Meet the Students event on Sunday October 6th from 1pm — 4pm at SFPC in the West Village, NYC (map). During the event, students will give short presentations to introduce themselves and what they are excited to learn this semester.
RSVP below
The Fall 2019 session will be taught by Zach Lieberman, Taeyoon Choi, Lauren Gardner, American Artist, CW&T, Fernando Ramallo, Melanie Hoff, Todd Anderson with guest teachers and workshops from, April Soetarman, Celine Wong Katzman, and Matt Jacobson. Teaching Assistants this semester will include Alexander Miller, Galen Macdonald, Sebastian Morales, Stefan Pelikan, Tiri Kananuruk, and Tsige Tafesse.
Special thanks to the Fall 2019 admissions committee which included SFPC alums Bomani Oseni McClendon, Juan Miguel Marin, Vivienne La, Tim Burcham, Yael Ort-Dinoor, advisor Golan Levin, teachers CW&T, teaching assistant Tiri Kananuruk, and SFPC staff Lauren Gardner and Taeyoon Choi.
Meet the students.
Allison Chan
Allison Chan is a transdisciplinary designer and artist based in Oakland, CA. Drawing upon a background in global south feminisms and a sensitivity to craft, her practice often centers emergent possibilities of community, belonging, and resilience. Lately, she spends a lot of time thinking about the interwoven geopolitics of diaspora, precarity, and care/care work. She is happiest when working together with kind and thoughtful people in pursuit of less harrowing, more liberating horizons.
https://allisonchan.info
Danny Garfield
Danny Garfield is a filmmaker and digital media artist from Philadelphia currently based in Brooklyn. His work explores virtual/actual ecologies and digital animism.
http://dgarf.github.io
Esther Bouquet
Esther Bouquet is a graphic designer who has recently graduated an interactive media master’s degree in France. Her work explores the issues and stakes linked to a design practice generated with programming languages. She is also doing a long-term research project on digital tracks, metadata and their related political impacts, aiming to defend the right of a private life online.
https://estherbouquet.com/
Francisco Rojo
Fran likes to make personally expressive videogames. He’s recently been thinking a lot about community — how and why groups of people come together and stay together. Today he bought a real book at a real bookstore and was only moderately anxious during the interaction. Later he will eat some leftover cold spaghetti from the fridge since he was too burnt out from the whole book extravaganza to go buy aluminum foil.
http://fran.red
Gia Castello
Gia is a Creative Technologist, activist and teacher based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Gia has a degree on Media and Entertainment Management and is focused on developing platforms to tell stories, and communities to share knowledge. She is Program Manager for the global community Chicas Poderosas, a community of women in media and is also a member of Chicas Programando, a community of women developers.
www.giacastello.com
Iain Nash
Iain Nash is a NYC-based engineer focusing on the intersection of computer and human communication. He studied computer engineering and computer science at USC, minoring in communication design. He is excited by realizing ideas, especially through collaboration and applying technical skills to build novel interactions and environments.
http://iain.in/interactive
Katherine Diemert
Katherine Diemert (k.d.rae), is an artist and illustrator from Toronto, Canada. Katherine makes bold, graphic works across multimedia including drawing and painting, motion, installation, and interactive media. Her work is characterized by repeating shapes and patterns reminiscent of forms in nature. Katherine completed her BA (Honours) in Illustration at Sheridan College in 2015.
http://kdrae.com
Lia Coleman
Lia is a multidisciplinary artist and computer vision engineer. Her research interests are in real-time generated concert visuals, projection mapping, and tangible play structures. She holds a degree in Computer Science from MIT, has exhibited her artwork at Harvard’s Carpenter Center, and drives the Living Characters project of ExcelMandarin (IG: @excelmandarin).
http://liacoleman.com
Mark Anthony Hernandez
Mark Hernandez is a New York-based designer working in spatial production with no primacy of the material over the virtual or vice versa. Mark received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from Syracuse University where he completed his thesis research Los Angeles Looks at Itself. He is the co-founder of the collaborative practice If So Then (@ifso_then), where they design playfully whimsical spaces, objects, and images.
https://mark-hernandez.com
Mathilde Mouw-Rao
Mathilde Mouw-Rao is an artist, singer-songwriter, and software engineer. She is working to build a creative practice that fosters a healthy life and planet, and supportive community. She is interested in how computers work at a physical level, sound engineering and music, and gardening.
http://mouwrao.com
Max Bittker
Developer & artist interested in building toys, tools, simulations and experiences from principles of care & communication. I maintain @nytfirstsaid, a bot tracking first-time usages of words in the NYT, and sandspiel.club, an online drawing sandbox community.
http://maxbittker.com
Maxwell Neely-Cohen
Maxwell Neely-Cohen is the author of the novel Echo of the Boom and Editor-at-Large for The Believer. His essays and non-fiction have been featured in places like The New Republic, Ssense, and BOMB Magazine. His experiments with literature and technology have been acclaimed by The New York Times Magazine, Electric Literature, The Financial Times, and Google. In 2019 he was an artist-in-residence at Pioneer Works and CultureHub.
https://www.maxwellneelycohen.com
Natalie Rothfels
Natalie is a product manager, leadership coach and potter. She is fascinated by changing identities, weird social experiments, and what makes for good conversation. As of this bio, her creative work center around themes of pleasure, transformation, and play.
http://www.natalierothfels.com
Olivia Ross
Olivia McKayla Ross is an 18 year old multimedia artist and programmer from Queens, New York City. A recent high school graduate, she is spending her gap year making and exploring ideas in new media art. Current research interests include the cyber-aesthetics of Blackness/Black womanhood, surveillance, bitch mutants and distributed networks.
http://oross.net
Shelby Wilson
Shelby Wilson is a software engineer specializing in front end web development and interactive data visualization. She is interested in data-driven art, natural languages and linguistics, color theory, and networks. She lives in Austin, TX.
http://www.westsoutheast.com
Yuzhu Chai
Yuzhu Chai is a software engineer and artist. She makes art for programmers and computers for artists. She explores the possibilities of text regeneration through electronic literature. Her work probes tension between human and machine languages, creating systems which allow the narrative to be disassembled and recombined visually and providing different perspectives on problem solving.
https://yuzhu-chai.herokuapp.com
Zainab Aliyu
Zai (pronounced/zā/) is a designer/artist/cultural worker who seeks to use speculative storytelling and thoughtful interventions to catalyze resilience, resistance and radical hope within communities. She interrogates societal cybernetics and dreams of liberated temporalities through installations, virtual environments, archives, poetry, printed matter and community-participatory (de)programming.
https://zai.zone
