Meet the students and teachers of Poetic Computation: Detroit 2019
The School for Poetic Computation’s Poetic Computation: Detroit kicked off on Sunday, August 19, 2019 with a barbecue at the Talking Dolls. Students, teachers and organizers gathered together in the same space for the first time.
Poetic Computation: Detroit co-organizer Neta Bomani led an intention setting activity and movement exercise to help us ease into getting to know each other. Students and teachers were asked to interview and introduce each other to the group.
The group is made up of primarily Detroit-based practitioners, artists, designers and entrepreneurs who applied through an open call for participants. Read about the students and teachers below and come meet them at the following public and free events:
- Meet the Teachers Salon on Friday, August 23, 2019 from 6–9 p.m. at Jam Handy
- Showcase on Sunday, August 25, 2019 from 4–9 p.m. at Talking Dolls
Students
Antajuan Scott
Antajuan Scott is a Detroit based cultural producer exploring the intersecting worlds of art, science, technology and culture. Focused on participatory and collaborative engagements Antajuan currently is the Head of Programming at Science Gallery Detroit.
Carlo is a student and researcher at the University of Michigan studying UX research and design. His research spans usable security and privacy. Specifically, he investigates the inequalities that arises in security and privacy behaviors and finding ways to mitigate these inequalities through system design, education, and training. He is interested in design systems and combining hacker culture into art and music.
Felix is studying philosophy and science-fiction literature at the University of Michigan. She is interested in the various ways in which technology and humans can merge.
Katy Dresner creates unique art experiences that encourage participation and contemplation about our use of technology. Using mediums that range from computer code to textiles, Katy’s work bridges the boundaries that separate our digital and analog worlds. In addition to being a commissioned artist for a diverse clientele, Katy is a filmmaker specializing in story editing and development. This professional background informs the humorous and nontraditional narrative forms in her art. Her work has been exhibited locally in Detroit and across the globe in cities such as Paris, London, New York, and Seoul.
Kristen Carethers
Throughout her career, Kristen Carethers has worked with top creative and strategic executives of multiple brands, advertising agencies and fortune 500 companies to ensure understanding of new technology and content trends, the evolution of tech enabled lifestyles and emerging business models. Her experience, as a Producer and Software Developer, extends across multiple platforms; broadcast TV, in-cinema, web, and print. She has worked on production teams at American Idol, Playboy, Propaganda, BET, General Electric, Ford and Lincoln. Long before Kristen became a Producer, she was a professional listener and teller of tales. She has always loved stories and she uses them as a way of examining themes like healing, racism, and multiculturalism.
Kristin Rose has enabled her 5 birth-children, many non-biological children, and over 50 foster dogs to survive and thrive in a well-below poverty household. With the kids pretty much grown, and dogs placed in new forever homes, Kristin has come up for air and is focusing on Book Suey, a worker-run collective book store in Hamtramck, MI. Kristin invites local poets and writers to speak at the book store, and will be focusing on merging digital media themes, code poetry and radical justice into upcoming programming events.
Stephen is a Korean American designer and artist living in Detroit. He received his BS in Computational Media from Georgia Tech, where he specialized in digital media prototyping and the design of online communities. Stephen’s design practice explores the production and organizations behind social media, the influences of digital commerce and surveillance capitalism, and how memories and emotional anchors influence our ways of meaning-making. Stephen is also starting a food business and creative collective called Noodle Club, where he explores the stories and production of Asian American home foods and its surrounding diasporic culture.
Jess Rogner is a communication and graphic designer. She’s a recent graduate from the College for Creative Studies. Her thesis work focused on creating a digital and print-based archive of art-driven initiatives throughout the neighborhoods of Detroit, using mapping and space as literal and metaphorical means for understanding their unique communities. She also enjoys book design — rethinking and traditional structures and exploring new means of navigating, organizing and disseminating information to illuminate unexpected relationships. Her hobbies include plant identification, listening to podcasts and struggling with words.
Tyrone M. Clemons, a native of the Detroit area, specializes in immersive design, creative coding, and the motion arts. He straddles the intersection of technology and arts with inspiration from Afro-futurism and science fiction. Driven by the altruistic goals of an equitable future via technology, he seeks to amplify the voices of POC’s creatives and their stories through the use of Immersive Tech and XR (Extended Reality: a medium encompassing Virtual, Mixed, and Augmented Reality).
Teikaut: Li Chen and Gerald Flynt
Li Chen and Gerald Flynt are 2/3 of the interdisciplinary design collaboration Teikaut (pronounced takeout), along with Timothy Schulze. Through object making and printed matter they focus on issues surrounding accessibility and economy of art and design, the future of design teaching, and the roles of play and rigor in design practice.
Stephon Thompson II
Stephon Thompson II’s curiosity about architecture and design has led to him to become a Realtor and Contractor. He owns and operates a small development company in Detroit. The purpose of his efforts are simple, to create multiple environments where people of various different backgrounds can expand their consciousness and find understanding of one another.
Samantha is a graphic designer and front-end developer living and practicing in Detroit. She considers herself to be a non-workaholic and takes great joy in the garden she’s planted this summer. At some point, she’s convinced her design practice will merge with the garden. Just how that might come to fruition is an answer she’s looking to investigate with SFPC.
Brooke Hawkins is a technologist, writer, and designer living in Detroit, MI. Brooke’s work sits at the intersection of designing innovative conversational and voice experiences, as well as creating scholarship around the ethics surrounding our future of living in a voice interface mediated world. Brooke has spoken at the IA Summit and the Voice Summit, as well as a variety of industry podcasts like Machine Yearning, VoiceFirstFM and more. Brooke also is committed to training and educating a new generation of talent, and co-authored the Career Foundry course Intro to VUI design.
Teachers and organizers
Janice has a background in program management, marketing and public relations, and communications. In her role as the Equitable internet Initiative Director, she works with anchor organizations in three Detroit neighborhoods (Islandview, Southwest and the North End) seeding community technology programming, including DCTP’s Digital Stewards training program, local expansion, outreach strategies, managing partnerships, program implementation, evaluation and internet adoption.
Tawana “Honeycomb” Petty is a mother, social justice organizer, youth advocate, poet and author. She is the founder and director of Petty Propolis, where she gets to grow through organizing transformative art and education initiatives, including an annual art festival and artist retreat in Historic Idlewild, Michigan. Honeycomb is a four-time author and co-founder of Our Data Bodies and an editorial team member and co-founder of Riverwise Magazine. She is the Data Justice Director for Detroit Community Technology Project, a member of the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition, a Detroit Equity Action Lab fellow, and a board member of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership.
Danielle Aubert is the author of Marking the Dispossessed and 16 Months Worth of Drawings in Microsoft Excel, and co-author, with Lana Cavar and Natasha Chandani, of Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies: Lafayette Park, Detroit. She is Associate Professor of graphic design at Wayne State University in Detroit. Her book, The Detroit Printing Co-op: The Politics of the Joy of Printing is forthcoming fall 2019 from Inventory Press.
Ron is a product designer, artist, educator, and Detroiter. He is the owner and founder of One Custom City and SCIDE Design (Systems Combining Industrial Design and Engineering). Ron holds a Bachelor of Arts in Industrial Design from the University of Michigan. He has taught socially-minded entrepreneurship and graphic design as an instructor with Detroit Future Media, an initiative of the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition and Allied Media Projects. He is also a member of the Move the Crowd True+Paid+Good Academy, a rigorous training founded by Rha Goddess to create a conscious entrepreneurial movement. Ron was a 2014 artist-in-residence at Detroit Community Schools as part of Detroit Connections, an initiative of the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design and has served on the Advisory Board for the Detroit Design Festival.
Collaborator, accomplice, artist, designer, & educator. Cardinal is an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Bowling Green State University, Principle of Tooth & Rag Design, Co-Director of Talking Dolls Studio in Detroit. She earned a BFA in Graphic Design and BA in the History of Art from the University of Michigan and an MFA in 2D Design at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her finest works to date are her daughters.
American Artist is an interdisciplinary artist whose work extends dialectics formalized in Black radicalism and organized labor into a context of networked virtual life. Their practice makes use of video, installation, new media, and writing to reveal historical dynamics embedded within contemporary culture and technology. American Artist’s legal name change serves as the basis of an ambivalent practice — one of declaration: by insisting on the visibility of blackness as descriptive of an american artist, and erasure: anonymity in virtual spaces where “American Artist” is an anonymous name, unable to be googled or validated by a computer as a person’s name.
a.tbd (ann haeyoung) is a New York based artist born in Seoul, Korea. She creates strange and horrible new technologies to explore questions of identity and alienation. Her works combine organic and electronic materials — such as teeth, blood, and deconstructed circuitry — to evoke feelings of exposure and vulnerability.
Colin Wang is a mechanical engineer and designer. He seeks to explore the connections between designers, products, and users. He views the work he does as more than just the tangible end results. The most important things created are the relationships formed both by and through the process of his work. He is driven to create work that is engaging, interactive, and accessible. He believes in the free exchange of information and experiences. He is a strong believer in allowing his work to be interpreted, interacted with, and aged naturally with minimal intervention after his initial efforts have been completed.
Nabil Hassein is a freelance technologist and educator based in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Besides working professionally as a software developer and a teacher of mathematics and programming in both public schools and private settings, Nabil participates in grassroots organizing against prisons and police in New York, and occasionally writes and speaks about the intersection between social and technical topics.
Melanie Hoff is an artist and educator examining the role technology plays in social organization and reinforcing hegemonic structures. They study how platforms and processes — including algorithms, data collection, social media, networks, simulation, and ritual — yield distinct modes of social organization and reinforce existing systems of power. Melanie writes software, teaches Critical Interaction Design at Rutgers University, organizes Code Societies and teaches at the School for Poetic Computation. They are a founding member of the Cybernetics Library and Soft Surplus.
Taeyoon Choi is an artist, writer and organizer. He’s a co-founder of School for Poetic Computation in New York City. In 2019, Taeyoon is working on Distributed Web of Care with a critical perspective towards technology, ethics, justice and sensitivity to the concept of personhood.
Lauren is a New York City–based product manager, community builder and artist. She is the co-owner of the art collective and DIY gallery Babycastles which has reinvented the arcade as a social space for independent video game culture. Lauren is also a partner at the School For Poetic Computation. She has spent 15+ years as a Technical Product Manager building enterprise level software for companies including Turner/Time Warner & Thomson Reuters. Building things through collaborative process is the heart of her professional and artistic pursuits.
Neta Bomani is a black, first generation American born, multicultural east African person of Tanzanian-Malawian lineage who engages in visual storytelling, direct action and anti-art practices for black and brown communities. Neta seeks to reveal and reduce social precarity and inequality through the use of tangible, accessible media such as DIY computational objects and abolitionist gestures of resistance like organizing and making archives, writings, prints, zines, maps, circuits and workshops. Neta’s work has materialized as an organizer of the Tech Zine Fair, an organizer of the School for Poetic Computation, a member of Stephanie Dinkins Studio and a participator in grassroots organizing against prisons and borders in New York City and beyond.
Join us for the public events.
- Meet the Teachers Salon on August 23, 2019 at the Jam Handy
- Showcase on August 25, 2019 at the Talking Dolls
Please stay tuned for further announcements via our mailing list. Poetic Computation: Detroit is supported by the Knight Foundation.
