Words by Taeyoon Choi and Neta Bomani
The second day of Poetic Computation: Detroit focused on our relationship to technology, comparatively as a tech consumer and tech worker, and literally as data stored in folder structures of operating systems. The first day of classes problematized the social impact of computation on surveillance and the environment, The second day of classes explored the social relationships and embodiment of computation.
The Workers Inquiry
ann haeyoung is a tech worker and artist. She’s worked at a major tech company and a small start up. As a mixed race person, she’s often confronted with questions about her race and identity. She makes art with organic and electronic components in response to the societal expectations of blood as a source of identity. In her class, The Workers Inquiry, she questions capitalism, in its grandest forms as well as more implicit manifestations in small companies and human relationships.
ann’s work as an artist and as an organizer complicates our identities as tech consumers and tech workers. She stresses the importance of building coalitions between different types of workers. Activism can take multiple approaches, as a direct action against ICE or complicit corporations, as well as unionizing and solidarity building within corporations.
After a short break, ann asked the students to have a conversation about their identities as workers. The prompts include:
- What do you work on? What labor or service do you provide?
- How do you use technology in your work? Who made the decision to adopt that technology?
- How does your boss use tech? Does tech make your job easier? Who do you think it benefits?
- How do you think technology helps your boss?
- Who controls the tech you use?
- Tech is developed to serve the needs of its owners/creators. Are those needs aligned with your own? If not, how can you ensure your needs are met in the tools you use?
After discussing the questions in small groups, everyone reconvened in the classroom.
- Group 1 mostly consisted of people who work in the tech industry. They talked about experiencing sexism and racism in their workplaces. They admitted it’s not easy to leave the workplaces, especially when you are financially responsible for yourself and your family. They wondered about safer spaces.
- Group 2 consisted of teachers and software developers. Everyone felt that the technologies were prescribed. They are required to use certain software in the workplace, which comes with subscription fees they have no choice but to pay. However, they were mostly frustrated with social interactions, things that other people did with technology and the ways people treat one another.
- Group 3 was a mix of independent contractors, a tech worker and a teacher. They expressed the discomfort of being associated with a company you work for, where individual identity is attached to the corporation or schools you go to. They were also concerned about schools that train students to become a consumer of technology products.
- Group 4 was mostly designers who use technology for their work. They want technology to play lesser of a role in their daily lives. There was a general distrust for technology that gives physical discomfort as well as psychological dependencies. Discomfort may not be a bad place to begin uncovering technology. As Nabil Hassein said during Monday’s class, “If you get frustrated with technology, that’s good. That means it wasn’t designed for you.”
Technology is made by people. The tech industry has a long history of exploiting and abandoning people. In order to have equitable technologies, we need to understand our relationships with technology and organize for collective empowerment. Uncovering technology begins by defining our identity as an individual consumer and tech worker. Only by building shared understanding among stakeholders in different positions will we establish a coda for equitable technology.
Peer to Peer Folder Poetry
The evening class was taught by Melanie Hoff. Melanie is an artist and teacher. She’s part of collectives such as Soft Surplus and Cybernetics Library. Her recent project, Garlic Trust is a game inspired by behavioral economics and social conventions around trust and cooperation online and offline. She taught a class called Peer to Peer Folder Poetry, because she’s interested in the strange nature of categorization. Computers, and the internet at large, are essentially giants link of folders that contain certain information. To uncover the complex technologies behind computers, Melanie introduced how to use the command-line interface.
Folder Poetry is when you use the common practice of computer folder organization as a new kind of poetic form. By naming and nesting folders and files, we can create unfolding narratives, rhythmic prose, and choose-your-own-adventure poetry. Other poetic forms you may have heard of is the haiku or iambic pentameter. While the haiku is good at communicating the essence of an idea, folder poetry is good at mapping out spatial concepts through nesting and telling a story through an unfolding narrative with forking paths.
Check out these Command Line Drawings Taeyoon Choi created for the Folder Poetry class.
One of the important pedagogical approaches of Uncovering Technology is to help beginner students recognize they are ‘always, already programming’ according to Melanie. When we use desktop applications, such as a word processor, we are working with programmed systems. While we may not be manipulating code itself, we are manipulating inputs to get desired results in the output. It’s possible to do almost all desktop operations with command-line interfaces. The transferability of code and interfaces is an important point to demystify the obscurities of user interactions.
Uncovering technology begins by having a better understanding of the geography of technology. Students learned to navigate inside of the Linux file structures in Melanie’s class. They made folders and text files in the command-line, imagining a fictional village they want to live in. The folder names became poetic elements for their folder poetry. Students spent about an hour to make their poems, some taking it as personal explorations and creative expression. At the end of the class, students used Dat to share their work with Melanie, creating an adhoc, local centralized network. Students gave brief presentations about their villages.
In the initial workshop in June, we used google drives to set up the folder poetry. In this workshop, Melanie used Dat protocol to collect student’s poems. Each of the students’ computers had a direct connection to the centralized node (Melanie’s computer), over the local Wifi, but bypassing the Internet Service Provider. This type of small peer to peer network can become a building block for the decentralized and distributed community network. The class introduced the basic distinction between various network topologies, which we will dive deeper in Friday by Taeyoon Choi, on Distributed Web of Care.
Understanding the disparities for access to technology for people in Detroit, we decided to give equal access to learning computation. We purchased Raspberry Pi computers, monitors, keyboards and peripherals for each student. Having the same computers for each student has been an overwhelmingly positive experience for teaching and learning. We are able to SSH into all the computers, configure the settings for class. In order to make a seamless experience for the students, we had to install about ten software packages and customize them for each machine. The preparation took about three days of onsite work by two teachers. The setup process is documented in the session repository. The Raspberry Pis in Poetic Computation: Detroit classes are carefully set up, almost like gardens with vegetable beds and tools for farming. Students are not aware of the behind scene. We think this experience of setting up Raspberry Pis is a revealing indicator of our relationship with technology, one that is contingent upon various social contexts. We can create equitable experiences for everyone who’s enrolled in our program if we have the capacity to create an environment for them. Equitable technology is possible, at a high price of labor and care, in this case, the time to set up, troubleshooting and preparing the hardware and software. Uncovering technology leads to a revelation — there are no hidden tricks to technology.
Poetic Computation: Detroit 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.
