by Neta Bomani and Tomoya Matsuura
“What’ do you call the thing under your mind?” -Thor
SFPC Fall 2018: Week 4 video by Tomoya Matsuura
Code: on recreating the past
Monday morning started with Zach’s class ‘Recreating the Past’. He showed the work of Japanese artist Sato Masahiko. In particular, the class looked at Kawamura’s pieces that make math visible. He does this by showing mathematical principles in everyday scenarios.
Students then split up into groups of three or four to show their recreations of and responses to John Whitney’s work.
Class reconvened for a lecture on Muriel Cooper, a designer, researcher and educator. Cooper was a pioneer of design at MIT Press, founder of the MIT Visible Language Workshop and co-founder of the MIT Media Lab. The lecture illuminated Cooper’s history as a result of her erasure. She was the first woman granted tenure at MIT and called, “the design heroine you’ve probably never heard of.”
Cooper’s work is Bauhaus-influenced, computational, elegant, typographical, lively and colorful.
“[Cooper] was more interested in process and research than product; her technical projects were often difficult to understand and not always public; and she worked behind the scenes or collaboratively, rather than under her name alone,” according to David Reinfurt et. al in Muriel Cooper: Muriel Cooper at MIT, 1954–1994.
Scrapism: on dictionaries
Tuesday’s class with Sam focused on how python dictionaries fit into web scraping. Dictionaries represent data structures. This becomes important once programmers start scraping and collecting data from the web. Dictionaries differ from lists (a collection of numerical sorted items) because they don’t have an explicit order and are sorted by another variable that is usually a string. Students learned the syntax of a dictionary, which includes one or more key(s) paired with value(s).
An empty dictionary:
dictionary = { }
A full dictionary:
dictionary = { “key_name1”: “value_name2,” “key_name2”: “value_name2,” }
After students learned how dictionaries work, Sam gave a basic introduction to HTML and CSS. To automate scraping the data from a web page, students need to understand of how web pages are structured. Data falls under certain elements or HTML tags and CSS selectors. You can collect data with Python library, requests-html by following the following simple steps:
- Download webpage
- Convert the page into a python data structure to manipulate it
- Parse through the text and select data using HTML tags and/or CSS selectors
For homework, students were instructed to make a long list with a poetic, satirical, or surrealist reason, using the techniques learned in class.
After class, students organized a mac and cheese lunch. Everyone brought in a box of mac and cheese along with their choice of topping.
Hardware: on eagle, logic gates and PCB boards
A late Tuesday night carried over into Wednesday morning class. Students racked their brains to figure out how to build logic gates the previous night. The pace from week one accelerated from one of allure and magic to confusion and frustration.
Taylor started with a tutorial on EAGLE, a free software application to automatic electronic design. Within EAGLE, you can draw schematics, design printed circuit boards (PCB) and other computer aided manufacturing features. The goal was to advance from breadboards and DIY circuits made from paper and tape to PCB boards, which make prototyping faster and easier. This requires more comfort in naming parts and ordering them online. Students were introduced to websites such as PCBNG and Oshpark.
Students then presented our previous week’s homework assignments, building at least one logic gate. This week proved more difficult as more students teamed up to take on the difficult task.
Family Dinner
This week’s family dinner was “CPU Dumplings” led by Taeyoon Choi and friends in which the process of making dumplings is used as a metaphor for how computers work.
On Saturday, CW&T invited students to do a visit at their Brooklyn studio. The pair showed students their fabrication equipment and gave a tutorial on how to get electronics manufactured. They left students with the challenge to make a 3D model, drawing or sketch and make a request for quotes to get an idea of how much it would cost to make whatever electronics.
Critical theory: on the introduction to other dark matters
Following the reading assignment introducing us to Simone Browne’s Dark Matters, class met Thursday morning to discuss the content rich text. Dark Matters “names the surveillance of blackness as often unperceivable within the study of surveillance, all the while blackness being that nonnameable matter that matters the racialized disciplinary society […] as a black diasporic, archival, historical and contemporary study that locates blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated and enacted,” according to Browne.
Browne used historical and pop culture references to shed a light on under-discussed matters of surveillance studies, such as the long, familiar history of FBI surveillance on black radials, artists, activists and intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, Assata Shakur, James Baldwin, Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael), Martin Luther King Junior, Malcolm X, Angela Y. Davis, Josephine Baker, Billie Holiday and Ol’ Dirty Bastard, to name a few.
The book is centered on Browne’s request for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to release documentation regarding Frantz Fanon under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). FOIA allowed for full or partial disclosure of American government documents, partial meaning many documents are redacted.
Surveillance is defined by Browne and Steve Mann in multiple parts (which include but aren’t limited to):
- veillance neutral observing or watching
- surveillance observing and recording done by an entity in a position of power relative to the person(s) being observed and recorded
- sousveillance “act of observing and recording by an entity not in a position of power or authority o ver the subject of veillance often done through the use of handheld or wearable cameras,” a term coined by Mann
Browne then segued into surveillance studies — how populations are tracked, profiled, policed and governed in physical and/or virtual spaces. She questioned, “what would happen if some of the ideas occurring in the emerging field of surveillance studies were put into conversation with the enduring archive of transatlantic slavery” and the “many ways that race continues to structure surveillance practices.”
After reading the text with American, class broke into group discussion. First, in five groups of three and finally, together as one large group. Discussion ranged from racial passing and the privilege of controlling your own viellance; to questions of who decides what is truth. For example, when video evidence (read: sousveillance) clearly shows the murder of Black people by police, but the murder isn’t recognized. Also, how jails and policing are surveillance tactics that go hand in hand with gentrification.
Showcase: on how to document, break down an idea and give feedback
Friday afternoon centered around goal setting with Lauren. Students were instructed on how to make change. Basically, to make a change happen, students need to determine which change they’d like to create. This involves planning around goals.
Lauren started by sharing a quote by Winston Churchill, “plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.” That was to say that, engaging in the process of planning is more important than the plans themselves.
Lauren also showed the class Zig Ziglar’s “The Seven Steps of Goal Setting” which are:
- Identify the goal
- List the benefits
- List the obstacles to overcome
- List the skills and knowledge required
- Identify the people and groups to work with
- Develop a plan of action
- Set a deadline for achievement
Then the class talked about process. How process can be overdone, especially within the tech industry and corporate settings. Also how project management methodologies like AGILE or SCRUM can be cumbersome.
Several people in the class were critical of how processes are too focused on worker’s output. Certain processes over emphasize or incentivize certain tasks that produce poor products. Others said it encouraged overthinking and bureaucratized tasks that people already have a diversity of tactics for, which should be kept, rather than streamlined.
A huge takeaway was the importance of finding goals to believe in that are worth the time, effort and focus put into them. Not only that, but goals should make one feel uncomfortable, otherwise they’re probably not that important.
The topic then segued into feedback — how to give it and how to get it. Towards the end of class, students broke out into groups of three or four to give each other feedback on six goals they were instructed to write down independently.
Students will be iterating on the goals they set during class for the weeks to come in order to create a plan of execution.
Are you interested in participating in SFPC as a student? Find out more about our upcoming semester here and apply. We’d love to meet you!
