blog post by Gia Castello & Esther Bouquet. video by Olivia Ross.
Day 1: Randomness is never random
Zach split class into groups of 4 and we shared our favorite pieces of art with our classmates. From paintings to writings to interactive installations, we started the class inspired by interesting pieces portrayed from different backgrounds and perspectives.
Zach commented that during his first classes we are expected to recreate different existing pieces of art, mostly analog, in a newly interpreted digital form. Later in the course, we will work on our own experimental translations of everything we’ve learned.
We were introduced to Vera Molnar’s work and made a collaborative document about her artistic practice including her background, her influences and the most representative pieces of art. We also compiled a list of her quotes that were interesting for us.
After that deep dive into Vera Molnar’s work, we started coding in OpenFrameworks! We were introduced to functions like ofRandom and ofNoise, and noted that ofRandom is never random, but follows the clock system of the computer to simulate randomness with algorithms. We also learned how to set the clock so we can have an expected behavior with ofSeedRandom. We also talked about the main differences between coherent noise (like Perlin Noise) and non-coherent noise (like the one our TVs do).
At the end of the class, Zach replicated two of Vera Molnar’s most iconic works in Open Frameworks and gave us the week to work on our recreations.
Day 2: That magnificent taste of autonomy of thought
Critical Theory is about “context, context, and context” said Tsige, our TA for this class. We started our class with a brief introduction of ourselves. Then we jumped right into the analysis of our first assigned reading, Early History and the Struggle for Resources from The Silicon Valley of Dreams, written by David N. Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park. For a first reading, it took me a while to understand what the text was really about. I think part of the reason is that English is not my first language and I am not from the US so I was lacking some historical context.
However, during the class, we took time to reflect and understand more deeply some parts of the text and it definitely helped me.
- How do structures of power operate?
- How have they been replicated through time?
- How can we trace our ancestry and the files on our bodies to heal them?
- What can we learn from the past, to understand our present and make better decisions in the future?
These are some of the questions that have arisen among ourselves, but we had something particular in common: that magnificent taste of autonomy of thought, and being able to share that in a critical and safe space was for sure a pleasant experience. Our teacher, American Artist showed us a few zines made during previous classes he taught at SFPC, which are also an inspiration for what we are going to build in the future and how we can keep track of what we learn at SFPC.
Day 3: Make a circuit you’d put on a wall and first family dinner
One of the best things about School For Poetic Computation is how multidisciplinary our backgrounds are and how they can coexist in one same space. When I saw the following chart, the first thought that came up to my mind was that it could either be applied to a sociology class or to a hardware class.
Taylor invited us to think about how our curiosity and endurance had given us the possibility of sitting at a table with amazing people from such different backgrounds and realities. After a short introduction of what hardware class will be, we started to learn more about circuits, conceptually but also technically. This led us to talk about the basics of the Ohm’s law, the role of voltage, current and resistances in our circuits. More practically, we also learned how to use multi-meters and how to light a LED!
After that, hardware mayhem started as we had to build our own circuits in creative ways.
We ended the day together with our first family dinner at Max’s apartment! It was an incredible and amazing night, full of laughs, confidences, music jam, honest and deep discussions about the past, present and future. We learnt a lot about each other during this evening, sharing our hopes, dreams, but also our fears outside of the space of the school. It felt like we were all connected to the same brain, sharing and learning from the different backgrounds and past experiences of everyone.
Day 4: The massive potential of building emotion-triggering texts
A true learning experience can only take place outside your comfort zone, and day one of our Code-Poetry class for sure took us all to that place. Todd deep dove into a panorama on the history and most iconic examples of digital and analog generative text and how it has mutated during the last few years like ‘Magical Realism Bot’ by Chris Rodley and @yeldora, ‘FellasBot’ by Darius Kazemi, or ‘The_Ephemerides bot’ by Allison Parrish, among others.
Later we had a lecture on Markov Chains applied to text, and how it is used to make automated text generators. We then made several lists of words that came from our dreams, and remixed this tracery template feeding it with our lists of words.
When we read them aloud, the words affected our emotions as we knew where those words where coming from, and we realized that we had created digital poems with massive potential of building beautiful, crazy and even existential-challenging texts.
Day 5: What is poetic Computation?
Taeyoon started the day by sharing with us a presentation he had given at SPAN conference. He told us how he starts every presentation honoring the ancestors and owners of the land he is in. He also explained the idea of care over control, based on how technology reflects our society, its beauty, faults and limitations, and the importance of drawing a line between care and control in all of our practices.
Later he shared his thoughts on his understanding of Poetic Computation, which is the poetry of the code itself and what it creates, but also how we can make or say a lot with very little words. And how possible it is to trigger sentiments by coding.
We also had a very interesting conversation about re-indigenization, its meaning, our understanding of how to honor our ancestor’s technology and to acknowledge our lands’ knowledge. We had a brief time to think how are we engaging with those communities, and how might we open spaces for them to be heard and respected.
Bonus Track: SFPC Film Festival 🍿
In the afternoon, Danny organized an SFPC Film Festival. We shared a list of videos that had inspired us, which was awesome on several levels. We ate popcorn and had a lot of fun. It was a busy week, but we have been learning a lot, and we cannot wait to see what week 3 is like.
