blog post by Gia Castello & Esther Bouquet. video by Olivia Ross.
Day 1: Recreating the past is a big deal
After a busy weekend visiting galleries in lower east side where some of us met Manfred Mohr, we started the week with Zach’s class, Recreating the Past.
We reviewed last week’s homework, recreating Vera Molnar’s artworks, in small groups and collectively shared our difficulties and problems we encountered. As we all have different backgrounds, our issues were varied: for one, it was situated at the logic applied to the code to recreate a hand-drawn artwork, for another it was the geometric variations.
Zach encouraged us to share our work but also process our thoughts using different methods in order to build a collective and open memory that will be useful beyond the session. He then lectured and showed examples about abstract computer animation and especially the works of early computer animation pioneers like Mary Ellen Bute and her audiovisual films, Len Lye and Oskar Fischinger.
He then introduced us to the work of John Whitney Sr., our artist of the week. Whitney was an American animation film-maker and composer. After collectively researching his life, thoughts, and achievements during class we were all impressed by how prolific and complementary his practice was.
Through introducing the work of John and James Whitney Sr., Zach also taught us about sine and cosine functions that are very powerful functions for animation without using variables. After refreshing our minds with some geometry/trigonometry basics, he took us on a journey of amplitude, frequency and phase modulations.
Day 2: Understanding levels of abstraction
On Tuesday, American Artist’s class was about Software as Ideology. The text we read tried to trace back the history of software in order to identify when different shifts happened. It also gave a better understanding of the master/slave relationship we have now with computers. It was frustrating to see that lots of women played a very important role in the development of computers and were now left behind, almost erased from the history (as the movie “Hidden Figures” from 2016 points out).
As this is such a broad topic, after the collective reading we broke into groups to talk about different parts of the text. Then we all gathered together to discuss of the notion of blindness that can be applied both to the computer and our society. We examined the notion of accountability among our peers which is made possible by the political, community or spiritual spaces because of the concomitant power that thrives through human relations.
What struck us was the history the text was explaining, was a continuous example of colonization compared to the text that we studied last week even if the colonization was applied in a different context. Once again, this class was very challenging but American’s great taste for gifs made it a bit easier.
Day 3: T is for Transistor
On Wednesday, we were all very enthusiastic to have our hardware class with Taylor from CW&T! First, we collectively reviewed our first homework from last week and it was completely astonishing. The assignment was very simple: build your own circuit and draw it in a way you understand it better; and yet, all the propositions were completely different from one another, creating huge surprises, laughs, and coos. It was just the first week and everybody worked so hard on their project. It was stunning and set the bar very high for the upcoming weeks! Here are some pictures of all this effervescence of ideas!
Next we learned about switches, relays and transistors. The difference between the three is that relays can be considered as an electronically activated switch, transistors are solid state devices with no moving parts; and like relays, they’re used to amplify electric signals and/or as electronically controlled switches. This introduction then led us to talk about logic gates using resistor / transistor logic. If they seem to be complicated, they are actually very useful especially in computers, and we learned how to build our own!
Later in the day, we had our first family dinner in the space with several students from the Fall 2018 cohort: Meghna, Eli, Ilona, Marcus and Sonia. It was a very warm (and rainy) evening during which we were able to learn more about their experiences before and during SFPC and how they are currently navigating their life, post-sfpc.
It was a day particularly special for us, full of hopes and new friendships and we were all very thankful and grateful.
Day 4: poetic Markov chains
On Tuesday we had our last class with Todd Anderson. We started by reviewing our homework and it was really amusing. The constraint was to work with generative text, but as for the hardware class the day before, students ended up with lots of different projects.
Max N-C generated for instance a version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar crossed with the NBA using Markov chains and gave us a stunning performance with Olivia and the class TA Stefan Pelikan.
Shelby developed a very convincing generator of fake news titles that you can see here. Gia created a mesmerizing mashup using the feminist manifesto and the Lion King while Max B scraped his conversations on a social network in order to make his 2017-Max talk with his 2019-Max in a very sensitive way.
During the second part of the class, we talked about text, sound and interactivity asking ourselves “what does a piece of music generally add when set to text?”. Todd introduced us to website instruments like Patatap and more poetic instruments/websites like gifRapBot or “Yardley,
PA 1997” that he developed. He also explained to us how to synchronize text with audio and showed us examples of keyboard interactivity using events in JavaScript.
Day 5: Artist Statement writing
On Friday we had our first workshop with Celine Wong Katzman and we talked about the feared and dreaded artist statement. She really tried to de-stress us by leading us step by step in what an artist statement is and isn’t, clearing out any abstraction or ambiguity. That was a necessary start, especially when we know how important it is to introduce people to our work. She also introduced her work through her former curatorial practice at bitforms and her current curatorial fellowship at the Queens Museum (she helped curate American Artist’s exhibition which is on view until Feb 16 2020!).
To explain the diversity and variety of artist statements, she presented various examples such as Ryan Kuo’s, Jen Liu’s but also artist statements from former SFPC students, Nabil Hassein and Galen MacDonald. The idea behind that was to make us understand that an artist's statement is meant to be revisited as it is reflective of where our current thinking, values, interests, or even medium are at. She also helped by giving us guiding questions.
All those classes and new homework definitely gave us a lot to think about and reflect on for next week! As intense and challenging SFPC can sometimes feel, it is also a very friendly and open learning environment where we can all count on each other.
