The School for Poetic Computation welcomes our new cohort of students and teachers for Spring 2018. A group of faculty, Moreshin Allahyari, Golan Levin, Zach Liebermam, Taeyoon Choi and alumni, Ann tbd, Ying Quan Tan and April Soetrman helped facilitate a competitive admissions process. The cohort will learn and collaborate for ten weeks. Our “Meet the Students Salon” is scheduled for March 6, 2018, 7~9pm at SFPC. Follow our twitter for more news.
Incoming students
Agnes Pyrchla
Agnes is a researcher and strategist who spends most of her time asking questions and learning about humans (in an effort to create thoughtful products). The most beautiful part of her process is finding patterns across seemingly disparate subjects. She is excited to learn a creative medium beyond lens and language to explore our relationship with the natural world.
Ailadi
Ailadi is an Italian visual artist & designer based in Hong Kong. She loves anything that makes the eye flirt with the mind. She likes yearly dailyconstraints, blue Klein, blood red, 8-bit stuff, the “what if.. ”incipit, curvy shapes, exploring how to draw in different ways/mediums and seeing what comes out from collaborations with people from different backgrounds. ailadi.com
Eunsun Choi
Eunsun Choi is a multidisciplinary, conceptual artist based in New York City. Born in South Korea, She is recently a graduate of the Hunter College MFA program. Her work takes many forms about focuses on her efforts to negotiate everyday reality and fit into her adopted American culture. eunsunchoi.com
Gonzalo Moiguer
Gonzalo has either of two ways: deep study, respect for structures and systems, or mixing wires experimenting and seeing what comes out of it. He believes the best work comes from a point in between. When asked what he wanted to do when he grew up, his response was “an inventor”. Gonzamoiguer.com.ar
Hans Steinbrecher
Hans (short for Johann) is an engineer, computer scientist, developer, musician that believes in a holistic approach to building technology. He has a passion for connecting diverse fields of science, art and technology to one homogenous system by both hardware and software. He thrives on the relationships created through the process of his work. In recent years he has been building real time collaboration tools working with startups and corporates. He loves hiking in the alps, where he is from, riding his motorcycle and sailing in San Francisco, where he lives and playing music of any kind, wherever he gets the chance to. Co-founder of politix.io.
Kelly Monson
Kelly is a web developer by trade originally from the Bay Area and currently based in NYC. Her interests include hysterical coding, drawing, staring at data, useless hardware and amateur everything. She thinks a lot about things that address the conflict between what is considered “rational” and the absurd, and power systems particularly in relation to the tech industry. She has referred to herself alternately as an engineer, artist, creative technologist, and in this case the third person. celltowertrees.glitch.me
Nabil Hassein
Nabil has worked professionally as a software developer and a public school teacher, and has also done grassroots political organizing in New York City, primarily for police and prison abolition. His interests include the use of computation to express Black cultural forms, the design and implementation of programming languages and social development environments, and the creation of participatory art which expands the imagination and aids struggles for liberation, as opposed to art’s uses to reinforce the oppressive status quo (as “diversity and inclusion” initiatives are often designed to do). Originally from Northern Virginia, he has lived in NYC since 2008 except for one year and is a resident of Crown Heights, Brooklyn. He is an alum of NYU and the Recurse Center, and is one of the organizers of !!Con, an annual two-day conference held in New York about the joy, excitement, and surprise of computing. nabilhassein.github.io
Nitcha Tothong (Fame)
Nitcha Fame Tothong is a Bangkok-born, New York-based visual artist, animator, and creative technologist. Her works explore contemporary technology’s impact on daily life. She is passionate maker that loves handcrafting and cross-medium pollination. She received her MFA from Parsons School of Design in Design, and Technology and fascinated by visual aesthetics, human-computer interaction and poetic technology. nitchafa.me
Omayeli Arenyeka
Yeli is a designer, developer and artist from Nigeria. She received her BA in the intersection of art, design and code from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study in 2017 and has since been working as a Software Engineer in San Francisco. She’s interested in using art and satire to present alternate realities and futures so as to encourage reconsideration, reflection and hopefully activism. omayeli.com
Paola Gonzalez
Paola is a designer, technologist and dogs lover who loves create stuff with Arduino and beat her friends in Mario Kart. She’s interested exploring the intersections of technology, design, code and theory, focusing on sensory experiences. She lives and work in Santiago, Chile, and is Co-founder of Brillocolectivo.com paoolea.com
Phil Schleihauf
Phil likes making bread and music political, and has made too many demos for companies on open data and financial literacy. They’re excited to explore new kinds of interactions and different ways of expression. uniphil.github.io
Rachel Simanjuntak
Rachel is an LA-based artist and graphic designer. For a long time she thought she needed to know what made her different from everyone else. Now, she’s more interested in what connects her to you; us to each other. She tries to create work that celebrates the simplicity of life and the beauty of human connection. rachelksim.com
Riley Shaw
Riley hopes you’re having a good day so far. He just woke up and is deleting promo emails on his phone. Later, he will make some tea and do dishes. The faucet is a little drippy so he’ll fiddle with that. Riley has a background in design and electrical engineering and wrote software for Khan Academy before joining SFPC. rileyjshaw.com
Sarah Gray
Sarah has been a professional software developer, working at companies large and small, since 2001. Prior to this, she created and directed experimental theater and got a Masters Degree from ITP at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. In 2016, she worked as an Engineering Manager on Hillary Clinton’s tech team; in 2017 she learned to program for the Ethereum blockchain; and she is currently taking time to focus on creative work and integration. Because of her dual background in coding and experimental performance, she is constantly looking at words and forms, and putting together new projects. She is extremely excited to spend ten weeks learning, collaborating, and deepening at SFPC. You can see some of her project work here: factory.fabled.net
Sean Catangui
Informed by his experiences as a musician, designer, and software developer, Sean works to push the limits of computation as an artistic medium. His most recent work explores the concept of ephemeral art. Aesthetically inspired by the work of KAWS, Wassily Kandinsky, and Leta Sobierajski, and conceptually inspired by jazz and hip hop, he hopes to push his art to occupy the space between the visual and the musical. Sean is from South Dakota and lives in Brooklyn. He works as a freelance designer and developer, and his hobbies include dancing and playing the piano. catangui.com/randomized-form
Syd Low
Syd is a recovering ex-barista and radical trans layabout enamored with the ocean. Coming from a background in linguistics, their interests include localized discourses of power and identity, literature’s role in political history, and writing systems and their digital input interfaces. Mostly making illustrations and looping gifs, they hope their work is equal parts unsettling, informative, indulgent and playful. Itsthisnow.com
Sukanya Aneja
Sukanya is a programmer based in Goa. She is currently interested in 3d graphics, generative systems, machine learning and a bunch of other things. She also builds websites. Recurse Center and School of Machines alum. playdo.io
Yael Ort-Dinoor
Yael is a designer and maker. Her work explores re-purposing content, materials and tools, both tangible and digital. She is intrigued by how people, objects and places operate in the context of non-linear storytelling and transient spaces. 117nowheres.com
Teaching Assistants
Ann
Ann is an artist and writer based in New York City. She creates experimental technology that couples biological and electronic components. Her work draws from science, engineering, history, and sociology to explore questions of identity and alienation. Inspired by body horror, science fiction, and DIY and hacker culture, her work seeks to make you feel uncomfortable, strange, and out-of-place. You can find her work online at a-tbd.com
Celine Katzman
Celine is a writer and curator based in New York. You can find her work at http://rhizome.org/profile/celinejade
Ed Bear
Ed Bear is an American performing artist and engineer. His work with robotics, sound, video, transmission and collective improvisation investigates the questionable calibration of social relationships with material technology. As an educator and designer committed to an equitable, open source world, he researches and practices material reuse as a civil responsibility. He has toured extensively in North America and Europe as a musician and teacher. In 2009 and 2010 he received NSF and other funds to study e-waste streams as educational resources, software defined radio, and novel energy harvesting using ionic polymer metal composites. He is currently working with littleBits, Inc. to revolutionize modular electronics. exitrip.org
Matt Jacobson
Matt is a statistician and recreational mathematician based in New York City. He received his BA in mathematics from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2012 and has since been working as a data scientist in finance and marketing. After discovering Processing in 2014 he was immediately fascinated and began devoting most of his free time to developing his skills and experimenting with the language. He hopes to make things that mesmerize and seduce his audience in unexpected ways and embrace that engagement to inspire others. iammattjacobson.com.
Guest teachers
Sarah Aoun
Sarah is currently currently a 2017–2018 Ford Mozilla Open Web Fellow, working on issues of data privacy and digital security. She is a data activist, operational security trainer, programmer, and data visualization developer. Her work lies at the intersection of data, tech, human rights, and transformative justice. You can find her somewhere between Brooklyn and Beirut and online at sarahaoun.com
Pedro Oliveira
Pedro Galvão Cesar de Oliveira is a Brazilian/Italian Art Director, Interactive Artist and Researcher based in New York City. His work history combines experiences in visual-effects, graphic design and motion graphics, interfaces and applications, interactive installations and code-generated art pieces. You can find his work online at pedro.work
Teachers
Kelli Anderson
Kelli is an artist, designer and tinkerer who is always experimenting with new means of making images and experiences. She draws, photographs, prints, codes and creates a variety of designed things for herself and other. From interactive paper to layered, experimental website, everything begins and ends in her studio which houses a 191 letterpress and an assortment of other benevolent contraptions. kellianderson.com/blog
Lauren Gardner
Lauren is the Associate Director for Education at Eyebeam. She is a Technical Product Manager and Community Builder originally from Texas living in Brooklyn. She is the co-owner of Babycastles, an independent digital art gallery and community space in Manhattan and seeks opportunities which place her between creative ideas and technology. Her super power is facilitating process and conversation to build out that initial spark into digital form. You can find her online at laurengardner.com
Morehshin Allahyari
Morehshin Allahyari is an artist, activist, educator, and occasional curator. Morehshin was born and raised in Iran and moved to the United States in 2007. Her work deals with the political, social, and cultural contradictions we face every day. She thinks about technology as a philosophical toolset to reflect on objects and as a poetic means to document our personal and collective lives struggles in the 21st century. Morehshin is currently developing a new body of work on Digital Colonialism and ‘re-Figuring’ as a Feminism and de-colonialism practice, using 3D scanners and 3D printers as her tools of investigation. You can find her work online at morehshin.com/.
Pam Liou
Pam is a computational designer and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. Her work examines tensions between craftsmanship, technology and commerce, revealing the hidden sociopolitical infrastructures undergirding human industry. Her research centers around recoupling the consumer with the producer through design literacy and mass customization, fostering intimacy and efficacy through a dialectic creation process. She is a recent graduate of NYU’s ITP program and is currently developing a desktop jacquard loom as a Project Resident at Eyebeam. You can find her work online at pamelaliou.com/index.html.
Robby Kraft
Roby is a software engineer and an origami artist. He makes software and tools that are inclusive and accessible. His origami artwork has an audience of over 50,000 followers on Instagram. He’s also a coding instructor at Parsons School of Design. You can find more of his projects online at robbykraft.com
Taeyoon Choi
Taeyoon is an artist and co-founder of the School for Poetic Computation. He makes art projects, teaches, writes and curates about technology, cities and political possibilities. His projects were presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He’s the 2017–2018 Fellow at the Data and Society Research Institute. He is the Session Director for SFPC Spring 2018. You can find him and his work online at taeyoonchoi.com
Zach Lieberman
Zach is an artist with a simple goal: he wants you surprised. His work uses technology in a playful way to break down the fragile boundary between the visible and the invisible. He has held residencies at Ars Electronica Futurelab, Eyebeam, Dance Theater Workshop, and the Hangar Center for the Arts in Barcelona, and his work has been exhibited around the world. Zach is one of the co-founders of openFrameworks, a C++ library for creative coding. He’s currently working on the EyeWriter project, a low-cost, open source hardware and software toolkit that helps people draw with their eyes. You can find him online at instagram.com/zach.lieberman/
Call for Fall 2018 students will open in the end of February. Sign up to SFPC mailing list for the latest updates. You can sign up by visiting SFPC’s website and entering your information at the bottom.
