It’s been one week since the 2017 fall semester students finished their 10 weeks at SFPC. Fueled by family dinners and home-brewed coffee, students pulled late nights to finish their podcasts, zines, recoded sketches, and final projects (whew!) in time for the showcase.
Day 1: Recoded with Zach
Zach spent most of the morning in 1:1 sessions with students discussing their projects. Afterwards, he did a live coding introduction to Framebuffer Objects (fbos). A helpful analogy is to think of the FBO as an offscreen canvas where you can draw textures or objects, which you can later draw on screen.
Day 2: Podcast!
Students spent the day working on their podcasts for Morehshin’s class, The Radical Outside. Students were given free reign to interpret their podcast topics, which included Futurism, Manifestos, Piracy and Digital Colonialism, and Art/Resistance/Protest. Some groups took an academic approach, while others used creative writing and sound to explore their topic.
As most groups were finished writing and recording their podcast content, the day was largely spent on editing. With help from Morehshin and Prince, students finalized their podcasts in time for the weekend’s showcase.
Roy Macdonald, a SFPC student from the class of 2013 and all around OpenFrameworks guru, arrived from Chile to help with the recoded project presentation.
Day 3 & 4: Install, install, install
Wednesday and Thursday were all about getting the projects up and running in the space. Over the weekend, Lauren met with each student to discuss their final showcase project and put together a floorplan for the final showcase. With Lauren’s guidance, students got to work prepping the space and getting their projects ready for display.
Students painted, prepped, sawed, drilled, hung, and did lots and lots of testing.
But there was still time for family dinner!
Day 5: Finishing touches & opening night
In just two short days, students and staff transformed the space from a classroom and studio to a gallery.
The show was a group effort with students working alongside staff, TAs, and alum. It was really clear in this final week that SFPC is not just a school, but also a community and family. It was great to see so many alum and friends of the school come out to the showcase, and to share the magic of the class of fall 2017.
And more photos and videos from week 9 and the showcase!
Students had a full week as they headed into the final stretch before the showcase (RSVP here!). They wrapped up their homemade computer and learned about installing and lighting their projects.
Day 1: Face Averaging and The Recoded Project
Students started class by sharing their averaging projects from the previous week. Qiao averaged chicken soup images (and noted that Western chicken soup was noticeably lighter than East Asian recipes), while Heather looked at facial averages of startup C-suites in Silicon Valley.
Robby also demonstrated how to align facial features using the ofxFaceTracker library.
The bulk of class was spent going over the SFPC recoded project and uploading projects into the repository. Zach will be helping students install the project at the SFPC final showcase. Check out this video of the recoded project at the Day for Night festival to see what it will look like!
Day 2: Manifestos — Blockchain, Balcanism, and Metabolism
For Morehshin Allahyari’s class, The Radical Outside, three students presented on three different manifestos: Feminism and the Blockchain, Balcanism, and Metabolism.
First, Niklas May presented the Bitcoin Manifesto and discussed how cryptocurrency could mark the “end of flow capitalism.” Flow capitalism refers to our current system of banking where value is placed on the movement of money: banks make money by acting as the middle man during transactions. Blockchain, as a distributed person-to-person technology, seeks to realign value to the information represented, rather than the storage and movement of money.
Next, Wei He presented on Balcanism, which is built around the idea of the balcony as a space that is both public facing, but privately owned. As such, it connects the mainstream (public/outside) to the subculture (private/inside). It calls on people to use the language of subcultures as a form of encryption, to discuss in public ideas that are understandable only to those who are in the know.
Lastly, Yumi Nishida presented on Metabolism, an architectural movement in Japan that fused ideas about architectural megastructures with those of organic biological growth.
Day 3: Inductance, motors, and movement
For Pam Liou’s class on handmade computers, students built their own brush motors using magnets and coiled wire.
First, they created a coil of wire (inductor). Whenever a current is passed through a wire, it creates a magnetic field. The shape of an inductor (coil) is such that it strengthens the magnetic field.
They then balanced the inductor between two copper wire legs to give the inductor room to spin. They then placed a magnet below the inductor to intensify the magnetic field.
Finally, they applied a current that passed through the copper legs and into the inductor to create a magnetic field that caused the inductor to spin.
Day 4: Web Scraping with Sam Lavigne
On their second class with Sam Lavigne, students learned about several different python tools for web scraping.
First, Sam walked the class through downloading and setting up Selenium. Selenium allows you to control the browser with Python. Many sites (like Facebook and Twitter) load content dynamically over javascript, which is harder to scrape with tools like Beautiful Soup. To access this kind of content we need a real browser we can control with Python.
Next, Sam showed the class how to scrape images from sites like shutterstock using Beautiful Soup. He also demonstrated simple image manipulation techniques using imagemagick.
Lastly, Sam shared some of his favorite resources for those wanting to go deeper with text and image work with Python:
On their final class of the week, students met with Pam to talk about installing and lighting their work.
Pam gave an introduction to some simple design principles to help show work in the best light (pun intended!). First, she recommended having different heights in the piece to add visual interest. She also emphasized the importance of the platform or pedestal as a way to control how the audience interacts with a piece.
Next, she went over the tools of the trade and the logistics of installation. She talked about finding studs in walls and joists in ceilings to make sure work is firmly secured. She also went over different types of hardware such as lag bolts, lag screws, and steel cabling.
And a few more pictures and video of the week from Yumi Nishida!
Day 1 kicked off with a lecture by Zach Lieberman that built on the previous week’s lecture on image processing. This week, students learned how to create an image that averages the frames of a video, and also how to recreate the well-known interactive art piece Text Rain (1999) by Camille Utterback & Romy Achituv.
The class started with a lecture on image averaging, and students discussed Nancy Burson and Jason Salavon’s work.
Burson was well known in the 1980s and 90s for her work on composite and morphed faces. The technology she created in collaboration with two MIT engineers (Richard Carling and David Kramlich) was used by the FBI to age the faces of missing children.
Her best-known public art project is probably the Human Race Machine, which was originally developed in 2000 but continues to be shown in museums today. The project is meant to spark a discussion about race as a social construct, rather than genetic determination.
After viewing Burson’s work, the class spent time discussing the controversial and problematic nature of her approach to race. In particular, Burson often presents as emblematic racial ‘types’ (Asian, Black, Hispanic, Indian) that are in fact an arbitrary fabrication reflective of her own biases as creator rather than any objective measure.
After the Salavon demonstration, Zach walked the class through a recreation of Text Rain. In short, he created a binary black/white image from his video feed, and instructed the falling particles to stop when they encountered a black pixel (code is here!).
Lastly, Zach shared some of his favorite computer vision books for further reading and study.
Day 2: Digital Colonialism, Time, and Piracy
Morehshin started her class with a short lecture on digital colonialism and data ownership. Morehshin has spokenextensively on digital colonialism, and shared with the class her perspective on the proprietary ownership of 3D models of ancient artifacts as a new form of colonialism.
Heather talked about the difference between colonialism, imperialism, and globalism (settlements and control of technology, ideology, transnational economies), and how colonialism today is about controlling people without military force. She also discussed restricting what is possible to do with a given technology as a modern control mechanism.
Next, Hyojin talked about the history of time. In the past, ‘time’ did not mean ‘clock time’ but could refer to many different representations of time such as a the movement of the sun in the sky or the changing seasons. She talked about how time affects our perception of the world and sets certain rituals. Today, we tend to think of time as linear and as a commodity.
“Time was an important way to measure labor output.” — Hyojin Yoo
Lastly, Matt talked about piracy as a facet of colonialism. He posited the open source movement as a form of revolution, meant to make democratic technologies that are usually obscured. He also talked about glitch art, and how artists working in that medium push back against the very hardware that constrains us and separates via access— the size of our monitors and the resolution of our screens.
Day 2 (afternoon): Student Colin Wang teaches a workshop on 3D modeling
As the final showcase approaches, many students have questions on creating custom parts for their projects. To help his classmates get started, Colin Wang, a current SFPC student, designer, and mechanical engineer, led an introductory workshop on 3D modeling.
Day 3: DIY sensors and capacitive touch
On Day 3 students were back with Pam Liou and Arduinos. Pam started by giving a lecture on potentiometers and variable resistance. She showed how some materials have enough resistance that it’s possible to create a quick-and-dirty potentiometer simply by sliding your power along the length while fixing the ground (she demonstrated with brass and steel yarn, which are both much less conductive than copper).
Then she challenged the class to develop their own sensors that used the concept of variable resistance. The students came up with everything from box shaped sensors, to ping pong balls wrapped in foil, to a crazy windchime sensor (sadly, not captured on film!).
Next, Pam talked about capacitive sensors and showed the class how to turn a regular Arduino into a capacitive touch sensor without any added shields or hardware. Simply add the capacitiveTouch library, wire up some big resistors (500K+ recommended!) and then you can use pins 2, 4, and 6 as touch sensors. Easy!
Day 4: Trading Zines on the last day with Nick Montfort
Day 4 marked the last code poetry class with Nick Montfort. In his three part lecture on small machines, Nick has taken the class through creating tweet-sized python programs that generated poems, to slightly longer (but still small!) programs to create zines. For their final class, students generated text for small zines which they read aloud, shared, and discussed.
Day 4 (evening): Family dinner and feedback session with SFPC alum
On Thursday evening, current SFPC TA and former student Todd Andersonarranged a family dinner + feedback session with four SFPC alum: Andy Clymer, Michael Simpson, Yeseul Song, and Anastasis Germanidis. After a hearty pizza dinner, alum introduced themselves, the projects they made for their final showcase, and their current work. Afterwards, students split into groups according to their interests and the expertise of the alum to receive feedback on their final showcase ideas.
It was great opportunity to sit down with the alum and get their insight, and a testament to the closeness of the SFPC family!
It was yet another packed week for SFPC students as they enter the home stretch of the program. Students learned about loading and creating images in openFrameworks with Zach Lieberman, discussed privacy with Morehshin Allahyari and guest speaker Sarah Aoun, got their first taste of Arduino with Pam Liou, looked at computer generated books with Nick Montfort and still managed to squeeze in a microlecture by artist-in-residence Golan Levin, a lecture on Origami by TA Robby Kraft, and a sushi making dinner led by student Colin Wang! Phew!
Day 1: Images, Mosaics, and Ken Knowlton
Students started their week by discussing the programs they wrote exploring typography and repetition for the previous week’s homework.
Next, Zach gave lecture on artist and computer graphics pioneer Ken Knowlton. In 1963 while at Bell Labs, Knowlton developed a program called BEFLIX (Bell Flicks) that generated animated films using bitmap images. During his time at Bell, he worked closely with artists such as Stan VanDerBeek — using the BEFLIX to create Poemfields — and Lillian Schwartz — creating Pixillation with another Knowlton language called EXPLOR.
However, Knowlton is perhaps best known for his mosaic portraits, which use objects, images, or letters as tesserae.
To create his portrait mosaics, Knowlton developed an algorithm that would analyze the color and pattern of a given object and match it to a target image, and produce a mapping of tessera to his desired final image.
Zach used Knowlton’s work as a jumping off point to demonstrate loading and generating images in openFrameworks. In the image below, Zach maps the brightness of every tenth pixel in the original image (left) to the radius of a circle in the computer generated image (right).
Day 2: Privacy and Surveillance and Guest Speaker Sarah Aoun
Day 2 began with a lecture by guest speaker Sarah Aoun. Sarah is a data activist, operational security trainer, and programmer. Her work lies at the intersection of tech, human rights, and transformative justice. She’s collaborated with activists, journalists, grassroots social movements, and NGOs in the US and MENA region on digital security, ethical data & privacy, and data-driven storytelling. Sarah grew up in Lebanon and holds a B.A. in International Relations from Brown University.
Sarah talked about the history of surveillance and it’s roots in colonialism, empire, and the oppression of black and brown bodies. She discussed the origin of the fingerprint and how the first wide-scale use of the fingerprint was by the English in the mid-1800s on contracts made with locals in India. At the time, English colonists began requiring fingerprints on all contracts with locals not for any scientific purpose, but to “frighten [them] out of all thought of repudiating [their] signature.”
Day 3 was the students’ first class on Arduino with Pam Liou. Pam kicked things off with a lecture about microcontrollers. She explained that a microcontroller is a programmable chip. The Arduino is an open-source electronics platform that consists of a microcontroller (the hardware) and an IDE (integrated development environment — the software) that makes the chip easy to program and control.
Pam also talked about how information is sent to and from a microcontroller. When data is sent between two devices, in order for the receiver to know when a unit of data begins and ends, the two devices must establish a synchronization protocol. In other words, thetwo devices must agree on how to read the stream of data.
Pam then discussed two ways that this can be accomplished:
When data is transferred “synchronously,” the sender sends a clock signal alongside the data. This means a special line for the clock signal is required.
When data is transferred “asynchronously,” the sender and receiver agree on a data transfer speed prior to data transfer, and sync their own internal systems accordingly. In order to ensure accuracy, the sender and receiver need to re-sync their clocks periodically during the data transfer process which can slow the rate of transfer.
“Like a murder of crows or a swarm of bees, there are a byte of bits.” — Pam Liou
Finally, Pam led the students in several different intro Arduino sketches. She began with a blinking LED (the “hello world” of hardware), and then got everyone set up with a node.js server to test out sending and receiving data to the Arudino from the web.
Day 3 (afternoon): Microlecture on springs with Golan Levin, Origami with Robby Kraft, and Family Dinner!
After class with Pam, Golan delivered a microlecture on springs. As part of his time as an artist-in-residence at SFPC, Golan Levin has been giving a series of microlectures on everything from interactivity to easing functions.
According to Golan, springs are the essential element of interactivity and lifelike movement. Springs are endlessly useful, and can be combined in various ways to produce almost any movement desired.
SFPC TA Robby Kraft also gave a mini-lecture about his origami program, which he also delivered at this year’s Strangeloop conference. He talked about the history of origami software, and his journey from expert origami folder to origami designer.
“If you don’t invent a new technique then what you’re making probably isn’t new.” — Philip Glass
Lastly, SFPC student (and former sushi chef) Colin Wang taught students how to roll their own sushi. The results were delicious and didn’t last on the plate for very long!
Day 4: Computer Generated Books
For their second code poetry class with Nick Montfort, students started by discussing 280-character python programs they had written for homework. Together, they discussed the purpose and meaning of the program, and refactored the code in realtime.
Next, Nick shared a selection of computer-generated books from his collection. Students broke off into small groups which were each given a single text to examine and discuss. After a few minutes, the class reconvened to share what they had discovered. Books ranged from Update by Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry which scrapes Facebook status updates to generate fictional “statuses” for deceased poets, to Nick’s Autopia which arranges car names into surreal statements.
Bonus! Trip to MIT for Processing Day
On Saturday October 21st, a group of students went to Processing Community Day at MIT Media Lab, organized by Taeyoon Choi. Among the presenters were Guillermo Montecinos, current student of SFPC.
And last but not least, more pictures and a video of Week 6 by Yumi Nishida!
Time flies with week 5 marking the halfway point for SFPC’s class of fall 2017. Week 5 also marked the start of artist-in-residence Golan Levin’s two weeks at SFPC, and the first guest lecture of the semester with Salome Asega. See more below!
Day 1 (morning): Typography, repetition, and Muriel Cooper
Week 5 kicked off with a lecture by Zach Lieberman on typography and repetition. He introduced students to the work of Muriel Cooper, a pioneering media artist and graphic designer who, in 1984, founded the Visible Language Workshop (VLW) at the MIT Media Lab.
At the VLW, Cooper developed the “information landscape,” which was a new interface design for text. After Cooper presented the new UI at the TED conference in 1994, Bill Gates, intrigued and excited by the possibilities, “personally asked for a copy of the presentation.”
Cooper tragically passed away shortly after the TED conference at the age of 68. However, her work has continued to inspire designers and technologies even today.
After researching Cooper, her student at the MIT Media Lab John Maeda, and her colleague Jacqueline Casey, Zach shoed students how to load type into openFrameworks. He then walked through some simple text manipulations, and explained how OFW treats type as a path (series of points) and how those points can be tweaked for compelling visual effects.
Day 1 (afternoon): Meet our Artist in Residence: Golan Levin
After a short break, students reconvened to meet artist-in-residence Golan Levin. Golan is a new media artist who’s work focuses on interactivity and the “expressive use of computation.” In particular, he “applies creative twists to digital technologies that highlight our relationship with machines, make visible our ways of interacting with each other, and explore the intersection of abstract communication and interactivity.”
Golan also advised Zach during his graduate studies at Parsons, and they have collaborated on several projectsover theyears. Golan will be spending two weeks with students at SFPC.
In his introductory talk, he walked students through several of his projects, and did a deep dive on the development of a passion project of his that was 10 years in the making: The Augmented Hand series.
Day 2: Futurism, Feminism, and a Guest Speaker — Salome Asega
On day 2 students were treated to a guest lecture on alternate futures by artist Salome Asega. Salome is an artist and researcher, and the co-host of speculative talk show Hyperopia: 20/30 Vision on bel-air radio and the Assistant Director of POWRPLNT, a digital art collaboratory.
Salome has participated in residencies and fellowships at Eyebeam, New Museum, and the Laundromat Project, and has given presentations at New Inc, Performa, Eyeo, and Gather Festival. Salome teaches in the MFA Design and Technology program at Parsons at The New School and is a Technology Fellow at the Ford Foundation.
Salome, who’s work “sits at the intersection of how cultural art and artifacts are recorded and preserved,” showed the students her projects Crown Heights Mike, Level Up, and the Iyapo Repository.
“‘futuring’ as a verb is done when you know you’re not recognized in certain systems so you have to create new systems for yourself.” — Salome Asega
She also talked about the politics of futuring, and the importance of giving voice to, and imagining futures with, those who are generally written out of mainstream sci-fi and speculative fiction. Salome talked about Afrofuturismand creating futures for and by Africans and the African diaspora, with a focus on black Americans.
“What do you have access to right now that you know someone else doesn’t have access to and how can you find ways to share that out?” — Salome Asega
ann started her talk with an introduction to first and second wave feminism in the US. She used that as a jumping off point to discuss Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. In particular, she talked about how Haraway was inspired by women of color feminism and the writings of Chela Sandoval. She then showed works by cyberfeminist media artists working in the 90s, many of whom were inspired by Haraway’s manifesto.
Next, Morehshin played a short piece of the xenofeminist manifesto. The class then discussed the meaning of kinship and whether it might be possible to form relationships or kinships with non-humans.
After the discussion, Qiao gave a presentation on gulf futurism. She talked about the long history of speculative desert fantasies (e.g. tower of Babylon) and how current day developments (e.g. Jeddah Tower) continue that historical narrative. She also talked about escapism and recontextualization, and how media, such Japanese anime dubbed in Arabic, are reconfigured for the local context.
Day 3 (morning): Wrapping up Handmade Computer with Taeyoon Choi
Day 3 was the last lecture by Taeyoon Choi for part I of the Handmade Computer course. Starting next week students will be learning about microcontrollers with Pam Liou.
Students started the day by sharing their half-adders from the previous week’s homework and talked through how to implement a full adder.
Next, Taeyoon lectured about time and memory. He introduced the idea of a capacitor, which is similar to a battery in that it stores and releases electrons, but at a much more steady rate. Capacitors are used to smooth the output of power supplies, and power components such as motors.
Because they ‘fill up’ and release energy at a constant rate, they can also be used to make clocks. After the lecture, students used capacitors to create their very own LED metronomes.
Day 3 (evening): Field trip to Data & Society
Later that day, students went up to Data & Society, where Taeyoon is currently a fellow, for whiskey Wednesday. Before mingling with community members and visitors, students met with researchers Claire Fontaine and postdoc schoalr Peter Krafft, and fellow Rishab Nithyanand, who introduced their work on education and inequality, behavior science, and (mis)information distribution networks respectively.
Day 4: Small Machines with Nick Montfort
Day 4 was students’ first class with Nick Montfort, who is teaching the code poetry class for the next three weeks. His section, titled Small Machines, focuses on what is possible with short, stand-alone programs.
“A poem is a small … machine made out of words.”— William Carlos Williams
The class started by looking at Nick’s Memory Slam project in which he recreated six classic poetry generation machines using javascript. The students downloaded the code and played around with changing words and parameters to create their own generative poetry.
Students discussed the difference between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and how tweaking the parameters in one area can significantly change the meaning in another.
And a few more pictures from week 5!
Mark your calendar for Student Showcase in November 11~12 at SFPC, 155 Bank Street, NYC!
The week’s highlight included philosophical discussion about preservation, privacy, generative poetry and animation. Students packed a lot into a shortened schedule this week, for example on Thursday, the morning session was held with Code Poetry track teacher Sam Lavigne, and a Q&A on OpenFrameworks with Zach in the afternoon. A busy schedule, but worth it as always!
Day 1: Poetry, Language, and Memory
For this week’s homework for their critical theory class with Morehshin Allahyari, students were asked to write a fiction piece in response to the following prompt: “Future Proof: Imagine how a museum conservator would approach preserving your work for a show in 40 years. What issues would arise?” Students came back with poetry, a play, a day-in-the-life of a future curator, and many, many great short stories.
After reading their short stories outside on the Hudson River Parkway, the class returned to their classroom in Westbeth for presentations by Stacy Kellner, Guillermo Montecinos, and Colin Wang.
Stacy kicked off the day’s presentations with an introduction to media archeology, which is the study of new/emerging media through the past. She explained how the archive itself has it’s own meaning, that it is itself a medium. She ended her talk by asking the class to consider whether the archive could help us change how we think about time and progress.
Next, Guillermo talked about memory, first from the perspective of digital culture, and then by discussing memory and art activism in his home country of Chile. He questioned who owns the memories we store in digital archives (us? Facebook? Google?) and what it means when we need electricity to keep memories alive.
He also discussed collective and national memory. He talked about the Pinochet dictatorship, and the 1,200 people who were ‘disappeared’ between 1973–1989. He showed the work of artist Francisco Papas Fritaswho, as a way to honor and remember the disappeared, tattooed a page from the Valech Report — a record of human rights abuses in Chile by Pinochet’s regime. Guillermo also asked the class to reflect on whether there are beneficial effects to forgetting, such as healing.
Finally, Colin presented on the Right to be Forgotten and the Right to be Remembered. He gave an overview of the legal base of the Right to be Forgotten in the EU. He also asked students to consider the differences between delisting and deleting, and the potential negative effects of obscuring information.
In the second part of his presentation, Colin discussed terrorist attacks and Facebook’s safety check feature as a way to explore the idea of the Right to be Remembered. He noted that most terrorist attacks do not make news in the West, and asked what it means when Facebook is able to control which events warrant the safety check feature and which don’t. Like Guillermo, he ended by asking if there is value in forgetting.
“Although much technology, especially since the Memex, has focused on enhancing human ability to remember, perhaps we need to secure our ability to forget. Perhaps this ability to forget is not our flaw, but our bliss; that which essentially makes us human.” — Taeyoon Choi, Poetic Computation Reader
Day 2: Logic Gates!
For Week 4 of Taeyoon Choi’s Handmaking Computerclass, students graduated from paper circuits to breadboards, but not without showing off their inventive paper AND, NAND, and OR gates from the week before.
After the students shared their homework, Taeyoon talked about the difference between TTL (transistor-transistor logic) and CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) integrated circuits. In short, TTL chips are truer to the discrete components, they consume more power and are a bit less hardier than CMOS chips, but CMOS chips allow a greater density of logic gates and are, therefore, the basis of many electronics products today.
Next, Taeyoon introduced the class to breadboard prototyping and the 14 pin, 4 NAND gate integrated circuit (IC). He then asked students to recreate AND, NOT, OR, XOR logic gates using only the IC and two push button signals.
Day 3 (Morning): Text manipulation with Sam Lavigne
The final day of class of the week started with a lecture by Code Poetry teacher Sam Lavigne, who gave an introduction to text manipulation with python. Sam challenged the class to think beyond art generated by a “solitary genius,” and to consider the artistic opportunities in digital collage.
How can we make use of what other people have put online to generate a statement, artistic or otherwise? — Sam Lavigne
Sam showed the class how to do simple text manipulation such as randomly changing the order or words or sentences in a text. He also walked the class through using the python libraries textblob and beautifulsoup. He explained how textblob tags parts of speech, and how students can use those tags to replace, for example, nouns or adjectives and create strange, funny, and poetic reinterpretations of an existing text.
Sam also walked the class through web scraping. He explained how to use html tags and css elements to select different parts of a website — such as titles, links, or headings. Next, using Craigslist as an example, Sam showed the class how to scrape the titles of the first 1000 posts on the missed connections page.
Day 3 (Afternoon): Ask Zach Anything
As usual, class began with a show and tell of the last week’s homework. Students shared their John Whitney recreations and talked about the difference between making a Whitney inspired piece vs. one inspired by Vera Molnar. (No consensus on which was harder, though!)
Students spent the remainder of the afternoon asking Zach anything and everything they’ve wondered about OpenFrameworks so far. With two homework assignments under their belt, one exploring the concept of randomness and noise and the other about animation, they were able to hone in on a number of shared topics of interest.
Announcing Learning to Teach Conference, January 20th, 2018 in NYC. Tickets
Learning to Teach is a day-long conference for educators teaching computation in creative fields like art, design or digital humanities departments. Led by Taeyoon Choi (SFPC) and Tega Brain (NYU), the conference will feature keynotes by leading educators including Daniel Shiffman, Naomi Clark, Brad Garton. The keynote speakers will share their experiences teaching computer programming and related topics, their strategies for blending critical thinking, engineering, and inspiring creativity in a teaching environment. This year’s program will include a participatory session for attendees to observe the pedagogical strategies of their peers and develop teaching approaches of their own. Join us to explore the intersection of pedagogy and creative practice, and get ready for the year ahead.
Date: January 20th, 2018 (10am ~ 5pm)
Venue: Integrated Digital Media, NYU, 8th floor of 2 Metrotech Center. Brooklyn.
Daniel Shiffman works as an Associate Arts Professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Originally from Baltimore, Daniel received a BA in Mathematics and Philosophy from Yale University and a Master’s Degree from the ITP. He is a director of The Processing Foundation and develops tutorials, examples, and libraries for Processing and p5.js. He is the author of Learning Processing: A Beginner’s Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction and The Nature of Code (self-published via Kickstarter), an open source book about simulating natural phenomenon in Processing. He can be found talking incessantly on YouTube about programming.
Naomi Clark is an independent game designer based in New York City and an Assistant Arts Professor at the NYU Game Center. For more than two decades she’s designed, produced, and written for a wide variety of games spanning many platforms and audiences. Among the several dozen released games she’s contributed to are early text-based virtual worlds, downloadable and mobile games for mass audiences, and online games for LEGO. She’s taught classes on the study and design of games at Parsons: the New School for Design, the New York Film Academy, and the School of Visual Arts, and has contributed writing on games to publications (Feministe) and collections of essays (Videogames for Humans, Queer Game Studies) in addition to co-authoring a textbook entitled A Game Design Vocabulary. For the last fourteen years, Naomi has also served as part of the collective that runs the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit legal organization by and for the trans and gender non-conforming communities of New York. Her current design projects are primarily non-digital games: Consentacle, a two-player game of trust, communication and intimacy, and Lacerunner, a 19th-century revision of an existing commercial card game.
Brad Garton received his BS in pharmacology from Purdue University, where he also worked towards an MS in psychoacoustics. He eventually entered the graduate music composition program at Princeton University and was awarded a PhD in music composition in 1989. He is currently a Professor on the composition faculty of Columbia University, where he also serves as Director of the Computer Music Center. Much of his work has focused upon the development and real-time use of music performance models, especially in collaboration with Terry Pender and Gregory Taylor in the improvisatory group “PGT”. He is an active composer and music software developer, co-authoring the computer music language RTcmix. He has written a number of ‘language objects’ for Max/MSP, melding the capabilities of diverse music and general-purpose programming languages with the extensive music and graphics processing of the Max platform. Recently he has embedded the RTcmix language within the Unity Game engine, enabling extended algorithmic and audio capabilities in the Unity environment. He has worked as consultant on the design and installation of computer music facilities throughout the world.
Event photo: Kaho Abe at Learning to Teach 2017, Photo by Kira Simon-Kennedy
Press inquiries and request for accessibility & sign language interpretation: taeyoon@sfpc.io
Fall has finally arrived in New York City! Week 3 marked the last (hopefully) hot week of summer and cooler weather couldn’t have arrived soon enough for students.
Day 1: John Whitney and Abstract Computer Animation
Fresh off the weekend, students started the day by showing off their Vera Molnár recreations from the previous week’s homework. Niklas and Matt J. even shared a very handy, super flexible grid template inspired by Molnár, which you can download from github here.
Next, Zach Lieberman lectured about abstract computer animation, starting with the work of Mary Ellen Bute, a pioneer of abstract animation, who created a number of influential films from the 1930s-50s. The students then researched the life and work of John Whitney, who is largely thought of as the founder of computer animation.
Whitney, who was in Paris studying to become a composer when the war broke out, was inspired, along with his brother, to create experimental films after seeing the work of Oskar Fischinger. In 1942, the Whitney brothers released their first piece Variations on a Circle. In order to create the work, Whitney had constructed an animation stand, and he continued developing a mechanical pendulum device that could be calibrated to obtain certain animation sequences.
In the late 1950s, Whitney repurposed a WWII M-5 gun director for use as a drawing device. As the original machine was used to calculate mathematical firing sequences, Whitney was able to use it to perform the types of calculations that would later be used for graphics by digital computers.
In 1966, Whitney became the first artist-in-residence at IBM, and by the 1970s he had abandoned analog machines for digital drawing, which he used in films such as Arabesque (1975).
Day 2: Art, Design, and Activism
Week 2 of Morehshin Allahyari’s class was all about art activism. The class began by discussing the week’s reading, and debated the difference between art and design.
“Does an art object need to have functionality?” — Morehshin Allahyari
Fernando asked whether artist Adrian Piper’s declaration that confronting the “sinner with the sin” and pushing people to question their belief systems by showing them their flawed thinking was naive. Especially in a world where people at times seem to be willfully ignorant, and hostile to ideological self-examination.
Ying took the class on a tour of artists that use archiving as an activist medium. He discussed artists such as Samson Young who use sound to memorialize US bombings on the Middle East, to Sheida Soleimani who uses digital archives and the viewer’s desktop as a space for exhibition, to Trevor Paglen who photographs restricted military sites that would otherwise escape the historical archive.
Day 3: Introduction to Logic Gates
Despite the sweltering heat, students fired up their soldering irons and got ready for week two of their hardware class with Taeyoon Choi.
Taeyoon kicked things off by showing the students his newly released book, the Poetic Computation Reader, which was made in collaboration with HAWRAF.
The Reader uses a custom-built platform that allows users to adjust type size, font, color, and spacing, and to read-aloud using a text-to-speech API. The project is open source for anyone who’s been looking for a better way to publish online.
Next, the students demoed the single-pull double-throw switches they had designed for the past week’s homework. Taeyoon also discussed the importance of a 0– Ground Signal, and how that differed from simply breaking out to an open circuit by cutting off power.
Taeyoon then lectured on transistors and gave an introduction to logic gates.
The class quickly dove into soldering their second set of circuits: a 9V → 5V Voltage Regulator, and an AND gate.
Day 4: Ramsey Nasser and the Meaning of ‘Poetic Computation’
The final day of week 3 marked the first lecture in the Code Poetry track this fall semester with Ramsey Nasser. Nasser invited students to reflect on the meaning of ‘poetic computation’ and led a discussion on the history and precedents to modern day computer and algorithmic art.
“[Digital art] is a form of instructional art that’s made unique by the fact that the agent that interprets the instructions need not be human.” — Ramsey Nasser
He talked about music, Fluxus instructional art, and Arabic calligraphy as corollaries to today’s computer art. In each case the artist either creates or works within a set of instructions, which then gets interpreted by another person.
Though the interpreter in the case of computation isn’t human, that does not mean it is neutral. Nasser also discussed his own research and art, and his interest in the neutrality of programming. He gave as example the primacy of American English in computer programming —e.g. in C# color is sans-u — and what that means for non-native speakers: how does that change access? How does it change someone’s ability to be expressive?
“The act of naming something is a cultural act. It can even be a violent act.” — Ramsey Nasser
After the discussion, the students broke into pairs for an activity on instruction and interpretation. One student was given a drawing and acted as a “programmer” while the second student was the “computer.” The programmer would describe the drawing to the computer, who would do her best to reproduce the original picture. There was a lot that got lost in translation (or interpretation) as evidenced by the photos below.
Week 2 of the fall semester marked the first full week of classes for SFPC. Energized after the weekend, students came ready to debate singularities, jump into soldering and coding, and introduce themselves and their work to the community.
Day 1: Vera Molnár and The Algorists
Day 1 started with a class on media art with Zach Lieberman.
First, students shared the programming languages they had created as part of last week’s homework. Some highlights were a language called ‘pretty please’ that requires programmers to ask the computer nicely in order to get operations to execute, and a physical object interpreter for cooking.
Next up was a lecture on the Algorists, and a group research session on the work and life of Vera Molnár, a pioneer of computer art.
Starting in 1959, Molnár created paintings using what she called the “Imaginary Machine.” Molnár would follow a series of set instructions with slight variations to create paintings that explored “the subtleties that turn a collection of forms into the ‘epiphany’ of art.” In 1968, she began working with a computer and plotter to expand her examination of algorithmic art.
“This may sound paradoxical, but the machine, which is thought to be cold and inhuman, can help to realize what is most subjective, unattainable, and profound in a human being.” — Vera Molnar
Day 2: Political objects, Silicon Valley, and Women in Computing
Morehshin Allahyari’s class, The Radical Outside, began with a discussion of the week’s reading. Students debated if creators with biases and beliefs about the purpose and audience of the technologies they are making can intentionally or unintentionally bias the objects they create. Students talked about snapchat filters and automatic soap dispensers as examples of technologies that perpetuate the biases and skin tones of their developers. There was also a lively debate over whether certain technologies necessitated particular political systems, as argued in the article, Do Artifacts Have Politics?
“Who is we? Who gets to decide to create technologies?” — Morehshin Allahyari
Amit argued that, “The suggestion that we should expect new technologies to reduce the gaps between the haves and have-nots” is too simplistic, and posited that the current technological revolution “will give birth to new forms of political philosophies” as it exposes the limitations in previous philosophies, such as capitalism and socialism, birthed from the industrial revolution.
Matt asked the class to think about the role of images in how we perceive certain roles and industries, and where we choose to work: “How important is it to see ourselves reflected via gender and race to provide a definition of what is possible in our world, and encourage us to work at the boundaries?”
Day 3: Buttons and blinking lights
Wednesday marked the first hardware lesson of the semester! Students met Pam Liou who is co-teaching the class along with Taeyoon Choi.
Pam is a computational designer working with textiles, who also has a background in jewelry design. Formerly a resident at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, working on an open source jacquard loom, Pam’s work investigates the “tensions between craftsmanship, technology, and commerce.”
Taeyoon also lectured on the basics of hardware. He introduced the class to his handmade computer project and his work on demystifying computational technology.
“There is a sense of beauty in how computers are designed.” — Taeyoon Choi
The technical portion of his talk started with a discussion of voltage and current, resistance, and LEDs. He then quickly moved to circuit diagrams and translating drawings to life. He then threw the class into the deep end, having them soldering their own circuits and experiment with different kinds of switches.
Day 4: Field trip to the MoMA Library
Thursday started with a field trip lead by Taeyoon to the MoMA Library, which houses an extensive collection of books, exhibition catalogs, correspondence, and other articles about individual artists and art collectives.
Students spent the morning reading over notes, letters, postcards, and speech transcripts from E.A.T members.
Day 4 cont’: Meet the Students!
The week ended with a coming out party for the fall 2017 class. In a rapid fire salon-style evening with alumni and community members, each student gave a four minute presentation on their work and their motivation for coming to SFPC. It was an intimate and welcoming audience excited to hear about what this semester’s SFPC is up to. Afterwards, students and attendees mingled and discussed art, media, and future collaborations.
For their presentations, student shared their work and plans for SFPC:
Colin gave an overview of his work as a mechanical engineer and woodworker, including the process behind his pieces.
Kaitlin talked about her evolution as a photographer from traditional landscape photography to digital photo manipulation to VR.
Matt O. showed his projects that combined his love of music and technology.
Yumi gave an overview of her work as a motion graphics designer and told the group that when she read the SFPC motto, “more poetry, less demos” she knew it would be the right place for her.
Fernando talked about his game Panoramical, a game he made about navigating the US healthcare system, and his responsibility as an artist and maker in today’s political climate.
Guillermo talked about his creative coding school in Chile, and his work as an electrical engineer and musician.
Heather talked about her company’s work in equality and sustainability, her interest in algorithmic biases, and her love of pair programming.
Niklas told the group about how he taught himself graphic design, ran his own agency, and traveled to Japan.
Qiao talked about her frustrations with teleconferencing with international colleagues, and her plans to build a real time translation app that would take into account the speaker’s mood and intention.
Matt J showed off his mesmerizing, math-based looping GIFs.
Stacy talked about her background in cognitive science, her love of the outdoors, and her hopes for SFPC.
Ying shared his love of photography and the powerful emotions a single image can evoke, and wondered how the same effect could be achieved through code.
Hyojin talked about her evolution from designer to artist and her interest in how identity is constructed.
Wei talked about his time at the New Inc. incubator and his artistic collaboration with his wife (together they form the creative duo He & Hu).
Ann shared her love of cyborgs and their relationship to the mixed race experience, and her interest in exploring discomfort as an artistic tool.
Amit closed the night by inviting the audience to choose one of three potential presentations. After taking a survey of the room, he shared a recent philosophical conundrum that’s been nagging at him: if you were to die right now and be given the choice to continue life but with no knowledge this choice had been presented, or to move on to a state of nothingness, which would you choose?
Time does a funny thing at SFPC. Even though it’s only been one week since the fall semester officially began, it feels like we’ve known each other a lot longer. From day 1, the SFPC team created an atmosphere of trust so that students felt comfortable diving straight into discussions of their art practice and hopes for the program, their thoughts on the responsibility of activist artists, and the philosophy of technology.
“Art creates a tiny tornado in your heart.” — Taeyoon Choi
Day 1: Introductions, hopes for SFPC, and transmitting code through sound
Day 1 opened with introductory lectures by founders Taeyoon Choi and Zach Lieberman. Students listed all the questions they had for their time at SFPC, and broke into small groups to discuss and categorize the questions.
Next, the class played the Human Fax Machine Experiment. Students created an aural system for transmitting and receiving code. The room filled with beeps, boops, and laughter as students tried transmitting instructions for simple line drawings across a makeshift barrier. Afterwards, the group discussed what they discovered was necessary for the sender to transmit (turn left, go forward) as well as the receiver (message received, send again!).
The day ended with a scavenger hunt around the West Village.
Day 2: Critical Thinking and Pedagogy
The students began the day with Morehshin Allahyari who is teaching critical theory in her class titled, The Racial Outside. She opened the day’s lecture with an introduction to digital colonialism, additivism, and her work. Morehshin asked students to reexamine the stories that are told about how objects and information are created and shared, and by whom they are owned.
“It matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts. Mathematically, visually, and narratively, it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems.” - Donna Haraway
Morehshin shared her project, Material Speculation: ISIS, in which she recreated as 3D printed objects 12 original artworks (statues from the Roman period city of Hatra and Assyrian artifacts from Nineveh) that were destroyed by ISIS in 2015. Material Speculation was one example of a philosophy she’s coined as additivism, which aims “to transmute digital forms through the material world into human scale actions and effects.”
Melanie Hoff, who is TAing Morehshin’s class, also gave an introduction to her work. She discussed three projects, Partisan Thesaurus, Small Data Squad, and Dopplecam from two perspectives. First, she talked about how her work exposes the hidden biases within information, language, and social convention. She then exposed the biases in her own work, highlighting decisions such as which texts she chose to train her thesaurus and which search engine she chose for dopplecam. Melanie’s dual-approach presentation was a direct response to Morehshin’s earlier lecture, in which she invited students to question the motivations and politics of those who create systems and technologies.
After their critical theory lecture, Taeyoon led students through an activity and discussion on pedagogy. Taeyoon talked about “teaching is a gift for learning,” and how learning is creating habits and teaching is creating habitat that need to be practiced and nurtured.
Day 3: Binary, Teaching and Learning, and SFPC Salon Part I
Zach Lieberman kicked off day 3 with a lecture on binary. He explained that computers are a “giant illusion machine”, and “files and folders and different kinds of datas are illusions created by computer programmers.”
Afterwards, students created simple systems to develop an intuitive understanding of binary. Projects ranged from a math-based game to demonstrate bit-shifting, to a color-by-binary-numbers chart, to a binary turntable.
Day 3 ended with the first night of the SFPC salon. The room quickly filled to capacity as students, alumni, and community members came together to hear artist talks by DIA, Claire Hentschker, and CWalonT. Though each artist’s approach and medium was completely different (DIA — typography, Claire — VR, CWT — hardware), their passion and energy came through clearly in their talks and was reflected back by the audience.
Day 4: Games, exploring Westbeth, and SFPC Salon Part II
On the final day of their first week, students met with SFPC co-organizer Lauren Gardner for their first lecture of the day. Lauren is a game creator, educator, and community builder. After falling in love with broadcast journalism in grade school, Lauren went on to build enterprise software for companies including Turner, Time Warner, and Thomson Reuters. More recently, she has focused on bringing people together and supporting underrepresented artists as a co-owner of babycastles, a co-organizer at SFPC, and the Associate Director of Education at Eyebeam.
After her introduction, Lauren lead students on a tour of the Westbeth Artists Community Complex, which has been home to SFPC since 2013. Westbeth was the original site of Bell Labs, where it was a world-leading research center and the site where the first TV broadcast and the first binary computer were demonstrated. After Bell Labs relocated, Westbeth was reimagined as a live-work space for artists and their families. It has housed a number of iconic cultural institutions such as The Martha Graham Center for Contemporary Dance and Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, the first LGBT synagogue in New York.
After the tour, students returned to the classroom for a lecture and activity on programming languages with Zach. Students broke into groups to work on designing their own programming languages guided by three questions:
What are programming languages built out of?
What does a programming language mean?
What does it mean to learn to code?
Finally, the group reconvened and discussed how programming languages are intensely personal and political creations that have encoded within them the biases, frustrations, desires of their creators. One group, in trying to create a language based on cooking, got into a heated debate on whether a knife is a variable or a function.
After a break for dinner, students gathered for day 2 of the SFPC Salon. Once again, the space filled with alumni, artists, and community members eager for the second round of presentations. The room filled with laughter and introductions, though quickly fell silent when the presentations began. The night began with TOTOYUYUMOMO’s (Tom Galle / Moises / johnyuyi) viral meme art, followed by James Clar’s thoughtful installations, and Kevin Slavin’s search for microorganisms, and ended with Ursula Endlicher’s tongue-in-cheek performances.
Overall, it was a packed first week for the fall semester at SFPC!
