SFPC Wrap Up

    Things got a little wild at the end—final crunch week, three days of standing and talking to people, then suddenly residency week and we're left to our own devices?? We cleaned up, we taught workshops, we we're asked to imagine 10 week to 25 year plans (Taeyoon bringing those Real Life™ skills as always). I shooould've immediately written all my thoughts, but it was dreamlike and I was enjoying being in the soup, so here's a mashup-wrapup of the end days.

  I'm pleased with what I had up for the showcase—the mounting and lighting worked out fine and making sure I had six done was a decent amount. (I'll be making a page for the piece with more pics & things) Almost all of my work these days goes straight to instagram so thinking about physical presentation was a nice change, and for these in particular the point is their physicality. I also am not used to being able to see people see my work! Seeing reactions, seeing people move on quickly or lingering and talking really made me feel like an ~artist~ in a whole different way. I was both responsible for this object and supposed to have answers (why I made it, how long did it take, what's the point) but also able to see it released into the wild where people would just take pictures and reinterpret. It was incredibly tiring (especially for my Super Introvert Self) to be around for so long, but really worth it. The semi-collaborative nature of the project was more rewarding than I expected; I pull from my own life often to talk about identity, so to have other people relate & get excited helped validate what I was trying to do, and then sharing that in person with people who might not have thought about identity online completed the piece in a real way. Going forward I am definitely thinking about how I might want to talk about my work and not just toss it into the internet ether.

   SFPC being over I'm sort of forced to think about the future in general. After much deliberation I am starting my MA in the fall at Columbia—but unlike the crushing experience of college my art will be both a part of and counterbalance to my studies. Through SFPC I even feel more at home in the city overall—I've made friends and connections, seen how people Make It Work. To that end I'm actually joining the SFPC residency month, where I'll be working on a graphic zine I hope to submit to small presses before the end of the summer. [I'm also available for commissions 8) ] 

taco night organized by yours truly

    I learned many very tangible things at SFPC—how to code in a new language, basic hardware skills, what's a good artist statement—but I think more importantly I got re-excited about doing stuff. I like learning & being critical, I like tech-shit and art in a very vague sense, but had no concept of where to go with that. Art felt like an impenetrable nightmare hustle, code felt like tech bros. I was at a slump in my life where I was pretty unhappy but pessimistic about what I might do better. Being around and supported by folks from all over, from so many careers, at different points in their life was a reminder of how key community is. Not just for the support, but to see that there are so many ways of being in the world and you can change if you need to! (you'd think as a trans person I would be better at that but y'know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) SFPC people want to share their skills, and you realize you have skills to share too. Mid-session Zach went down to the MIT Media Lab for a potential position there, and when he came back he said it was a great experience but "they had no kitchen." It's a simple thing, but for me encapsulates why SFPC feels like more than just a school—there's a level of care that's hard to find much of the time. To combine that with an expansive and rigorous curriculum is truly an impressive feat.

   I'm very grateful to have been selected for the session—the work that goes in to "curating" the participants is equally key to the feel of the space. If you are thinking of applying don't hesitate to reach out with questions about more concrete things than woo woo good vibes review heh. I am going to carry all of the things I learned with me, but for sure the real gift is the people. 

Fruition

It's production week; classes are over and it's the somewhat frantic final push before the showcase this weekend. My project has been through some morphings since it's initial conception to say the least. 

After some feedback about the needles I was getting the sense that what I was feeling about them wasn't coming across. Alden very helpfully worked through this concept map and sort of material affordances map with me, and it seemed like maybe the thing to do was make the needles actually more playful than I originally wanted. Because I'm so used to the needles it's hard for me to get a good grasp of how other people react to them, and Alden suggested that it's actually disconcerting to see these "scary" sharp things doing cute little tasks like watering a plant or knitting. That that would be a better way to exploit the gap between how they're everyday for me but not for most people. 

That concept went over pretty well, but the way people suggested changes made it feel like a materials gimmick, not something thoughtful. I just couldn't quite sell it to myself and I'd rather not futz with servo motors if I'm not really sure about talking to folks about the final thing.  There's people out there making boring ~edgy~ art with needles and I didn't feel like just saying these were my needles saved the project from becoming that. I do want to come back to the idea and I still of course have all the needles; I think I just need to get a better grasp of what I'm trying to express about the medicalization of transness, about process, about time. Or maybe I'm just not in the right mood for this tone right now, y'know?

Conveniently I had an idea on the back-burner. Especially with the recent SESTA/FOSTA bs I was thinking about how ephemeral online spaces can be, how very regulated they are. Something about Grindr sharing HIV data and perilous visibility. Many folks have come to their understanding of their gender/sexuality through the internet in a way that's extremely local in time, increasingly less in space. Identity always is localized but how are we holding on to the artifacts; the modern snippets of Sappho's poetry, the daguerreotypes of bygone gender benders. Even the Internet Archive is on the internet. After the Ethics and Archiving the Web conference I've also been thinking about archives and what goes in them, what doesn't, how it's tagged. One presenter talked about the phasing out of Geocities and I started thinking about the panic around when Yahoo bought Tumblr. Out of this general thought soup I thought, "what if I make tracings of websites foundational to people's experience with gender/sexuality?"

whenever I search about T questions I either get body builder forums or this—what if the hoster just decides to not anymore?

     I like that the tracing defamiliarizes the page & has a sort of "museum effect." I've been asking people for their website recollections and it's funny because it's a personal question but of course these sites are frequently large and public. Some you might have interacted with—like deviantArt or Facebook—others you might not have heard of until now—like Susan's Place or Furry Paws. Sometimes it's more specific like a particular music video or artist, I want to leave my request very open ended to include all these odds and ends that particularly underrepresented identities come to. But everyone's sexuality is regulated so I should probably find like the most popular video on PornHub or something too. (I'm not specifically hunting down positive influences, but mostly that's what people have been offering) I also want to generate some sort of metadata/pseudo filing system to go with them, however many I end up with. 

So that's thaaat. Still sort of a concept blob but I'm content with the objects themselves and the general conversations that have been coming out. Also as someone that wants to work mostly with illustration it makes a kind of sense to showcase that to potential collaborators. Inking them is quite time consuming but hey 3.5 days till showcase! NYC come see! 

Bodies, Blood, Belligerence

    Not only does SFPC have some really exciting teachers, the TAs are all involved in interesting work too! Ann is the critical theory TA, and was also a student last session and so has invaluable insights into the final exhibition process. Her final project was this Blood Battery: 

In many cultures ‘blood’ represents familial or cultural connection; it is a synonym for belonging. As a mixed race woman, I am often confronted with questions about my racial authenticity.  And the purity (or lack thereof) of my blood is used as a metaphor for why I should be included or excluded from certain spaces. (read more)

Who Will Feed Us When You're Gone?. Blood, glass, copper, zinc, stainless steel, cotton, rubber, wood, foamcore, vinyl, LED light, electronic circuit. (2017).

     I really love how bodily confrontational it is. It's not immediately consumable but forces a potentially uncomfortable double-take. I think this can be very difficult to accomplish in (new) media art (especially interactive work) as inadvertently there is often a little awe or whimsy in just the construction of it. Phil recently tried to make a game that was a bit of commentary on the common connection between new technologies and the military, but by virtue of being a game it's just naturally a little fun. How do we provoke other emotions? Another reason I'm particularly interested in the Blood Battery is because I've been unsure how much "tech" I want in my project, and it's helped me think about how I want to use tech to say something in a way I couldn't without it, but I don't want to make something about tech (not right now anyway). The Blood Battery looks like all wires and glowing red but they're not what make it interesting, the blood is. 

     People do expect a sort of frustration with technology the way one expects it of government bureaucracy—think the post office, the dmv—but it's because the printer is jammed on something important, or the website wont load for the tickets they want. There's a larger end goal than game points. Moving to New York I was thrown in a fresh transgender hell of finding a new doctor, new pharmacy, a horrible therapist encounter, weird state laws, etc. just to maintain myself, and I've been thinking about how to share that experience but am running up against this wall of "how do I make it interactive but unfun." Can I harness the frustration of a broken echeck-in machine to talk about the frustration of a broken medical system. If it's too unfun people wont interact, if it's fun they've missed the point. Maybe make the unfun tangental to the actual experience? Like a game that mangles your name or your avatar no matter how many times you edit it. Actually that's a pretty accurate metaphor for how I move through the world I guess. 

     But thinking of the blood battery, I want that bodily feeling. That sort of fascination/horror that I feel coming from stares in public, repurposed for my own satisfaction. There's always questions people want to ask a Real Live Trans Person, and being that I'm aggressively out I try to be open to having to do trans 101 so that so other folks don't have to be, but of course I don't always relish it. Medical questions are to be expected, and so I've been considering how I might make something with the needles I use for weekly intramuscular injections. They are long, an inch and a half, and unforgiving if inserted incorrectly. They've become mundane to me but only through sheer force of will. Being a craft packrat and that they're a pain to dispose of (find your local biohazard sharps accepter) I have every one I've ever used. That I can mark time by these injections got me thinking about trying to make a calendar.

     The other thing with starting HRT (hormone replacement therapy) is that even within the community it becomes this marker of time. How long have you been on T? Before and After pics? How long till your voice dropped? Understandably too, it's a big shift, and my first year it very much felt like something I was "doing," like it took daily energy to rebuild myself in this weird and unexplainable way. Now in year two there is some settling, some acclimation. The thing is, I'm never going to be "done." If I want the effects of T, I can never stop taking it. This is true of many medications*, and an odd burden to bear. There's also frustration in wondering "what if I had started sooner?" like there's all this time I can't get back. A calendar of needles seems like it could both express this weight of time that rolls over me some days but also be that confrontational bodily answer. I like that for other trans folks it could be a kind of acknowledgment, a commiseration**, and at the same time say to cis folks "look! yep this is it!" I am also thinking of the history of LGBT art, and in particular artists working with blood and bodies to discuss the AIDS crisis. That sometimes we have to be a little exhibitionist to tell our stories.

confirming the needles are decently conductive

     I'm not exactly sure how this would work or what it would look like. Ann suggested that since the needles are metal maybe they could be used to close a circuit, which I really like, but they'd have to be running in parallel not serial. Or maybe they are in serial and the joke is the light at the end will never light up. I am thinking maybe some sort of display that has how long it's been but also a countdown to the next shot. I have all my little empty vials too and would like to incorporate those somehow. The imp in me wants to just stuff fairy lights into them & string them up in some ham-fisted commentary on what people expect of masculinity and what I actually want.

     So I don't know. This sort of style of art is very foreign to me, and especially thinking about making art that heavily relies on the concept behind it I get bogged down in "is this interesting? even if it is, interesting enough to do more than talk about but actually make?" But coming from illustration where I don't even know if people read the instagram captions it's also exciting in that it is expected there will be an explanation. If not this hopefully I cobble together something else worth asking about. 

*I have very incoherent mental mumblings about who takes on medicating themselves in not clear-cut illness cases; for example cis women taking various birth control methods with side effects deemed unbearable to cis men. in a world where gender was never forced on me to begin with, I wouldn’t have taken on transness 

**obviously not all trans folks have any interest in medication! (and like, cis dude body builders shoot up more T than me) also hopefully obvious I'm speaking less to the experience of trans women; though shots are an option pills are an equally effective method (oral testosterone so far not as much, though there is gel). I think in some ways the normalizing of the 'medicalization' of transness actually helps hold up cis gender visions, but this is a larger topic for another day. It is a difficult balance coping with now and hoping to create a different future. 

Hardware & Soft Realities

     This week was the hardware intensive week! And maybe the last of the big snows? Despite having at one point assembled a computer, various small robots, and held a title like "master electrician" (in the technical theater sense heyo) before this I'd never actually built a circuit. I guess maybe a potato clock? Anyway, it's incredibly satisfying! (and I really like soldering now that I have the hang of it) We started with copper tape and paper circuits:

     If you're in the know you can see the beginnings of a SPDT switch on the bottom there. If you're not that's fine but I'm not going to get into it since I think a hands-on approach is the best way to do this stuff justice. And that's why I'm glad we started with this super simple approach since as soon at the pieces start doing things for you you don't get to appreciate all the steps in the same way. Or how painfully easy it is for things to touch not-quite-right and not work. Or that the reasons you need resistors where you might not expect is because energy is this fickle real-world chemical reaction—some things are designed the way they are because of immutable material properties! All of this (9V battery not pictured) is just to turn on the LED. So thinking about how many connections there are in something only slightly more complicated?? We moved over to bread boards 

     No soldering fun here, but for the best because troubleshooting logic can involve lots of plugging things in and out. Here we were using NAND gates to try and create other gates, I think this was an XOR gate. Logic gates are kind of wild if I think about it too much—they take two inputs, and depending on what those are spit out one output. All in +/1s and -/0s. And that's the basis of computing. Everything else is degrees of making the 1s & 0s intelligible/usable to humans (oversimplification but not really). Logic gates are a sort of "primordial soup" and some things that don't need full computers just run on combinations of them; like elevators or light switches. (our working definition of "full computer" being that it needs memory, time, and calculation abilities)

After breadboarding we made a 1-Bit Computer (designed by Taeyoon & Pedro G. C. Oliveira) on a printed circuit board (PCB) that had a "clock" (a capacitor), memory (more gates), and could count up to two in binary! This addition ability coming directly from the logic gates' ability to tell when both inputs are 1. This technically could have been done on a breadboard or even paper circuit, but the PCB means less potential for missed connections and just an overall tighter use of space; things we can now fortunately take for granted. On our final hardware intensive day we jumped to Arduinos, basically small very open-ended computers. But for the Arduino suddenly the specter of software appears and there's a whole different interface. Instead of the hardwired logic being available only directly we can now write what we want applied to what inputs. The simple adder looks a lot different.

This part was easy to me, this is what I've seen before, but now in comparison the explanation for why the computer thinks like this made much more sense. This intangible version was almost not as interesting. Of course that's because now that this is easy we can beat our brains into more complex problems. (I'm also totally glossing over the fact that the software to write my software is also a whole constructed environment of 1s and 0s) 

   This progressive view of building up a computer more generally made me think about how very small properties get built on and expand into much larger inscrutable forces. For our critical theory class this coming week we've been reading about the dangers of surveillance algorithms, but even before Big Data and machine learning I think even this little nitty gritty stuff is the root of changes in the way we interact with spaces and each other. Sort of obvious but for that reason worth slowing down and really looking at. I've been reading this book Code/Space and just passed a great line (p. 30) saying "Theory = Mathematics = Code = Story." That very first thing is theory; an interpretation of things. Steampunk is a unpleasant genre, but I think it's interesting in that it is an exploration on what if we'd latched our theory development to different physical mechanics than the ones we did. Even if there is a material "truth" in circuits we're the one's taking that to whatever conclusions we imagine. I'm clearly just chewing on something here but the point being I think that this kind of foundational electronics experience is part of "digital literacy" that should be available to people. There's sOoOo much I don't know and more than I could ever hope to, but knowing that nothing is truly "automagic" is a healthy skepticism start. Also now I can solder stuff. Stay tuned for that final project. 

like?? big thanks to TA Ed Bear who is just generally very interesting

Oh, also this week was the quick-fire four-minute student introductions, which I'll put here for posterity/incase you missed it. (I start @ 44 min in)

reCode: Vera Molnár

     For Zach's software class (I know! learning OF with a creator of OF!!) we're taking a week to focus on an artist's work and what sort of techniques they favor, and then individually recreating a particular piece (or at least a piece inspired by one). It's a cool approach because no matter your level with coding you can figure new things out and come back to discuss it in the group. 

     The first artist we looked at is Vera Molnár, an artist starting in the 50s exploring pre-computer computational art and then later on with early computers (she has a show up at MoMA till April 8th). Her work varies from stark geometric shapes to more intricate patterns with a sort of contained random element. To do that by hand seems time consuming but not necessarily difficult, and oppositly using a computer you get a result very quickly but suddenly have to be much more intentional and precise with instructions. An example:

Molnár's original

my iteration

     In Molnár's original one immediately grasps that there's red squares being maybe "stamped," but not in a way that perfectly lines up. My initial starting attempt used a simple for-loop inside a for-loop to generate a grid of squares, but with a little x/y jitter in their actual placement. Not quite right, I noticed there is always a little horizontal overlap, and only vertically do gaps appear. Adjusted accordingly, I was pretty content, but the original still has an oddly more organic feel and whole rows are shifted so that while overlap is preserved, the larger square has a rougher edge and tilts. Some folks also noted the texture of the squares themselves—something possibly not even intentional but just the nature of using paint on paper as a medium—and tried to recreate that. Through this mimicking and repeated looking I really grew to appreciate the original more, and while sketching from a master oil painting is very similar in this way, it's not something I would've thought to try with more geometric art where rather than just copy visually you are trying to find an underlying method. In copying you are also temporarily freed from being visually creative and able to focus on "skill" in a way I think under-appreciated but necessary. Now (over)confident, I wanted to take a stab at this piece:

     This one needed a lot more pre-planning. Because the lines eventually become squiggles I didn't think I could just draw squares made up of four lines that shifted vertexes or something, so what I ended up doing was making an object that was a vector of points* that when drawn looked like a square. My thought being that by using noise (rather than pure random) the dots would shift and the overall effect would be a squiggly line. That is not what happened. 

     The lines disintegrate quite rapidly and left to its own devices the whole thing buzzes outwards like a hit beehive. Because each point has no computational relation to the point next to it the visual line is lost. I tried again:

     The lines stay together, but too together. Also mysterious still artifacts appeared. After looking at Nabil's project where he used p5.js and found a way to alter a line itself (turns out you can add vertexes basically) I decided maybe my vector of points was fundamentally Not Right. Which is sort of a hard truth you have to sometimes accept with code—maybe you brute forced something together but sometimes you still have to toss it all out. Feeling appreciative of the original and with lessons learned I just left it there though. Our next artist is John Whitney, who is going to involve significantly more time and sin waves to figure out.  

"Porting" not-code art into code art is an interesting medium adventure, but even from one coding language to another helps emphasize the different structures and "givens" unique to various languages. For a really cool deep-dive, 10PRINT looks at an early Basic program and (among other things) some of its modern ports. It's not a terribly technical book so I'd recommend to anyone: free pdf. Zach's class was in part inspired by a similar sort of project from this old zine. if you are a bit technical & curious, my code mess is on github. I don't know that I'll get too detailed about each artist but thought something light-hearted was in order (and either way I'll push the code).

*basically a list of (x, y) items. I had originally used an array, which in openframeworks you have to define the length, but switched to a vector (more like a shopping list, as long as you want it) because smaller inner squares need fewer points.  

Feeling out our potentials

     The first week of SFPC was a shorter three-day dash, but I feel like I'm already chewing on quite a bit. You can see all the cool kids I'm hanging out with here, and you can even meet us all in one go at this event! The SFPC Salon is also fast approaching. 

     While we met several teachers and TAs, right now I want to focus on Morehshin Allahyari's Critical Thinking of Technology: The Radical Outside class. Before even that, Morehshin's artist talk was incredibly inspiring to me not only for the work itself, but because she has found concrete ways to create art investigating precise and discrete topics stemming from her own interests. That kind of confidence in my own creative critiques is something I want to work towards. To be able to narrow in on something I want people to contemplate.

In getting used to each other we played several teaching/communication games, including making a game about binary. (feat Taeyoon Choi) 

     To prepare for our meeting we read "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" by Langdon Winner (1980) and "Critical Theory of Technology: an Overview" by Andrew Feenberg (2005). These essays sketched an argument that far from being a neutral (or even positive and progressive) tool, technology can embody and encourage certain unequal power structures when manipulated in various ways. These politics can be part of the technology's actual functioning or a secondary effect of implementation, but the point is it's not always just a case of "good technology in the wrong hands." For example; the idea that wind/solar power lends itself well to democratization because of its decentralized nature, as opposed to nuclear power's necessitation of rigid structure. When the question of violence in the role of pushing back against these power structures came up someone proposed humans just are violent—both in the tech they'll create and the way others will respond to it. This is a line of thinking I am fundamentally not interested in; it is the shallow reading of Lord of The Flies instead of acknowledging that of course a group of prep school boys coming from a system that rewards ruthlessness are going to create a vicious society. We create our technology from what we know, which currently "mutilates not just human beings and nature, but technology itself." (Feenberg) What might we create in a culture with totally different values? We can analyze the relation of politics and painting styles for example, and we should extend that to everything. To limit the potential of humans to what we see in ourselves now is not only defeatist but just generally a boring framework to explore.

     These readings reminded me to finally sit down and read Murray Bookchin's "Post-Scarcity Anarchism" and "Towards a Liberatory Technology." These essays written in the 60s work from the assumption that with modern technology we are no longer forced to labor for survival; "a century ago scarcity had to be endured; today it has to be enforced." (Post) This is essentially true—there are more empty houses than houseless folks and for reasons purely political giving out food for free is sometimes illegal. Very relatedly, Feenberg notes that our push for endless efficiency is not neutral, it is defined ideologically in a system that values profits over people, but we can change that algorithm. Technology has moved past "the realm of invention to that of design," and from an "extension of human muscles into an extension of the human nervous system." (Towards) Unfortunately, that includes our biases. So between all these authors it seems certain that one can say tech is political, critiquable, and pliable. Coming from where we are now, how do we imagine a technology that creates a "self-liberation that reaches social dimensions"? (Post) 

     And it is imagination that is required, a most human skill I think crucial to critical thinking. Feenberg calls on critical theory to "interpret the world in light of its potentialities" and not just actualities, to look for facts and not just norms. The work to construct a society significantly more or less equal (or any other measure) than our current one requires defamiliarization from how our perceived individual worlds work. This is incredibly complicated! There are no sure answers! The wide reach of technology means that a few have "unprecedented means for manipulating and mobilizing the entire environment...and for perpetuating hierarchy, exploitation and unfreedom" (Post) and it's difficult to look away from this programmable media. A fellow student, Nabil Hassein, wrote this piece "Against Black Inclusion in Facial Recognition" that is a good example of stopping to interrogate "diversity" as good in-and-of-itself without an actual anti-racist system. I have many more personal speculations on our fully automated luxury-communism future that I'll save for now, but I think its clear that there is a feedback loop between the politics of our artifacts and the politics that organize our lives. The task at hand is to not settle on just the recognition of that being satisfactory but to critically speculate on possible futures. 

*if it's not obvious, I'm a hyperlink fiend. Educated in the age of Wikipedia and memes, I'm very aware that my thoughts are an accumulation of my clicks and I like to present that collage for others when possible. I'm still figuring out how to write for an "audience," and I think including full references also means less guesswork about what people might have heard of. 

*I've got a cold so I apologize if this turns out to be unusually incoherent

starting somewhere

     I've been meaning to try to write more publicly but until now it had yet to manifest—in part because it took about this long to recover from writing my undergrad thesis, and in another part because the internet is mean and I'm still getting inane notifications on blogs from years ago. However now that I'm at the School For Poetic Computation it seems like an ideal time to start documenting that learning as a process and not just in final pieces that have no guarantee of manifesting. 

my background: if you've found this site you've got a decent idea of what I do art-wise; mostly traditional illustration with a sprinkling of graphic design when I get the chance. Working as a barista has been my actual job though, and so it's intimidating to be working with a bunch of professionals in more art/code fields! Academically my focus was linguistics, and while I am in the process of waiting to hear from grad schools, I haven't been doing much ling-ing in the meantime. I want to say all that explicitly incase you are thinking of applying but worried you're not particularly impressive (you an' me are gonna get through this imposter syndrome). I do have some coding experience with C++ and Java from high school, but I don't remember really any of the actual language and we worked exclusively non-visually. So! I also powered through a p5.js crash course (would recommend generally) in preparation. 

My hope in joining SFPC then is to get back into code but from both a more critical and playful mindset. Critical of how code is made, who makes it, and what it gets used for—and I think coming from food service where code is used in a backend money sense and customers treat us like robot extensions of it is a worthwhile perspective to bring to the conversation. Being trans and queer similarly informs my practice—we now know it's much more complicated than just "on the internet, no one knows you're a dog." Critical also in the desire to see new media art that isn't just gimmicks with our new techno-abilities but a question about the larger ramifications. Playful in that like any medium there are unique beautiful uses of it and so new things to experience or old questions to re-examine. Still finding joy in the gimmicks. It's a tool with its own history and discourses I'm looking forward to engaging with. I'm also very excited about the craft track happening this session!

I am a knowledge hoarder, I think everything is interesting, and so my slightly more tangible goal for this spring is to create more from that hoarding synthesis. Talk more, collaborate more, write more. Even sloppily. Reminding myself that I don't have to be an expert to talk about what I do know as part of learning/analyzing. Gotta start somewhere.

via reddit