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