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First Critical Theory of Technology Class and Pia Van Gelder*
We started with morning with an artist talk from Pia Van Gelder. She walked us through her journey of interest in sound and heirloom technologies. A project that was especially interesting was the psychic synth, which read your alpha and beta brain waves to produce a sound and light show. The math behind it was pretty intriguing - her collaborater used some sort of fractal analysis!
Allison’s first Critical Theory of Technology class was this afternoon. I’m excited about this class because I have a feeling that we’re going to read a lot of the pieces that I was assigned for a similar class in university but didn’t read (whoops…), so this is my chance to really dig into them! We started by introducing ourselves and identifying what we wanted to get out of the class/desired areas of focus. I mentioned that I’d like to focus on the concept of a digital divide, and how technology is really only accessible to those who can pay for it.
We finished the class by watching ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’ which really got me thinking. It was a pretty depressing film and I’m still not quite sure how to process it all/what to think - maybe I’ll have to watch it again…
This weekend will also be really busy: a bunch of us plan to go to the opening of Eyebeam and Zan and I are also going to the Robotic Church on Saturday. On Sunday, Zan, Rachel, and I are planning to go to the Brooklyn Museum.
Here are some photos from the trips:
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Taeyoon's Intro and Aram Bartholl*
Today was Taeyoon’s intro to his work, he showed us the range of projects he’s worked on, from the Sharing Faces project to creating simple and playful wall street robot protestors. He’s pretty awesome - check out his work here.
Later that night, Aram Bartholl spoke as our visiting artist. I really enjoyed his playful and humorous work and appreciated his theme of bringing the digital world back into the physical world. I think my favorite was his google street view car project.
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Amit's Intro*
I slacked on doing blog posts for the next week, but I still want to remember what I did each day, so this is me going back after the fact and writing down what I remember before it gets too late. All posts done in this fashion will be denoted by a *.
Today began with studio as there wasn’t a check in. After struggling some more with the d3 version of my circos visualization, Ramsey’s class started. We had a few readings for class, my favorite was the Wat talk which comments on some silly decisions that were made when writing some commonly used programming languages.
In the evening, Amit’s intro happened. It was basically a discussion about his ideas for his time with us and his teaching philosophy. He challenges traditional education and examines how we can better help people understand programming. He talked about how the learning curve for programming is pretty easy at first but then gets really hard, and how most people aren’t taught how to overcome this stage in the curve. Many give up and think they will never be capable. The reality is that it is hard - and that’s okay, but we have to be taught to deal with that. He’ll work with a group of ‘Kitchen Table Coders’ (only those who can fit around his kitchen table) to understand how this education gap can be overcome.
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First Studio Day
Today was considered our first studio day. Taeyoon started the day with a check in and went over all the events that SFPC will be participating in this term. All seem really awesome. He encourages us to present at some but not all of them, and I know I’ll have to push myself out of my comfort zone in order to do this. I spent some time looking at the generative design book which has a bunch of processing tutorials - I focused on the text section and worked through some fun stuff.
I asked Jonas what he was working on and he showed me this tool he made that visualized what servers your computer was pinging all over the world. He got it working in a day with node.js and d3 which is pretty amazing. Zan showed me a few things she’s done in d3 and introduced me to the examples page and bl.ocks.org which had some chord diagrams very similar to my circos visualization. I’m going to try to use it to animate my circos visualization. Overall, I felt pretty overwhelmed/anxious today. I was introduced to a lot of new information and tools and got a chance to see what others were working on. Everyone is working on interesting mini projects and I want to be able to create something cool too.
Over lunch, Lauren mentioned a workshop for women in tech that she went to that focused the first half enirely on understanding imposter syndrome and that totally clicked with me because I feel like that’s what happening to me here at SFPC, but I know I need to change that fast. I spent the rest of today thinking about the themes, my ideas, and generating new inspirations. Looking forward to see what happens!
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Ramsey's First Class
This was Ramsey’s first teaching day. He spent some time going over what he had planned for his class called ‘Radical Computer Science’ and also went over his prior and current work. He studies the politics of code by focusing on the more meta stuff, like creating his own coding languages. He really helped me think about code in a way that the creator would by forcing us to understand the decisions that are made in writing a new language. He has created an arabic coding language as well as God.js, which I really enjoyed.
He ended his class by proposing an exercise where we had to code out an image of an iconic dance from this site. Someone acted as the computer (the interpreter) and someone acted as the programmer. We basically wrote out how to perform the dance for another student. I read mine out while Nathan performed. He did a great job and it was pretty funny. He danced Napoleon Dynamite’s Canned Heat.
As homework, Ramsey gave us the exercise of finding a piece we liked from the Twitter Great Art Bot and then designing a language to create the image we chose. I felt like I was just writing a bunch of functions, or even a library, than a language. It was hard for me to draw the line about where to make assumptions about what you can/can’t do. I don’t know if I’ve really wrapped my head around it yet…
