Code Societies: Student Showcase

Final day!

"Room full of people at SFPC seated and listening to Code Societies Winter 2019 student presentations."

On the final day of Code Societies, we celebrated each other and the experience as a whole with a showcase event. Each student gave a short presentation on something they had been working on, or their musings since participating in the program. The impact of the program on each student really came through and it was so nice to hear everyone’s reflections on the experience. It became clear just how meaningful the workshops had been for each person. In addition to giving short presentations we also had the opportunity to install our work in the window room of SFPC. There were installations of mushrooms, pen plotters, and super sad google queries. It was so fun to finally spend some time with all of the different projects. Even though we only had a day and a half to get everything ready for a public showcase I was able to see all of the things we discussed throughout the 3 week session shining through each piece.

AC Gillette: Found Manuscripts I II and III

These mid 22nd century manuscripts were found at an abandoned CYM site. On loan from The Society for the Study of the CYM People. "Three plotted pieces of asemic writing presented on a wall." "AC Gilette presenting."

Carlos Sanchez Artist Website as Shifting Landscape/Character

Work-in-progress collaboration with movement-theater artist and poet, Jo Stewart. This project begins with a metaphor extracted from the artist’s practice that is taken as the site’s architectural backbone. "A gif of movements on Carlos' artist website." "Carlos Sanchez presenting."

Deni Chen: God View

God View takes from statements Big Tech companies have made in response to public outrage to examine how language is used in the industry to obfuscate wrongdoing and evade accountability. The poem is created using predictive text generation, learning from and remixing a corpus of real public apologies by CEOs across various companies along with Jeff Bezos’ speech, ‘Amazing Amazon Story,’ which details Amazon’s incredible start-up journey.

Emily Saltz: Super Sad Googles

Super Sad Googles is an autocomplete search platform populated only with users’ saddest, weirdest, most disturbed searches. The goal of searching Super Sad Googles is not to find an answer, but to find (advertisement-free!) solace in the queries of fellow weirdos. "A photograph of Emily's "Super Sad Googles" landing page on a laptop screen." "Emily Saltz presenting."

emma rae norton: a collaborative archive of code societies ephemera

all at once / a love letter / and an archive / and a well of shared knowledge "A photograph of Emma's collaborative archive on a laptop screen." "Emma Rae Norton presenting."

Ingrid Lange: Generative instructions for collaborative drawings

Sets of instructions generated from texts about perspective drawing and nature to inform collaborative charcoal drawings. "A visitor following instructions from a card and drawing a shape in charcoal on paper." "Ingrid Lange presenting."

Iris Qu: Alternative news generator

A machine’s take on what’s going on in the news. See the live project at: https://trumptails.glitch.me "A photograph of machine generated news about Trump on a laptop screen." "Iris Qu presenting."

Jacob Liechty

"Six piece sof paper arranged in a cross with Jacob's website number address hidden from sight." "Jacob Liechty presenting."

Jarret Bryan: git-commitment

git commitment is a data-visualization that unsuccessfully quantifies the contributions you make not to code repositories, but to your relationships. "A photograph of Jarret's git commitment page on a laptop screen. It reads: emotive web. on GitHub, your profile contributions graph is a record of contributions you’ve made to git repositories - commits, pull requests, code reviews, issue reporting, etc. contributions are only counted if they meet certain criteria. among these criteria is not the significance of your contribution, just that it happened. a pull request for a crucial bug fix holds the same weight as a pull request as a cosmetic typo. git commitment unsuccessfully quantifies the contributions you make not to code repositories but to your relationships. acts of care, emotional investment, expressions of compassion, empathy, and intimacy - your commitment - can only be counted in discrete increments. git commitment unsuccessfully quantifies the contributions you make not to code repositories but to you relationships. acts, emotional investment, expressions of compassion, empathy, and intimacy - your -commitment - can only be counted in discrete increments. git commitment cannot weigh the significance of any ‘contribution’ to you relationships - only they happened. something like saying i love you might just be one contribution - whether it was a heartfelt full-throated expression of genuine love, or an automated response to signal the end of a phone call. are you performing as part of an automated process, or genuinely emoting? what qualifies as a ‘contribution’ to your relationships is something that can resist computation or quantification. moreover the results are self reported. git commitment therefore is not just a measure of relationships, or a journal, but a report of self-worth or self-importance. it may rely on the idea of the relationship as something transactional, in which you need to offer something consistently. it may not. you can make your own commitment heat map: using beaker, GitHub or the dat cli tool - fork this repository. you can edit the ‘dates.csv’ int he repository, suing excel, numbers or any text editor, the count will represent the number of…" "Jarret Bryan presenting."

Matt O’Hagan: bits and bobs

An inquiry of interfaces and interaction - see the project here "A photograph of instructions "write your emotions here" written on a piece of paper taped to a laptop screen." "Matt O'Hagan presenting."

Mimi Doan: Autonomous Missed Connections

An experiment in (re)generative/recycled computational longing. "A screenshot of Mimi's 'Autonomous Missed Connections'. The subtitle reads 'generative computer longing'. The generated stences read: To her surprise. he took her hand and raised it to some Godless thing, as my mother had called it. It felt as if you’ve got some champagne. I am coming back to the L around midnight. I hope everyone who does not exert on us a culpable attraction? I wanted to go get us milk. If this is long enough…Anyway I’m Anthony I wish I asked your name or number!" "Mimi Doan presenting."

Nadja Oertelt: Fungal Communion

A ritual for re-integrating those who rule into our corporeal self. "Box of various mushrooms ready for use in fungal communion." "Nadja Oertelt presenting."

Nicole Cheng 郑旎: an internet of seams

Thinking through how to bring the Cloud back down to earth and actually bring some semblance of human progress. "A chunk of foam bound by a grid of string, changing both forms simultaneously"." "Nicole Cheng presenting."

Sonny Li: 01000011 00110100 01001000

Computer-generated poetry in 0s & 1s (wip). "Some zeros and ones being typed out on a typewriter." "Sonny Li presenting."

Tushar Goyal: Asemic Artifact

Interpretive typographic designs. "A paper cube with asemic writing on four sides of the cube." "Tushar Goyal presenting."

Victoria Campbell: Studio Visit

A fun subversive working community. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXGvSJUOgUmuU2NXaaVla3aCPuMFIolTh "Post-colonial playlist" "Victoria Campbell presenting."

Yasmeen Khaja: “Cultural Affect in (Solitary) Cyberspace

"A slide from Yasmeen's slideshow projected on the wall with the phrases in arabic, "allah kareem" and "inshallah"." "Yasmeen Khaja presenting."

From automatic writing through automation to creating a distributed web of care, we covered a vast amount of material over the course of a mere 3 weeks. With countless new ideas and seedings of nurturing friendships, the depth we achieved in this short window of time served as testament to the boundless possibilities that lay ahead. I’m excited to see how our relationships develop and what will come of the final assignment Melanie set us – to take the Code Societies syllabus and spirit, and adapt it to our own communities with hopes that hybrid futures will emerge.

"A photo of all the Code Societies Winter 2019 students, TAs (Nabil Hassein and Ying Quan Tan) and organizer Melanie Hoff."

written by emma rae norton & nicole cheng