Code Societies 2020

Syllabi:

Code Societies Orientation

Taught by Melanie Hoff, Neta Bomani, Emma Rae Norton, & Taeyoon Choi

• Slides
• Blog post
• Are.na
• Code Societies centers understanding technology as social and the social as political technology. We will engage with code, and the ways code acts on our bodies and networks equally as subject and as medium. How do different platforms and processes—including algorithms, surveillance, social media, infrastructure, and interface—yield distinct modes of seeing, thinking, feeling, and reinforce existing systems of power?

P2P Folder Poetry

Taught by Melanie Hoff

• Syllabus
• Blog post
• Are.na
• What if we could transform our online networks from something we passively receive to something we actively create? Folder Poetry is the practice of using the structure of computer folder organization as a new kind of poetic form like the haiku or iambic pentameter. By naming and nesting folders and files, we can create unfolding narratives, rhythmic prose, and choose-your-own-adventure poetry. In this workshop we will collectively create peer-to-peer folder poetry using the command line and Dat. Through lecture, examples, and writing folder poetry as meditation, we will explore the narrative qualities of folder structures and Dat as a tool for building digital spaces with and for our networks.
  
  In this session we will get intimate with computers and write poetry with their logic. This workshop is an introduction to writing folder poetry, the P2P protocol Dat, and navigating the command line interface using Bash. Together, we will create living networked poetry through connecting folders on the peer-to-peer web for each other to inhabit and explore.

Computational Exploration of Magical and Divinatory Language

Taught by Allison Parrish

• Syllabus
• Blog post Part 1
• Blog post Part 2
• Are.na
• Words have power that arises not just from their meaning but from their material. Some words, those "somewhere between the 'legible' and 'illegible,' between the 'spirit world' and the 'human world'," as scholar James Robson writes, "express or illustrate ineffable meanings and powers that defy... traditional modalities of communication." Some words, that is, are magic. In this workshop, we will use techniques in computational text analysis and text generation to better understand how magic words work, and coin new magic words of our own. In the first part of the session, we consider magic words as islands in a largely unexplored infinite space of potential linguistic expression—a space that can be explored computationally in order to uncover new magic words with new affordances. In the second part of the session, we consider systems of divination (in particular, Tarot) as ad-hoc ontologies for dividing the world into comprehensible categories. We then analyze the "semantic space" of these divinatory ontologies, and endeavor to create new divinatory systems with new ontologies that reflect our own worldviews. Technologies covered include cryptography, phoneme-to-grapheme models, generative adversarial networks, text clustering, predictive language models and variational autoencoders. No previous programming experience required.

Surveillance Studies

Taught by American Artist & Simone Browne

• Syllabus
• Blog post
• Are.na
• This class grappled with the surveillance of Black life – the archive of slavery, predictive policing, biometric technologies, direct-to-consumer DNA testing kits – in order to understand and also create acts of refusal. Taking hope as a method of refusal, the class questioned various ways of challenging and resisting surveillance.

The fuzzy edges of character encoding

Taught by Everest Pipkin

• Syllabus
• Blog post
• Are.na
• The fuzzy edges of character encoding is a one-session class on the history, politics, and computational basics of text-based character encoding. We will cover morse code, ASCII, Unicode (including emoji), and alternative text encoding schemes, as well as their social, ethical, and emotional stories.
  
  We will also talk about low-level conceits of text encoding on computers: binary, byte encoding, hex codes, buffers, data formats, and plaintext files. We will discuss how those conceits relate to digital representations of text and allow us to perform operations on digital language with tools like Regex and data bending.
  
  Fundamentally, we will be considering the fuzzy edges of what a character “is” on a computer.

Radical Hardware (Transistors to CPU)

Taught by Taeyoon Choi

• Syllabus
• Blog post
• Are.na
• What is computer, really? Computer is an idea that’s evolved over time. The sleek machines we use day-to-day are made from elements extracted from the earth, and every bit of data is actually something, somewhere. And underneath the operating systems, there’s a history that needs to be examined. Let’s build a computer, from its most fundamental elements: Adder, Clock, and Memory. By handmaking a computer, soldering electronic components, we may find an elegance in the abstraction and repetition of computational logic that can only be described as “poetic.” Taeyoon Choi will use his open-source tool and curriculum for making computing more accessible, developed over time in collaboration with fellow SFPC teachers CW&T. By learning how computers work on a fundamental level, participants can gain agency and imagine a reciprocal relationship with technology. We can make technology more approachable by giving access to tools and ideas and demystifying computer science.

The Unfinished Sentence: Algorithmic Text Generation

Taught by Kameelah Janan Rasheed

• Syllabus
• Blog post
• Are.na
• For this course, algorithmic text generation refers to the automatic creation of texts using algorithms1, or rules. These rules or conditions can be stated as “replace every noun in your pre-written poem with the last noun you used in a conversation” and performed by humans. There are also machine learning algorithms that use language models2 as training data to generate new texts that mirror human language.
  
  This course grew from my interests in Oulipo (and other constrained writing techniques) and “programmatic situations structured by artists” such as prompts, instructions, choreographies, codes, or constraints used to invite others to create text content. These algorithms are often used to experiment with form and content to generate writing that is both aleatoric and unexpected. In recent years, machine learning algorithms have been developed to predict and mimic human language.
  
  We will explore text generation by reading algorithm generated texts, playing with text generation tools, and discussing the implication of algorithm text generation within the context of agency, alienation, appropriation, archiving, and authorship. We will consider the relationship between the “author,” “computer,” and “reader”4 as we reflect on what counts as a “text,” and what counts as “writing.”

Cybernetics of Race/ism and Sex/ism

Taught by Neta Bomani & Melanie Hoff

• Syllabus
• Blog post
• Are.na
• What can cybernetics, the study of how we shape and are shaped by systems, teach us about the sexual and social reproduction of sexism and racism? This workshop is an intervention of the ways sexually and racially coded social regulatory systems are co-created through somatic exercises, prompts and discussion. How do the taxonomic systems we live inside of shape our understandings of identity, family, and punishment in order to produce social pressure and govern behavior? We will explore the ways systems of domination and exploitation produce sex and race in addition to how sex becomes gender—sex and race become labor—and how both are criminalized.

Black Mirrors: Reimagining Race, Technology, and Justice

Taught by Ruha Benjamin

• Syllabus
• Blog post
• Are.na
• From everyday apps to complex algorithms, technology has the potential to hide, speed, and even deepen discrimination, while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to racist practices of a previous era. In this class, participants will explore a range of discriminatory designs that encode inequity: by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies, by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions, or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. This session takes us into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements, and provides conceptual tools to decode tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold, but also the ones we manufacture ourselves.

Remote Control

Taught by FlucT

• Syllabus
• Blog post
• Are.na
• A class about performance, not just as art but performance as behavior. We prioritize certain behaviors curated by social programming, whether by poetry or by survival. Through dissecting Fluct’s work ‘everythingmakesmehappy.’, we will discuss the processes used to create performance aimed at exposing and ultimately interrupting the psychology of social programming. With fluid interruption, responsive support and acute presence, we are aiming to disable oppressive structures in order to become the authors of our existence.

Between Me and You: Encryption, Proxies, VPNs and Privacy

Taught by Harlo Holmes

• Syllabus
• Blog post
• Are.na
• In this workshop, students will take a deep dive into how communication across the web is encrypted, and come to understand why location privacy matters, and its technical, legal, and political challenges. Part lab exploration and part oral history, students will come away with the tools they need to understand exactly what different actors on a network can see of your data, and make the choices to protect privacy online. During the workshop, students will build their own VPNs, capture their own data, and analyze it using the popular, open-source tool Wireshark.

Space is an Ecology of Our Systems

Taught by Dan Taeyoung

• Syllabus
• Blog post
• Are.na
• Space is an Ecology of Our Systems is a workshop on thinking about communal spaces. We will think about the hybrids of physical & technological spaces that we inhabit, how we code spaces, and how they code us. We will experiment and play with the ways in which we communicate, interact, collaborate, and hold space with each other.

Hand Coding Round Robin

Taught by Emma Rae Norton

• Syllabus
• Blog post
• Are.na
• participants of this workshop will learn how to "hand code" a web page by working on each others computers.
  the session will start with a brief lecture on the significance of coding slowly and by hand.
  participants will learn how to do this kind of coding by example and with care.
  equal attention will be given to html elements, css styles, and the content on the page.
  through adding and styling the content of each others web pages students will learn the basic building blocks of web development as well as what it feels like to code with and for each other.

Meet the Students & Teachers ↬ ↬ ↬