Melanie Hoff is an artist and educator examining the role technology plays in social organization and reinforcing hegemonic structures. Their work plays with structural conventions of software, installation, and workshops. They are a founding member of the "Cybernetics Library", an art and research collective offering resources for study and critique of technical and social systems and "Soft Surplus", a collective art studio warehouse for making things near each other. They teach at Rutgers University, the School for Poetic Computation, and have presented their work in the New Museum, the Queens Museum, The Internet Archive, and elsewhere.
What if we could create and inhabit a new kind of digital city that transforms our online networks from something we passively receive to something we actively create? In this workshop we will collectively create a peer-to-peer city using the structure of nested folders and DAT. Through lecture, examples, and hands on making, we will explore folder structures as a new kind of narrative poetic structure and DAT as a way to build digital spaces with and for our networks.
In this session we will create a space where we are having a conversation with computers and writing poetry with their logic. We will work with computers and DAT as collaborators and develop a taste for creating emotive and community centered software.
Together, we will create poetry through building a folder-based city on the peer-to-peer web for each other to inhabit during the duration of the workshop and beyond.
This workshop assumes no coding experience and simultaneously takes the position that everyone who interacts with computers in some way is already a programmer.
The workshop will run Saturday, October 19, 2019, from 10:00 am - 12:30 pm. Tickets are available here.
Participants should bring their laptop to the workshop.
Additional information