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 for learning together by making things near each other. They teach at the Rhode Island School of Design, 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 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.
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. Please contact Melanie beforehand if you are planning to use a Windows machine.
Additional information