unMonastery: Programmed Media

[This is an excerpt from my application to unMonastery in Matera 2014, beginning with the project/ work proposal and followed by questions from the application.]

Programmed Media/ Thought Networks

A 12-week introductory course in Computer Science for local adolescents aged 12-18, though the applicable ages can vary depending on community interest. The course would be taught through a multimedia lens, using the Jython programming environment for simple sound and graphics processing, with the option to realize projects in Processing and/or on the web with additional basic HTML5 and CSS3 instruction. Approaching the material from a digital humanities framework, the course, however, would assign readings and ask students to complete additional written and creative projects on the concept/ representation/ impact of the idea "network."

The project aims to educate individuals on how media they encounter on a daily basis is constructed while simultaneously asking them to interrogate the possibilities of this media and its presence and proliferation in a larger community. While established educational techniques assume a model of induction to tacit knowledge, this course aims to share already open source material while questioning the form it has assumed thus far. Rather than solidifying thought, the course aims for opposing yet simultaneous motions of thinking: exposing existing frameworks while asking, why *something* rather than something else?

The course would ask for weekly readings, responses, or exercises, three "completed" programs, and one longer project of variable type. By the end of the course, students should have a grasp on command statements, variables, finite and infinite loops, recursion, and basic graphics programming situated on a two-dimensional grid, as well as, if time and interest persist, a basic introduction to objects. The students should be acquainted to several lines of thought in contemporary media studies. The overarching aim, however, would be an increased awareness of how media, code, and communities interact and are influenced by an increasingly global system and framework(s) of knowledge.

Simultaneously, I will focus on a current artistic project. My work spanning mediums of painting, performance, music, and interaction- and graphics-oriented programming, I am currently working on something that may be best thought of as a concept app, akin to a concept album or short story collection, which I will develop myself. The app will recombine and package different forms of work, including written, sonic, and interactive pieces, centered around the possibility of an aesthetic malady. From previous extensive research on interfaces, I came to understand design as both as an aesthetic and political act, for its ability to restrict and reformulate data related to social bodies. The concept of an aesthetic malady proves an interesting lens of interrogation of contemporary design in an expanded field. While the idea poses an inherent problematic (who has the power to formulate criteria and perform diagnoses?), it is for this reason that it is a relevant, powerful, and affective tool of critique for late capitalistic production on personal to global scales.

The exact resources required varies based on the number of participants, but the course ideally requires access to a computer with an Internet connection at least 8 hours per week. However, the syllabus can be adjusted to accommodate the actual availability of resources. The course material itself will be public access friendly and open source. For my personal practice, I can provide (and often stumble upon) my own resources.

I have previously been a teaching assistant in both computer science and media studies courses at the college level, and I have undertaken my own computer science tutoring service in New York City, working with adolescents between 10 and 15 years of age. While I have never taken on a project with quite the level of particularity as what I propose for unMonastery, it is the form toward which my educational practice has been leaning for some time.

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What will you do to build momentum for your project?

I will do extensive research to consolidate a syllabus for the course, and I will develop a web site to host the assignments and projects that will additionally serve as a discussion platform. On this site, 4-6 weeks before Matera 2014, I will post the syllabus as part of the discussion forum and send the link to a list of academic and professional contacts, as well as post it as a public link, to encourage a properly "peer-reviewed" syllabus and generate attention for the project.

I will be acting as Rhizome's Editorial Fellow in the months leading up to Matera, and I would love to plan a particular series of posts covering the chosen projects as they develop.

I would also study Italian intensively.

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Biggest challenges the project faces

Language barrier
Lack of cohesion between different individuals' projects
Facilitating conversation both speculative and tangible for a lasting educational orientation
The tension between experimenting and teaching a rule-oriented system, and keeping both rewarding
Encouraging involvement beyond initial curiosity/ supporting consistent curiosity
Imparting the importance of design fictions and fantasies to an intergenerational community

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How will you evaluate the impact of your project?

The degree to which others in the community engage in/ with the participants' projects.
Can the students legibly demonstrate what they've learned to others?
A continued engagement, a desire to keep in touch
I would be interested in developing a formal (self-)evaluation method as the specific dimensions of the project materialize.

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What will you bring? Anything and everything, Skills / knowledge / tools / equipment

I have experience as an educator, museum administrator and curator, editorial writer, audio/visual technician, graphic designer, and web developer.

I am trained in woodworking and welding, painting and filmmaking, 10 years in ballet, and I am a Qi Gong and Kundalini practitioner. I also have an in-depth engagement with and knowledge of continental philosophy, contemporary art and poetry, and digital humanities studies.

I will likely travel with a laptop, iPad, and MicroKorg synth.

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Tell us about your past history and activity and how they might inform your contribution

My experience, elucidated above, spans fields technical, academic, and administrative in nature. As one example, I attended Sarah Lawrence College at the undergraduate level, and while there I acted as an editor of a campus publication, Vanguard. Our final year, a fellow editor and I organized the Pedagogy Forum, featuring a panel of students, faculty, and college administrators to speak on the pedagogical nature of the institution at large. In the months leading up to the event, featuring a brief panel introduction followed by an hour of open audience, we held weekly open community meetings and sought interviews with selected faculty and staff. From this experience, in both its mistakes and strides, I learned the importance of discussing educational forms and the nuance with which you must handle an event that is hosted by an institution which its purpose is to critique. As its legacy, the institution continues to hold meetings on its pedagogy monthly.

Currently, I am involved as a Membership Manager at a non-profit contemporary art museum in New York City, while maintaining an artistic practice.

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What is it about collective living and working that is important to you?

(a) Writing from a personal perspective, I find a service-oriented existence more pleasurable and ultimately more viable than any alternative on both the individual and community scale. An existence that asks "What can be done?" rather than where to draw the line cultivates a much more interesting mental life than the circular thought resultant in a mode of ceaseless acquiring.

(b) It is important to live by one's politics.

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The greatest challenge we will face in the next 100 years

I would propose the ability to refrain from an uncritical subsumption by interface(s) the greatest challenge the next 100 years poses.

Earlier in 2013, Bruce Sterling delivered a keynote speech closing the nextWeb conference in Berlin. After forecasting the legacy of startup culture as profiteers for an economic elite, he asked for a favor. He called for a "taxonomy of dragons," a classificiation in modalities both critical and affective of the good and the bad, to elucidate the striating from the transgressive, the totalizing from the pariticularizing, in technological production and even in our design fictions--today never far from realization as prototypes.

I propose we absolutely must have a technologically informed public at large (startups and hackerspaces are a good expansion, but they are not quite public enough) in order to not only produce but to proffer critically minded analyses of both production and use. We might, quite simply, fall victim to swipes, scrolls, and other motions yet to be, while the pressing energy, environmental, and social crises crumble before our screens that could have changed them.