CYBERNETIC SCULPTURE

Code Societies: Cybernetic Sculpture is an exploration into the transformative potential of computational processes within sculptural practice. In this hybrid coding and art production class, discover what happens when we push far past the screen to deeply situate into our material and social lives.

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 lives, equally as subject and as medium. Together we will build new codes made of the digital, the social, and the material on a co-created foundation of radical perspective shifting and a commitment to learning with care.

Cybernetics is the study of how we shape and are shaped by systems. What embodied forms can code-based art take that create openings for interrupting systems of power and control? How do different platforms and processes—including networks, data, installation, and interface—yield distinct modes of seeing, thinking, and feeling? Cybernetic Sculpture is an introduction to re-introducing yourselves to computers as a physical and contextually specific art medium.

This class is about redrawing the divisions that make us and unmake us. We’ll begin by challenging the division between those who code software and those who are coded by it. We’ll end by dispersing equipped with new skills and projects for shaping experience and provoking change within and outside of ourselves.

SYLLABUS

CODE

Week one

• Welcome to one particular real society of our making
• An orientation to coding and being coded by societies

Week two

• Introduction to computational language & computational thinking through file systems
• Bash & Folder Poetry

Week three

• Introduction to computational language & natural language processing.
• Python

SOLID

Week four

• Situated Screens; The Browser and its Extensions
• Programming on the web and placing the web physically in our social spaces
• CSS + HTML

Week five

• Special Guest
• CSS + HTML + JAVASCTIPT

LIQUID

Week six

• Data and its Discontents; Data Gathering from your Societies
• Persistant storage, databases

Week seven

• Alchemical networked installations

GAS

Week eight

• Connecting what we have learned together and with each other

Week nine

• Collective Feedback circle

Week ten

• Public Code Societies Salon