Peer-to-Peer Poetry: Invisible Cities

[melaniehoff]

Peer-to-Peer Poetry: Invisible Cities

What if we could create and inhabit a new kind of digital city that transforms our online networks from an ordained protocol to an expressive medium of shared placemaking? In this workshop we will collectively create a peer-to-peer city using the structure of nested folders and DAT. Taking up after Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and the common practice of digital organization, through lecture, examples, and hands on making, we will explore folder structures as a new kind of poetic meter and DAT as a way to build digital spaces with and for our networks.

This workshop assumes no coding experience and simultaneously takes the position that everyone who interacts with computers in some way is already a programmer.

Resources

Check out a related workshop I taught recently with SFPC in Detroit called Folder Poetry: https://github.com/melaniehoff/folderpoetry/
⇢ folderpoetry.club

• https://www.are.na/melanie-hoff/peer-to-peer-poetry-invisible-cities

Session Objectives

• To create a space where we are having a conversation with computers and writing poetry with their logic
• To develop a taste for creating emotive and community centered software.
• To introduce DAT and Command Line
• To 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

Material and Technical Requirements

Projector, desks, chairs, and each participant with a laptop.

Presenter(s)

Name: Melanie Hoff
Email: hoffmelanie@gmail.com
Url(s): melanie-hoff.com, Twitter: @melanie_hoff
GitHub: melaniehoff

As organizers we strive for low-cost pathways of participation, are you interested in a community billet program either hosting out-of-towners or staying with locals?

I am happy to stay with locals.

Presenter Bio

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 New Museum, the Queens Museum, The Internet Archive, and elsewhere.