So I have to tell you that is incredibly challenging to come back a third year in a row and talk.
And so I'm going to begin. I wrote you a letter. So I'm going to read you a letter.
Dear Io, how are you? I'm good. I haven't seen you in a long time and I thought I would
write you a letter. I remember this one time when I was teaching in class with my friend
Tae Yoon Choi. He came in on the first class and started to read a letter to the class.
I had never taught with him. And my first inclination was like, whoa, maybe he's never
taught before. And he's so nervous that he needs to write down a letter. To be honest,
I was nervous thinking that he was nervous. But I quickly realized that a letter is a
good way for him to come in and tell the class what he's been thinking about. He would write
eloquently about his walks, what he's considering, what he wants to do in the class. And it was
really beautiful. You know, and I think in the 15 weeks that we talked together, he came
in with 15 letters. So I'm writing you. I want to tell you something. On Sunday, I was
taking a jog in the city and I had just come over the Manhattan Bridge. And it was really
early. And there were groups of women in Chinatown doing Tai Chi, moving circularly, smoothly,
facing one direction. Squirrels were jumping over fences. And at that moment, I had a revelation.
I am not 100% sure I want to talk to you. Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't be offended.
I actually came to IO to listen, not to talk. I spoke two years ago and I showed all the
projects I've done. When I was invited back, I was a bit nervous because I was like, okay,
what am I going to talk about now? But I spoke about failure and a really tough year and becoming
a dad. And I did performances and I wrote a really personal poem about what can go wrong.
And it was a really beautiful moment for me and it felt awesome. And so now I have to
give a keynote. It's like the pressure level just went up 500%. So I want to preface this
keynote by saying, I want more than anything to listen. I am starting a new school, having
ended my 10 years teaching at Parsons. I taught my last class a few weeks ago. I'm totally
excited about this, but it's this kind of in between phase where it hasn't succeeded
or failed yet. It's becoming. So this keynote is about the school and what I think it should
stand for and what we need to remember and so on. And really it's a giant question mark.
I'll tell you a bit about it, but more than anything, I want to listen to you. So consider
this a big, fat invitation to talk. We should really talk. Can we talk? Love, Zach. That's
my mailing. My friend Tayun Choi has done all this kind of awesome drawing. So that's
the mail drawing. So we're starting a school and the school is called the School for Poetic
Computation. And the way I structured this talk is to actually talk about the name. And
it's really funny. I was talking to Casey today. And Casey is like, I love the idea
for the school, but I'm not sure about the name. And I remember that he wasn't sure about
open frameworks either. So I feel like at one point in my life, I have to get Casey to be
comfortable with my name. But then he's like, okay, it's like a band. The name doesn't matter.
So I want to take this, I want to take this apart, right? So we have school. And I've
been teaching at a school called Parsons. And actually I've been teaching so long that
my ID card is completely worn out. And I taught my last class just a couple of weeks ago.
And I was thinking, you know, what are the things that I did as a teacher? Like what's
meaningful to me? And one of the things that I have done when I've been teaching at Parsons
is every time I come in on the first day of class, I say, I adopt you. And this is something
I got from my typography teacher, Mike Essel, he would come in and say, you know, I adopt
you. And this is like really beautiful saying, are you coming on the first day of class,
you say, I adopt you. And actually, you know, that's how I, when I started teaching, I thought,
okay, I'm adopting these students, but it really turns out that the students adopt you. And
that's what I've come to discover. So like when Evan called me up, because of the iRider
project or Theo, you know, jumped into open frameworks, it's like the students adopt you.
And there's something that I really try to preach in teaching was this idea of fearlessness,
trying to be trying to remove fear. And so we do these experiments and assignments where
I would like come in and write algorithms on the board for things that I didn't even
know how to do. And invite the students to do it. So I had students basically creating
like a whole library of computer vision, not using open CV, but doing it from scratch.
And the whole idea was to promote fearlessness. And the last thing is to promote this idea
that this is not hard. It's not easy, but also it's not hard. And out of this and out
of the teaching came this open frameworks project. And you know, I've talked about it at IO before,
but open frameworks was a tool and it was a tool that was created at Parsons for students
to help students make work. And the basic idea is that you don't need to be, you don't
need to be a computer scientist that you don't need to read all the books in the library
that you can just get started. So it's a kind of demo reel of some open frameworks projects.
So there we go.
And
I've been working with a woman named Carol Becker, and Carol is the Dean of the Art
School at Columbia, and before that she was the Dean of the Art School at the School of
Art Institute in Chicago.
And Carol is a writer, and she's found her way into academia.
And she writes really eloquently about art school, and what an art school should be like,
and how an art school should promote failure, you know, that we live in a kind of society
that promotes risk, but it doesn't promote failure, it promotes, you know, risk when
things are successful, but it doesn't promote, you know, risk when things fail.
And she writes about this idea that we need artists at the table when important decisions
are being made, that, you know, they're at a table when decisions are being made and
artists should be present.
And I was reading her, her writings, and I was thinking, okay, I like, I really, I'm
so passionate about what she's passionate about, but I don't feel like I can do this
at Parsons, and I really felt like, okay, that's been my home for a while, but I need
to find a new home, and that's what this school is about.
And I've also been thinking about, you know, what's happening in higher education, and
there's a lot of things, there's a lot of great things about universities, but there's
a lot of really weird things that are happening right now in higher education.
For example, let's build bigger buildings.
So this is one of the things that's happening in higher education, including my university.
Let's open a campus in Dubai, or Shanghai, or Abu Dhabi.
Let's add another administrator, and of course, a mounting and growing debt.
And this is the current debt, you know, the debt calculator.
This is what, you know, what's happening to students these days.
And you can see that something really troubling is happening.
It's really evident if you look at Cooper Union.
Cooper Union has been free for 110 years, and because of fiscal mismanagement and a large
building that they purchased on debt, they are now starting to charge tuition.
And the students have actually taken over the president's office, and it's crazy for
me because, you know, I'm a father now, and so I've been like preaching to my daughter,
like, okay, you know, Brooklyn Tech and then Cooper Union, because Cooper Union's is free
university.
And it's like so sad to think of this idea that we're losing this free university, and
I think education should be free.
And so what are the alternatives?
What are the alternatives to university?
And there are alternatives like hacker school and public school and trade school and the
Brooklyn Institute and kitchen table coders.
And it really seems like this kind of, you know, it's the battle between the very famous
expensive school and this sort of, you know, free learning and teaching.
And it's also this kind of the vertical versus horizontal pedagogy, right?
The vertical pedagogy is one where you're, you know, the cost is rising as the level
of study is increasing and the horizontal is all sort of scattered and based on what
you want to learn when you want to learn it.
And this is one of my favorite drawings.
This is Caroline Woolard from the trade school.
It's just this basic idea of like, in terms of teaching, there are things that you want
and things that you have and if we find the right relationship we can make the right exchange.
And just to say like there's also a really rich history of alternative schools.
And so teachable file.org, there's like great resources for things like Black Mountain and
just kind of like whole genre of this idea of an artist run school and that's what we're
thinking about.
And I've been thinking, so we have this school for poetic computation, we're trying to come
up with the logo, we don't have it yet.
And we have this kind of like premise and the premise is that it's an anti-vocational
school and I really like this, I'm going to read this, the goal of the school is to promote
completely strange and practical and magical work.
Not the sort of things that are about building a portfolio for finding a job but the sort
of things that will surprise and delight people and make you think you don't want a job.
So the teachers and we are, it's this group and we are thinking, you know, we want to
have other teachers and have other things, you know, things happen, there's four of us
that are working on it.
It's myself and Tayun Choi who made all these great drawings, Jen Loh who's speaking here,
Amit Pataru who's also speaking here.
And I think the three of them are superheroes.
I think I'm, I don't have any superpowers but I think they have superpowers and I think
Amit's superpower is this, is it like this X-ray vision in terms of interaction design
and I know when I go to Amit with a project and I have some sort of problem, he can look
at it and he can find out exactly this sort of hidden, this hidden, you know, routine to
make everything fit.
Tayun has a superpower which is his ability to draw and take complex ideas and to turn
them into drawing and to teach through drawing and so here he is protesting for the protesters
in Turkey and he's made a drawing of some, so he's holding a sign, of somebody holding
a sign of the city, right and there's something very beautiful about that and he's involved
and he's protesting and he's a part of things and Jen, I met last year at IO and she spoke
on the stage and she gave one of them, for my money, one of the most eloquent talks I've
ever heard about data visualization and I think her superpower is radical empathy and
she's gotten involved with open frameworks, we've been thinking about how to have women
more involved in development and she wrote one of the most beautiful passages about heroism
and really how to change the way we work.
Okay, so school for poetic computation, let's talk about poetic, why poetry and I think
we really need to think about this word poetry and specifically poesis and I have to thank
Golan who sent this great video, you know, after we were talking about the name of the
school and this is the artist Jean Tingli talking about the word poesis.
It was invented and it was at 350 years and we did a lot of work with it and I think
he's saying the word he likes to use is poetry.
I also think there's something really difficult for me about this term creative coder and
you see this word a lot and it's used to describe the profession of what we do like
I'm searching for a creative coder but for me it has this weird connotation like our
other forms of coding not creative and there's also this kind of strange idea of this word
creative like the creative city, the creative class, it has for me a sort of strange ring
and I just like this idea of computational poet and it's like you have the coder on the
one side and the poet on the other and nobody would tell your mom that you're going to poetry
school but I like this idea and another kind of great video from Golan so in terms of technology
you have the kind of demo culture, demo or die, this idea of like taking technology and
like putting it to work and just seeing it in action and I really like this idea of a
poem, right?
We should use technology, we should make poems with it and Golan points out just how easily
it is to turn a demo into a poem.
The other thing that I love about poetry is that it's the sort of like black sheep art
form so you go to a bookstore and you walk in the bookstore and you actually have to
go to like the back of the bookstore to find the poetry section, right?
And the poetry section is full of books that are self-published and small publishing houses
and nobody's making money, making poetry books but it's beautiful, there's something really
beautiful happening there.
This is a, you have to forgive me, this is like, I debated like endlessly if I should
add this slide but I love, it's okay, I was torn, this is a moment in the Dead Poets Society
where Robin Williams is describing why poetry and he's using this Walt Whitman poem and
there's this great moment in the Walt Whitman poem that's just like, you know, what is the
point of poetry?
So I'm gonna play it for you.
We don't read and write poetry because it's cute, we read and write poetry because we
are members of the human race and the human race is filled with passion and medicine,
law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits necessary to sustain life but poetry,
beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for, to quote from Whitman, oh me, oh
life of the questions of these recurring, of the endless trains of the faithless, of
the cities filled with the foolish, what good amid these, oh me, oh life, answer, that you
are here, that life exists and identity, that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute
a verse, what will your verse be?
So I showed this in a talk, I think two years ago at I.O., I showed this example, I want
to show it again just to talk about what I think a poem is and this was this kind of
giant project at the Venice Biennial, this is a UFO, you wait in line, you put brainwave
sensors on, I waited for like two hours and you go back in this UFO and you're supposed
to have this sort of animation based on your brainwave reading and this project's like
a giant movie, like it's a million dollar artwork and it was really, really boring,
I could not, super boring and I turned the corner and there was an artwork by a Portuguese
artist named Laura Bellum and this artwork is called The Lovers and this is two boats
that are in the water and the lights are flashing on and off and the boats, sometimes the lights
are in sync and sometimes the lights are out of sync and you could just sit there, it's
a kind of artwork that you would even miss walking around Venice but you could sit there
and it's this thing that like, this is an artwork that costs, you know, $300, it's nothing,
it's a small thing but it tells you so much about what it means to be alive, what it means
to be human, what it means to communicate and I've been thinking, you know, I preached
this idea in other talks, I've said art and artists are like R&D for humanity but I've
also been thinking that art, in this case poetry, is also like an immune system for
humanity and that art, you know, attacks and also like makes healthy and thinking a lot
about kind of poetry and language and computation and what are the similarities and what are
the differences and there's great examples so this is, Florian Kramer points this out,
this is a poet from the 17th century and this was after a 30 year war and he wrote this
one phrase, let there be peace, give us peace this time, I ask you Lord and he wrote this
one phrase and then what he did is he rearranged the words but kept the meter the same so he
wrote one line and then he just, it's almost like, it's a computational algorithm, a combinatorial,
he took the same words and rearranged them and he wrote this line 24,000 times, right
so this is an anonymous poet in the 17th century that's creating a poem and a prayer and really
a computational program and there's like beautiful, I haven't totally got all of my
logic down about how poem and poetry and code work but there's great parallels so you look
at a pollinator doing these kilograms and this obfuscated sea, this idea of using type
and painting with type, creating images with type and I just love, I think poetry just
in general is a beautiful form and we should be looking at it and we should be experimenting
with it and thinking about how it relates to what we do, I've also been researching
now or reading a lot about this, from this poet Kenneth Goldsmith who's got a great book
called Uncreative Writing and he teaches this class which is not, the whole idea is that
you're not allowed to make any new words, that we have words all around us and it's
about appropriation and finding things and he preaches this idea that we're surrounded
by text so wherever you look, you're on an airplane and your entertainment system goes
down and it comes back up and there's text everywhere and his idea is like this is the
most text heavy period of time and it's like the best time to be a poet, okay so what does
it mean if you have computation, if you have technology without poetry and this is what
computation and technology without poetry look like, it looks like this, or a CEO, we
wanted to take that model one step further, we are taking it one step further, the next
big thing, the next generation, the next generation, testing class smart one in the world, this
is the most innovative smart phone in the world, the most fast, great, really fast, faster,
faster, faster, faster, faster, faster, faster, faster than that, great, great, really fast,
great, great, great, great, fastest, great, it's also, so technology without poetry is
also about new stuff, I really like this, this is like out of focus model putting a
new phone in your face and it's about presentations and convention centers and you know what happens
is like they set up and then they take it down and then the convention center is empty,
right, and I think we really have to ask this question is do we want the ideas of the future,
do we want, if we make the logic that technology affects society, technology affects culture
and that dictates the future, do we want ideas of the future shaped in convention centers,
a place that have no history, right, do we want CEOs on the stage and I would make the
argument that we want people that understand our culture, we want people that understand
openness, we want people that understand hackers, we want Gabriela Coleman on stage, we want
why on stage or Aaron Schwartz on stage, we want people that understand freedom, you
know, thinking about the future, so that's where poetic computation is, I think poetic
computation is about approaching technology and imagining possible futures and I want
to talk about some projects that are really meaningful to me and that I think, you know,
the school should be supporting, this is one of my favorite projects, this is an artist
named Julian Marie, a French artist, he made this project called Digit and it is seriously
one of the most beautiful projects, it's a live performance, he's on stage and what
he's done is he's built a small printer that fits on his fingertip and he wipes his hand
over a piece of paper and you see letters from his fingertip, you see letters emerge
from his fingertip, so he takes a blank piece of paper and he stands there and he writes
type with his hands.
And I have been, I saw this performance when I was at a show, we performed together in
the same set sometimes and I was at a show in Sonar in Barcelona and I was doing a project
with the magician and then Julian would come in and set up and do this performance and
there was this moment, it was really like one of the most beautiful moments I've ever
seen with somebody making a project and he was telling a story, it looks like he's making
drawings now but he's actually programmed the text to tell a story and he was telling
the story about two people that were going to meet again and he drew the runway with
his fingertips and he drew just a series of plus signs and then he drew an airplane coming
down onto the runway and it was dots, right, so his fingertips, he's drawing this line
of dots and when the dots hit the runway he just wrote the word screeching and it was
something so beautiful seeing language composed just by moving his finger.
Delicate boundaries by Chris Segru, I talk about this all the time, probably every time
I talk about open frameworks but this is another project that for me is really meaningful and
this is a project, Chris had been working on these kind of crazy dance performances
at Ars Electronica and she wanted to make something that was really intimate, she wanted
to make the most intimate form of interaction and she designed a system where an element
on the screen would come off the screen onto your hand and it's basically a series of bugs
that are on the screen and when you put your hand up next to the screen they come off onto
your hand and she told me a story which was, she was developing this at Eyebeam and one
night she was in there and let's see what, fast forward so you can see what this feels
like, she was in there and she had a bug in her hand and she couldn't reach the keyboard,
and she had to go hit a key on the keyboard to go into debug mode and she didn't want
to let go of the bug and she asked her friend to go grab the keyboard and her friend looked
at her like she was crazy, but there was something so magical about holding something
in your hand and we talk about artwork leaving the screen, we talk about wanting to leave
the screen and I think it's really beautiful, this project in particular because things
really do leave the screen.
There's also work thinking about code and poetry and there's a great book called Code
Poems that Eshock Bertrand and a group of people have worked on, he put out a call and
he said to people in the community can you write poems through code and these are code
that's meant to be read, not meant to be executed and it's this beautiful book and I have a
copy with me if you want to see it and I love this dedication page, it's probably my favorite
dedication page that I have ever seen and it's beautiful, it's full of really simple
elegant ideas and for what we're doing, we're thinking about code and poetry, it's a really
good reference and the other thing that I really love about it is that it's printed
in this extremely limited edition so he worked with a great publishing house so it's very
much like a book of poetry, you publish 100 pieces, it's limited edition, it's the opposite
of what we think about code and software but actually just making this book and this book
which is really full of ideas of what it means to be human, what it means to be alive.
There's a great project that I'm a super big fan of called the Recode Project which is Matthew
Epler and a group of people and Matthew was a student at ITP and he was doing research
and he discovered these PDFs, these computer graphics and art PDFs from the 70s and these
magazines are full of artworks that computer artists were making in the 70s and they're
full of algorithms and code and ideas and what he did is he said, you know, I want to
see these things and these things are oftentimes programmed in languages that I can't execute
and he created this project called the Recode Project which basically organizes these examples
and then invites people to recode them and there's a whole community of people that have
been contributing and taking something and then saying, okay, let me rewrite this, let
me rewrite this in processing, let me understand the algorithm and let me remake this and I
think this is really beautiful.
I think we have to look backwards as well as looking forwards so I think we are thinking,
you know, a lot of times we think about, okay, what does a 10-year-old child need, right?
Like, we have, if we grew up, we grew up with Amigas or Basic or, you know, StarLogo or
StarLogo or whatever you grew up with or HyperCard, you're thinking about, okay, what do people
have now?
They have processing, they have Arduino, they have Makey Makey, they have Scratch, so we're
thinking about the younger generation.
I think we also need to think about the older generation, you know, what's going to happen
to these ideas and this code that exists and how can we preserve it and, you know, make
sure those ideas don't die.
And what's amazing is that the people that made this code are still alive and they're
still working and I got a chance to work with one of them, Ken Nolton.
And Ken Nolton and another designer named Mark Seter-Dukati and I worked on a project.
Ken is an old-school Bell Labs programmer, you know, he's about 80 years old now and
he was working in Bell Labs.
He was one of the first people to be doing computer graphics, he was one of the first
people to make ASCII art, to take images and turn them into ASCII characters.
And he's a kind of master of the mosaic form and I got to work on a project with him and
hang out with him quite a bit, which was amazing for me, and really learn about his art form
and what we worked on was a puzzle.
It's basically a jigsaw puzzle where all of the pieces in the puzzle are gradients.
So you have a jigsaw puzzle, maybe 300 pieces, 20 by 15, and every piece has a kind of gradient
and you can rearrange those pieces to make any picture.
So the idea is that you will take a photograph and it will tell you how to rearrange those
pieces to make any picture.
So it's a kind of reconfigurable jigsaw puzzle and we also made a larger set with artwork
where we tried to say, okay, how could you take a painting and cut it up into pieces
and rearrange them to make any picture.
So here I'm taking this webcam and using a Botticella painting and rearranging them
to make my face.
But the exciting thing, so we made this product and it was like kind of big in Japan.
It's my mom, she's really excited.
But the thing that I appreciate even more than making the project was hanging out with
Ken and really like understanding he's got floppy disks full of code, right?
He's got floppy disks full of ideas and we were like salvaging and getting all of his
code back up and putting it.
It's amazing.
Like I got him a hard drive and the things that he's made like fit into one hundredth
of the hard drive.
And we got an iMac computer and he needs an MS-DOS emulator and we got the MS-DOS emulator
running full screen on a 27-inch iMac.
And every character is about this big and it's awesome.
There's another project that I think is also really beautiful thinking about poetic computation
and it's this book called Ten Print that I know Casey was a part of and a bunch of other
people.
And this book is really beautiful because this book takes one line of code.
And this is one line of code, ten print, char, dollar sign, 205.5 plus R&D 1, go to 10, right?
It's a simple line of code that produces this pattern.
And what's amazing is this book takes this line of code as a starting point and delves
into it and says, okay, how are we sharing code, what was going on with basic, how are
people learning code?
And it says, okay, how can we rearrange this algorithm?
How can we, you know, what sort of changes can we make?
And it pushes it in all kinds of directions and directions where you're really learning
about randomness, like the idea that they had a book of random numbers, how computation
came about and it takes this little thing, this little thing as a starting point.
And for me, I think that's really beautiful.
My friend Ramsay has worked on a project called ALB, which is a programming language completely
in Arabic.
Elb, as far as I know, is the first programming language that is a conceptual art piece.
The language can express any kind of computation.
A big part of Elb was, could you really build a language that didn't use Latin alphabet?
Elb is built entirely on Arabic and everything broke.
Every text editor just has no idea what to do.
The terminal is useless.
All of the tools that I use to be creative while writing code fall apart.
I thought it would be interesting to challenge that.
So this is the Elb interface.
It's modeled after a traditional terminal programming session.
So you can write code directly into it.
So I'm just going to print out my name, I type cool, cool means say in Arabic, followed
by that is what it is that I want it to print and here it's, this is my name written in
Arabic and it just prints it out directly after it.
Arabic has language has some very interesting properties that lend itself towards code.
Arabic is a joint language where certain letters are joined with the letter that follows them
using the line so that words form almost like solid forms.
What you can do in Arabic is you can stretch out the length of that joint.
So you can align things perfectly and just by stretching all the words out and make it
look visually beautiful in a way that you couldn't do with English code and that's entirely
a result of just using Arabic as a text.
I've implemented three algorithms.
So I love this idea of people making languages or trying to say, okay, how can we make an
Arabic programming language?
I really like esoteric languages.
There's a language that I cannot say the name of, but it's brain and then something
that rhymes with puck and this is how you say hello world.
This is eight characters and it's something like very, very strange and very beautiful.
This idea of creating programming languages that are just like impossible, that are cryptic,
that are, you know, like, you know, so deeply obfuscated.
I won't show pattern, Daito and Matoi's project, but they made an interface where you could
actually tweet this brain-something language at them and they would, they had an embroidery
machine that they would control, but this is my favorite example of somebody doing something
strange with this language.
This is called body...
How do I do it?
So this is using, he's using his body movement to program this esoteric language.
And then clap to execute.
There's a kind of amazing thing happening right now that I think is really beautiful,
which is this debug view art that Elliott Woods, a friend of ours and like big in the
community, you know, put out a call just like tweeted him if you have debug views for the
things that you're making.
And it's really beautiful.
If you go to debug view art, it's a tumbler and you can see this sort of like, it's the
hidden side of software.
It's the side that you're not supposed to see.
It's the moment in the Wizard of Oz where you open the curtain and you see the person
with the machine.
And there's something really beautiful of seeing unfinished work, seeing work in progress,
seeing the residue of work.
And I've also, along this front, Reza Ali has just been tweeted.
He goes through this thing where he just tweets his work in progress and it's like for me
really beautiful.
Endless computation, embodied computation, using your body to compute like the last project,
arithmetic garden, Masaiko Sato did this project at the ICC where he used RFID reader and you
walk through these doorways that have different symbols like plus five, divide by two, plus
eight, and you have to get to a number, right?
That you are using your body to do math.
You are moving through space to do math.
Endless computation.
This is John F.
He's a senior.
This is an applet that he created in 1997, which is literally counting, and it's called
every icon.
It is counting one pixel at a time.
And this is how far it's gotten since 1997.
And so it's going to take a billion years to count through every single pixel in this
image.
But at some point, your face will be in this icon.
At some point, my face will be in this icon.
At some point, Seinfeld's face will be in this icon.
And there's something very beautiful about the kind of everything, seeing everything.
Computation bringing things to life.
Carolina Subeka, I love her work, she has a project called Wild Life where she hacks
into the sensors in a car.
She sees how fast the car is driving, and then she projects a tiger along with the car.
And the speed that the car is driving changes the animation of the tiger.
And her projects are all about kind of putting things in places where you wouldn't expect
them sniff.
She worked on a project with James George.
This is a dog that sort of moves.
So it's about animals.
And it's also about kind of a, for me, I find her work really about a sort of spirit world
and seeing things kind of unexpected in unexpected places.
And so what does this medium not need?
This medium doesn't need computer labs.
What this medium needs is other ways of learning.
And there's beautiful things that are happening with how we learn in this medium.
Cardboard computer workshop by Nicholas Roy.
So he did this workshop where they basically took parts of the computer, different aspects
of what makes a computer a computer, and they built it out of cardboard.
So building logic gates, building input systems, and really thinking about how a computer works
and designing pieces.
There's another project that I really like called From Zero to Sea by Ubi DeFio.
And the idea that they have here is that you, you know, what if you were able to think like
a computer, but also like what if you taught programming without using a computer at all?
So the last thing you need to learn programming is a computer screen.
And they have a great tag line on the website that's from Zero to Sea, but the tag line
is make believe sounds better than simulation.
So the last thing is the word for, right?
We talked about school, we talked about poetic, we talked about computation, and the word
for is really simple, right?
You can have the school of something.
You can have the poetic computation school, but the school for something is really about
advocacy, right?
It's really about promoting.
It's really about figuring out what the medium wants and how can we be for it.
And I like, Tae Yoon made a great drawing of just like, this is what it means to be
for, is to hold the sign.
Now I want to do a small experiment.
Everybody stand up.
Here's what I want to suggest, right?
With everybody pointing their hand to the center of the room.
This is an amazing conference.
You're going to hear great speakers, and for me, so many of them are heroes, and it's
going to be awesome to go see what people are up to and what people are thinking about.
But the most important part of this conference is going to be here.
It's going to be in the center of this room.
And so I'll end with what I said before.
I'm not here to talk.
I'm here to listen.
Have a great festival.
