So, I'm super excited to be back here, and the first time I was invited to Pop Tech,
I got this email from Andrew, and he emailed the iRider team, he's like, where are you
guys exist in the world, like we want you to come to Pop Tech, and I wrote him back
and I said, I'm in the same building as you, I'm actually in the same floor as you, I pass
your office every day, we probably share the same bathroom, and that was my first time
to Pop Tech, and my second time to Pop Tech, I think a couple months ago I was walking
down the street and Andrew, I think he almost ran me over, he was parking his car with his
daughter and I was taking my daughter out for a stroll, and so I'm super happy to be
here and happy to be so close to Pop Tech, you know, physically close and emotionally
close to Pop Tech, and what I would like to do actually is start with something totally
different, because you're going to hear a lot of speaking, but I actually want you on
your feet, so stand up.
And what I want you to do is I want you to take your right hand, and I want you to put
your right hand on the shoulder of somebody that you don't know.
And then I want you to take your left hand and put it on the shoulder of somebody else
that you don't know.
And now what I want you to do as quickly as possible, because I'm eating my seconds now,
I want you to introduce yourself and make a friend.
And I should make you talk to each other for 18 minutes, and that will be my talk.
I won't have to do anything, it would be awesome.
So how many of you started something new this year, like a new job or a new business, or
a new relationship, or a new child?
So I started something new, and it's actually really super hard and weird to talk about
something new.
It's easy to talk about old things, and I talk about projects a lot, and they're like
pebbles.
They're smooth, and you know what they mean, and new things are really complicated, and
it's like I know how I got myself into trouble, I don't know how I'm going to get myself out
of trouble.
So I'm going to talk about poems, not demos, and specifically a school that we started
this year called the School for Poetic Computation.
And I'll sort of talk about the name, and the talk is sort of structured around the
name and what it means.
And so I've been really interested in school and teaching for a long time, and I've been
teaching at a school called Parsons, Parsons School of Design, for about 10 years.
And this is what my ID card looks like.
It's really, it's super worn out, you can still see my name, but that's about it.
I've been there for forever, and this was my last class, my last group of students.
And I've been teaching in the university for a while, and I loved it, I loved the students.
And one of the things that, you know, I always come in the first day of class, I would say
I adopt you.
But actually it's the students that adopted me, there's this great kind of feeling that
I had teaching, and you know, one of the things that I promoted as a professor is this idea
of fearlessness, and specifically I was teaching artists and designers how to work with code
in computation, and trying to teach them to be fearless about using code, and specifically
this message that this is not hard.
So for example, out of this teaching came an open source library, this was a tool that
was developed for my students and with my students, and Open Frameworks is a kind of
product of the teaching, of this kind of years at Parsons.
So it's essentially a library of code, you can think about it as small building blocks
of code for artists and designers to make creative projects with.
And the idea we had is that, you know, you would think like, to do interesting things
with software, I need a computer science degree, but actually we wanted to make it so that
you don't need to read a lot of the books, you just need to look at a few of the books,
and then you can connect those ideas outside of the computer science section to some other
section in the bookstore.
And Open Frameworks is used for a lot of projects, and one of the nice things about
open source is you put this tool out there, and then there's so many kind of like creative
strange places it goes, and the sort of things that people do with it, and that's one of
the sort of joys of working in this field.
And I had an amazing sort of epiphany this last year, which is I started to work with,
I was on a council with a woman named Carol Becker, and Carol Becker is the Dean of the
Art School at Columbia, and before that she was the Dean of the Art School at the Art
Institute of Chicago, and Carol Becker writes really eloquently about what a school should
be.
She's one of the people that I think has the most beautiful writing about the potential
of a school, and I started to look around my university and feel like, although I love
the students, this is not what I want, I want to make a new school something different.
And I started to see a lot of things happening at universities that really made me afraid.
So there's a lot of stuff that's happening in higher education that I was really scared
of.
There's a whole sort of movement around bigger buildings, so you have this sort of like kind
of crazy architecture around education.
You have campuses opening in really kind of like very awkward places, places that I really
question some of the locations and places that we're putting campuses, administrators
and debt, and you really see that there's this kind of trouble brewing in higher education,
and that's really evident to see in, for example, an institution like Cooper Union, which has
had a hundred plus year history of giving away education, of having free education,
and they've lost it, and they've lost it because the board has really squandered the financial
resources of the university.
So are there alternatives?
And that's really the question that we're looking at, and there's this great movement
of different schools, different sort of places to learn, alternatives to the very famous
expensive school.
We like this idea of really kind of teaching and learning and free.
Also a difference between a sort of vertical pedagogy and horizontal pedagogy, and this
is probably my favorite image, Carolyn Woolard of the trade school has this great, great
image to really describe at the heart what education should be, which is want and have,
and finding the right people with the right wants and the right halves and putting them
in the same room.
And there's also a really rich history of art of schools, art of space education, teachable
file is a kind of good resource, and we got really excited about this, and we created
the school for poetic computation.
This is our, we don't have a logo yet, we're still working on our logo.
And we have, although we have kind of a nice manifesto, we preach this idea of an anti-vocational
school.
And this is a school that's not about, you know, it's a school about magic, about building
and practical work, and really it's not about finding a job, we want to convince you that
you don't need a job.
There's a group of us that are teaching, just awesome people, Amit Pataru, Tain Choi,
Jen Loh, and the four of us are really focused on this idea of poetry and computation.
So what is poetic?
What is the word poetic?
Why focus on poetry?
And we really like this word poetry and poesis.
This is an amazing video that I think explains it better than I could.
This is the sculptor.
So the word art, okay.
And I think that the word poetic is better because it's, in fact, an amazing word because
it means to live, the original word means to just live, and that's what I like, but
the word art is bullshit.
I like the word poetry, it comes from a word which means to live, and we love this idea
of poet, like there's a word, you know, a term used to describe what we do as creative
coder, but we love the word poet, computational poet, just the idea of walking around and
saying I'm a coder versus I'm a poet, just feels nicer to say.
And we also like this idea that there's a whole sort of culture, you have this culture
of sort of demo or die in technology, like you make a demo, and what's amazing is the
word demo, you can easily just flip the letters around and, you know, make poems.
I also love this idea that poetry is in the back of the bookstore, right, you go into
a bookstore, you have to go all the way to the back, and it's this like, these are the
self-published books, you know, there's not big publishing houses in poetry, nobody makes
money in poetry, you lose money in poetry, but these are the things that are about, you
know, what it means to be human, what it means to be alive, but my father's an English teacher,
and so when I watch movies like the Dead Poets Society, I get the feeling of, you know, when
he was teaching us and teaching his students about poetry and about the beauty of poetry,
and I try to explain, like, what I mean when we say poetic, and I have a really good example,
this is from the Venice Biennial, and these are two projects that I used to compare, and
the first project, this is, so the Venice Biennial happens every other year, it's an
art show in Venice, and this is a project by a Japanese artist, and she made a giant
UFO, and she worked with an Italian shipmaker, and this UFO is really beautiful, it's really
gorgeous, and you wait in line, and you put brainwave meters on your head, and then you
go in this UFO, and you have, there's an animation that's playing, and it's supposed to be based
on what you're feeling, how your brain is working, and I waited in line, I waited for
about an hour and a half, and I had no idea about what the relationship of what I was
seeing and what I was feeling was, and this project is crazy, if you look at the credits
for this project, it's like a movie, right, this is a million dollar artwork, and you
turn the corner, and I just turned the corner in Venice, and there was an art piece by an
artist named Laura Bellum, who's a Brazilian artist, and she put two boats in the water,
and this project is called The Lovers, and there are two boats that are looking at each
other, and there are lights that are blinking at each other, right, that's it, there's just
two row boats that are sort of docked in the water, and there are lights that are blinking
back and forth, and sometimes these lights are in sync, and sometimes these lights are
out of sync, and here's this project that speaks so eloquently to what it means to be
human, to what it means to communicate, to what it means to be alive, and I think we
have this notion when we create art with technology that we need to make this UFO, but actually
it's this small project, these small gestures that can tell us so much, and we've been preaching
this idea of art in poetry as an immune system, that it's this kind of immune system.
There is kind of great examples of how language and computation work, and this is where we
get sort of inspired for the research in the school.
This is Proteus Poeticus, this whole idea of Proteus Poems, based on the mythical Proteus,
these are poems that take one line of text and rearrange them, so this is a poem from
the 17th century after the Thirty Years War that sort of devastated Europe, and it took
this one line saying, you know, please Lord, give us peace in this time, and rearrange
the words really algorithmically, and just writing this one line multiple times, just
taking the words and putting them in different orders, like an anagram.
Apollonaires, visual poems, here I put it side by side with some obfuscated code.
Just this idea of poetry as visual form and how it relates to code, we're really excited
about.
The work of Kenneth Goldsmith, who teaches classes in uncreative writing, and this idea
of doing poetry without actually making new words, but finding words that are out there
and rearranging them, and he really preaches this idea that it's an amazing time to be
a poet, because so much of our world is built around language now, and you see this if you're
in the airplane and the entertainment system restarts itself, you just see it spewing words,
right?
There's words everywhere.
Words are underlying our world at the moment, and we wanted to create a place, like a place
where you could be reading books simultaneously.
You could be reading, you know, Madness, Wrecking Honey, Mary Ruffles, amazing lectures about
what it means to write and consume poetry, along with the C programming language by currently
Hand and Richie, so what is non-poetic computation, right?
We're trying to figure out what it means, what poetic computation means.
What is non-poetic computation?
Non-poetic computation really looks like this, new, faster, better, awesome.
We're born mobiles.
We're born mobiles.
You got to be mobiles.
You want to be a top dog.
Or a tough-ass warrior.
Or super popular.
Or a CEO.
Just a moment.
The world has been waiting for.
Today, everything changes.
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.
The last smart one in the world.
This is...
Faster.
Really fast.
Faster.
Faster.
Faster.
Faster.
Faster.
Faster.
No.
Now, great, great.
Really fast.
Great, great.
And it's this.
It's new, new, new in your face and the thing that's really shocking is that these are...
We're building the future.
We're building the future with technology.
But we're building it in conference centers.
Right?
We're talking about in conference centers.
What happens in a conference center when the conference is over?
They take it down.
It's empty.
It's a place without history.
Do we want the future being created in a place
without history?
And I would argue that instead of those CEOs on stage,
we want people like Gabriela Coleman.
We want why the lucky stiff.
We want Aaron Schwartz, rest in peace.
We want people like that on stage talking about building
and shaping the future.
And that's what we're about.
I'm going to have a bunch of projects if you're curious.
But I'm going to end by showing just a ton of photographs.
This is my attempt to show you what the last five
weeks of the School of Poetic Computation has been like.
And I'm just going to flick through it.
Here you're going to see a lot of craziness,
a lot of going outside, building,
trying to build a computer from the ground up,
thinking about the first principles of computation,
trying to learn, trying to take notes, read books,
experiment.
There's a lot of cooking, a lot of drinking beer.
What you'll notice is that it's not a computer lab.
We're not sitting in front of a screen,
but we're trying to create a space for reimagining
what's possible.
I'm going to go as fast as I can.
I like this.
He serves pizza wearing a pizza shirt.
More than anything, we wanted to create a home.
And that's what the School for Poetic Computation is about.
It is what I think this medium needs.
And this is the trouble that I've gotten myself into,
that I don't know how I'm going to get myself out
of this trouble, but this is what I've started.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
