DIGITAL LOVE LANGUAGES ♡ Communion, Consent, Refusal, Renewal

At the School for Poetic Computation Online

instructor melanie hoff
teaching assistants meghna dholakia & max fowler
duration 10 weeks online
time thurs 5-8pm, fri 12-3pm with 39 students

Overview

Digital Love Languages: Communion, Consent, Refusal, Renewal is an introductory computing class for reimagining the core of technology’s purpose. This class is based on the premise that there is a world where all our software is made by people who love us and that we can contribute to building it. Digital Love Languages is an experiment in computational communion disguised as a class.

In this class, we will learn about things as a proxy to learn about other things. Learn about digital coding to learn how we’re socially coded. Learn about digital consent to learn about sexual consent. Learn about network protocols to learn about sharing. Learn about naming to learn about knowing. Learn about learning to learn about living.

Together, we will build small, personal software with Python HTML Bash and Javascript for affirming one another across physical distance while making and sharing digital space with each other. We will engage with code as a craft capable of expressing a full range of feeling and desire. We will look to the love letter as form, from the quill to the sext. We will explore social and digital consent and ask: How are they interwoven?

Through a series of educational encounters, we will code poetic structures for digital touching and practice a re-examination of personal and networked computing. This is a call to action for expanding computation’s capacity for fostering interdependence and feeling among the immense personal and collective transformations brought on by COVID-19, collapse, and renewal. ➰

Week 1 ◌

  • Orientation

Digital Love Languages [[now]] the conditions of a virus of body and mind – of lungs and skin, of contamination. How does the digital harm and how does it hold? What are your love languages? What are your digital love languages?

Week 2 ◌

  • Folder Poetry Part I
  • Melanie Intro
  • Reintroducing ourselves to our computers

Can code express love?

Week 3 ◌

  • Folder Poetry Part II
  • Group share

Week 4 ◌

  • The internet is a folder poem
  • Digital Gardening

Week 5 ◌

  • The internet is a folder poem pt 2
  • Digital Gardening pt 2

Week 6 ◌

  • Codes Words Spells
  • Python intro in the terminal
  • Transition to Python with Anaconda

Week 7 ◌

  • Introduction to natural language processing
  • Python methods
  • Computational love letters & language

Week 8 ◌

  • In class project!
  • Code as a Gift for Digital Garden Party

Week 9 ◌

  • Guest lecture, Alice Zhang
  • The Presentation Presentation
  • Consensual Hacking

Week 10 ◌

Salon / Showcase

  • Digital Garden party
  • sharing and decompressing
  • A celebration