for the spring semester 2021 i will be teaching a class with Sasha Portis at Parsons. we will be teaching sophmore design students how to make websites from scratch, a practice that i *love* to share.
in early november i finished writing through the annotated script of my 11-minute desktop performance lecture on the computer mouse. it is published on futurefeed, an extension of Futurepoem, and was edited by Ariel Yelen.
this year i am a resident artist at CultureHub. here i will be doing a mix of research performances and writing leading up to the organization of the second Computer Mouse Conference. the conference is currently being organized with Ashley Jane Lewis and we are planning to hold the event online in late April, please stay tuned for updates on that!in May i completed a two year graduate program and presented
The Mouse Holds Us, a website which itself holds two years of research conducted on the history of the computer mouse.
while i see the thesis video at the top of that page as able to stand on its own, the questions i have asked there are ones which i continue to think about. some of them were born out of a shorter essay i wrote a year earlier titled
Complication of the Computer Mousewhich was published in Urgency Reader 2 and seeks to complicate the computer mouse and its place within histories of computing and gendered divisions of labor. i often look up to the work of artist and educator Paul Soulellis and am so thankful to have been published by them in Urgency Reader along with all of the amazing thinkers inside.
this was preceded by some writing i did over the summer of 2019 after taking a class with Danya Glabau who has since energized so much of my thinking. with Danya's support i wrote an essay for Real Life Magazine called
Close To The Metalwhich elucidates the value of reintroducing friction into our interactions with computers.
in addition to writing and research i am also dedicated to coding carefully. since 2010 i have been making websites from scratch by writing html and css, simply because i like to and not so simply because i reject the move fast and break things ethos with which so much of the internet has been built upon. in step with this practice i run a workshop called
Hand Coding Round Robinwhich is organized so that participants learn how to "hand code" a web page by working on each others computers (or in the year 2020, on each others remote web pages over video conferencing software). the session starts with a brief lecture on the significance of coding slowly and by hand. participants learn how to do this kind of coding by example and with care.
speaking of hand coding, the first website i ever made is for sale on cd-rom at Printed Matter. you can also listen to it here, it's called
website with the sound of its own makingand was made as a digital response to "box with the sound of its own making" by robert morris. i come back to this website a lot, its a reminder that the internet is material. that its infrastructure is built alongside the railroad which means that it is always and already occupying and operating on stolen land. someone on the internet once said that RM would be rolling in his grave if he found out about this website but i disagree. fast forward ten years,
in january 2020 i co-organized code societies. this experience was a gift. i participated as a student in 2019 so it was energizing to be on the organizing side a year later. this is not only because of the 18 amazing partipants in the cohort who i learned so much from, but also because i was co-organizing with neta bomani and melanie hoff. i owe so much of what i know as an educator and organizer to neta and melanie, if you are not familiar with their work click those links and spend time on their pages.