School for Poetic Computation, Rhizome and Art & Code
By Clara Che Wei Peh

This article is a part of CHECK-IN 2024, our annual publication, which comes in at 313 pages this year. You can buy a limited-edition print copy at SGD38 here.

Celine Wong Katzman. Photo by Douglas Ross.

Celine Wong Katzman is an independent curator based in New York and Singapore. Celine is Co-Director at the School for Poetic Computation, a platform for the study of art, code, hardware, and theory, through lenses of decolonisation and transformative justice. Previously, she was Curator at Rhizome, Curatorial Fellow at the Queens Museum, and a mentor and facilitator of Art & Code, an artist residency programme at NEW INC.

‘Rhizome Presents: CyberPowWow’, 2022, installation view at the New Museum, New York City. Pictured: Jason Lewis, ‘re:map’ (2001). Image courtesy of Cameron Kelly McLeod and Rhizome.

Prior to your role as Co-Director at School for Poetic Computation, you worked and made exhibitions in institutions. You have worked on projects such as ‘Rhizome Presents: CyberPowWow’, where community is at the heart of the exhibited presentation as well as how the exhibition is designed. How have you integrated community into exhibitions within an institutional context?

In 2022, with Mikhel Proulx, I co-organised ‘Rhizome Presents: 'CyberPowWow’, a restaging of one of the first major online exhibitions, ‘CyberPowWow,’ which took place at the New Museum in New York. ‘CyberPowWow’ was launched in 1997 by Nation to Nation, a collective co-founded by Skawennati, Ryan Rice, and Eric Robertson. The exhibition presented works by Indigenous artists on the web and in The Palace, a multi-user, graphical chat environment which is now obsolete. To experience ‘CyberPowWow’, a viewer would traverse and interact within multifaceted, artist-made virtual rooms. These rooms include self-portraiture, archival photography, geographical maps, natural landscapes and other images. ‘CyberPowWow’ was also activated by in-person gatherings at more than twenty locations where community members shared food and conversation while having some of their first experiences of the internet together.

While planning this exhibition, I asked myself: what are my responsibilities, as a settler, in co-organising a presentation of an exhibition made by and for an Indigenous community, which will take place at a museum on unceded Lenape land? I considered if there were existing museum practices that were possible to revise to make the exhibition more equitable, accessible, and welcoming to the artists, curators and their extended community. I also worked with Proulx and Skawennati to design the exhibition with the aim of balancing the seriousness of this first major U.S. museum presentation of a historically significant and overlooked project, with the warm spirit of the original community gatherings.

We used legacy computer environments to display restored versions of the four roughly biennial ‘CyberPowWow’ exhibitions alongside ephemera from the Indigenous Art Archive, potted plants, with refreshments sourced from Indigenous-owned purveyors. We contacted Indigenous community organisations in the New York area to offer complimentary admission. And we arranged the computers with space for multiple seats around them to encourage group viewing, conversation, and evoke the feeling of the early days of the internet where gathering around a screen with friends was a common practice.

‘Rhizome Presents: CyberPowWow’, 2022, installation view at the New Museum, New York City. Image courtesy of Cameron Kelly McLeod and Rhizome.

You have also worked on a number of experimental residency programmes, such as NEW INC and Cycle X, which have culminated in exhibitions. Could you share with us your experiences facilitating these residencies and how they differ?

NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator, hosts a residency programme with different areas of focus called tracks. Each track is mentored by a mentor-in-residence, a field expert who meets with the resident artists over the course of nine months towards a public outcome. During my time as mentor for the Art & Code track, which focused on artists engaged with computation techniques, I facilitated monthly meetings where the approximately ten selected residents would share work, offer each other feedback, and we would discuss topics ranging from new forms of distribution for digital art to the challenges of maintaining an artistic practice while teaching or being a parent. My involvement in the selection process enabled me to shape the cohort to represent a diverse array of practices and life experiences, with an emphasis on applicants who expressed a desire to learn from others. I organised a group exhibition at the conclusion of each cohort’s residency period.

“My involvement in the selection process enabled me to shape the cohort to represent a diverse array of practices and life experiences, with an emphasis on applicants who expressed a desire to learn from others. I organised a group exhibition at the conclusion of each cohort’s residency period.”

The residency at CycleX resulted from my interest in organising an exhibition at the Queens Museum inside the gallery that holds The Relief Map of New York City’s Water Supply System, a model originally designed for the 1939 World’s Fair to educate the public about the construction of the water supply system. I wanted to involve Cheang after seeing Fresh Kill, her 1994 punk, hacker film which follows a lesbian love story through a corporate conspiracy related to radioactive fish, and is named after the Staten Island garbage dump upon which it is set. Given the film’s connection to New York City infrastructure, and mine and Cheang’s mutual interest in hacker ethos, I thought she might be interested.

After contacting Cheang, I learned she had used proceeds from Fresh Kill to purchase land in upstate New York near the Pepacton reservoir which feeds New York City, where she has been informally hosting artists and collaborators since the 1990s to decompress from urban life and touch grass. I became intrigued by how meaningful this natural site was for Cheang’s artistic practice given her work’s deep engagement with digital culture. Cheang invited me to organise the first iteration of a dream of hers, “Geek Camp,” which manifested as a four-day camping residency at the farm where I invited artists whose practices engaged with digital technology, or the watershed, or both. I facilitated the residency for artists, setting up camp and meals, authoring a community agreement, and inviting teachers: a local mycologist and the Founder of the Center for Algonquin Culture. The resulting commissions provided encounters with images, sculpture, soil, databases, and Algonquin history that illuminate the relationships between new technologies and traditional ways of knowing.

The NEW INC and CycleX residencies differed vastly in length, format, and setting, yet the resulting exhibitions share commonalities. When I have been in community with artists, having mundane conversations, eating together, the exhibition becomes an expression of our collective experience. In ‘Wet Networks’, this manifested as several artistic collaborations in the exhibited commissions, and the appearance of materials from shared meals and hikes such as bone char, mushrooms, and soil. In the NEW INC Art & Code Year 9 exhibition, there was an abundance of overlapping thematic content in the artworks related to our ongoing conversations over the nine months. They deal with the mediation of identity through technology, monetary transaction, and technological obsolescence. In these exhibitions, the collection of artworks not only speaks to these curatorial themes, but reveals the social milieu of a community.

‘Wet Networks’, 2021-2022, installation view at the Queens Museum, New York City. Pictured: Melanie Hoff’s ‘FAILURE<> COLLAPSE<>YIELD<>CATALYZE’ (2021) and Erwin A. Karl’s ‘Flora for Cycle X’ (2018-present). Image courtesy of Dario Lasagni and Rhizome.

You have been involved with the School for Poetic Computation (SFPC) since 2018 in various capacities including teaching assistant, teacher, and now, Co-Director. How has the school evolved since you joined?

SFPC was founded in 2013 by Taeyoon Choi, Zach Lieberman, Amit Pitaru, and Jen Lowe in the context of the Occupy movement and growing mainstream conversation about the student debt crisis in the U.S. They created an experimental environment for the shared study of hardware, code, poetry, and critical theory which stood in contrast to the university, and grew to attract student residents from around the world.

In 2018, Taeyoon Choi invited me to be his teaching assistant for an artist statement writing class. At the time, the school was operating a bi-annual ten-week residency programme at Westbeth Artists Housing in New York for 10 to 20 student residents per session. While operating on an ad-hoc basis without any full-time employees, SFPC was growing. There was demand to pay tuition to study at SFPC and teachers were paid USD6,000 per ten-week class, which was competitive compensation at that time.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic forced the school to halt its hallmark programme. Teachers, including myself, were asked to bring the school online without guaranteed pay, given the unprecedented circumstances. Concurrently, there was a rising political movement for Black Lives in response to murders by racist police. These events, alongside an acknowledgement of the structural inequities perpetuated by a tuition-based business model, led to a series of negotiations between teachers and leadership towards transforming SFPC.

In 2020, SFPC’s leadership team stepped down to support seven teachers, of whom I am one, in leading the school as a cooperative. In moving the school online, we were able to increase the number of classes offered, reach audiences who could not come to New York, and holistically expand our community to include a greater diversity of practices and people. Despite inheriting a tuition-based model, we have been able to move away from it thanks to first-time grants from foundations, donations from artists in our community, and students who paid above their individual tuition to redistribute their weather to others who otherwise would not be able to study at SFPC. From 2021 to 2023, we distributed approximately USD215,000 in scholarships to nearly 800 students across 41 classes.

Project by Nneka Sobers for Instruments of the Black Gooey Universe class. Photo by Kedrick Walker. Image courtesy of School for Poetic Computation.

New members have to subscribe to a community agreement. Why do you think such a practice is important to the School?

SFPC has a community agreement to codify ways of relating that match the values we shared in the letter we wrote to our community in 2021 detailing SFPC’s structural transformation.¹ Every community encounters conflict and there is no such thing as a never uncomfortable space. Rather than threaten punitive measures to try to avoid conflict or discomfort, our community agreement helps us understand how to navigate conflict and discomfort in a way that prioritises victims and marginalised people. Importantly, the community agreement also outlines processes for reparative measures. Every teacher, student, staff, and community member agrees to uphold the community agreement. Each season, we host a student orientation group exercise where we read portions aloud together and collectively sign a Google Doc. It is moving and cute!

What do you see to be the role and responsibility of independent initiatives and communities, such as SFPC, in our art and tech climate today?

SFPC is not yet encumbered by the weight of institutional history or bureaucracy that stalwart cultural organisations bear. This flexibility has allowed us to remain responsive to the needs of our community, changing cultural contexts, and the organisation’s structural demands as it grows. It has also enabled us to freely and expeditiously experiment with our programmatic offerings and business model. When I worked in museums, I was interested in hacking the institution towards a more equitable future, but at times, the heaviness sunk my spirit. Artists engaging with new technologies are inventing materials and ways of thinking. Sometimes they are the first to experiment with a software that will change the world. These artists therefore need new types of curatorial support, in new institutional frameworks that are responsive to the conditions in which they are making work. At SFPC, we are nurturing learning environments and communities for these artists.

“SFPC is not yet encumbered by the weight of institutional history or bureaucracy that stalwart cultural organisations bear. This flexibility has allowed us to remain responsive to the needs of our community, changing cultural contexts, and the organisation’s structural demands as it grows.”

This article is a part of CHECK-IN 2024, our annual publication, which comes in at 313 pages this year. You can buy a limited-edition print copy at SGD38 here.

¹Zainab Aliyu, Todd Anderson, American Artist, Neta Bomani, Melanie Hoff, Galen Macdonald, and Celine Wong Katzman, "A Beautiful School," School for Poetic Computation, 20 April 2021, https://sfpc.study/blog/a-beautiful-school.