Taeyoon Choi — School for Poetic Computation founded

2013

Artists: Taeyoon Choi, Zach Lieberman, Amit Pitaru, Jen Lowe · Year: 2013 · Medium: Independent teaching institution — ten-week creative-coding intensives for working artists and designers · Substrate: Small-class residential program in Manhattan; curricular design combining programming instruction with art-historical and theoretical reading · Place: New York, USA · Institution: School for Poetic Computation (SFPC) Taeyoon Choi, Zach Lieberman, and Amit Pitaru co-founded the School for Poetic Computation (SFPC) in New York in 2013 as an independent ten-week educational program for artists, engineers, and writers to work together on experimental computational projects. The school operates from a small Manhattan studio, admits approximately fifteen students per ten-week session, and runs its sessions on a deliberately non-accredited structure — no grades, no transcripts, no degree. The curriculum is co-developed each session by the invited teachers (who have included Golan Levin, Marina Zurkow, Jen Lowe, Allison Parrish, and dozens of others) and is renegotiated for each cohort. SFPC's operational premise is that formal technology education is specifically inadequate to the practice it trains its students for. Computer-science programs at universities treat programming as engineering; design programs treat it as tool-use. SFPC's co-founders argued that a third framing — programming as poetic material, negotiated between groups of practitioners with different backgrounds, in a specifically collaborative pedagogical setting — was what was missing. The school is the institutional realization of that argument. The school has, since 2013, produced roughly 200 alumni, many of whom are now working artists in this archive or adjacent to it. SFPC's specific pedagogical methods — the cohort-based ten-week structure, the invited-teacher rotation, the emphasis on collaborative rather than individual final projects — have been partially imitated by other independent programs (the School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe in Berlin; the School of Poetic Computation's own satellite sessions in different cities). SFPC's financial model has been consistently precarious. The school runs on tuition fees (deliberately kept lower than comparable institutions) and a rotating support cast of small foundation grants; the teachers are paid but at rates that sustain occasional rather than career-level commitment. Choi has continued to run the school since 2013 and has become, in that role, one of the most significant American non-academic teaching figures in the interactive-media field. Lore The original 2013 founding class was small — perhaps a dozen students in the first session — and ran in a borrowed space in a SoHo building. Lieberman, a co-founder of the openFrameworks C++ library and one of the primary Zach Lieberman / Theodore Watson teaching figures of the period, brought his existing curriculum materials from Parsons and made them available as a starting point. Choi, who had been running informal teaching sessions in Korea and New York for several years, provided the organizational structure. Pitaru contributed the specifically interdisciplinary framing — his own practice included music-software design and installation art, and he insisted from the founding that the school treat those disciplines as the same discipline. The three have remained the institutional spine of the school through a decade of leadership transitions. Sources • School for Poetic Computation — sfpc.study (school site). • Choi, Taeyoon — taeyoonchoi.com (founder's archive and writings on pedagogy). • Lieberman, Zach — thesystemis.com (archive).