A project by Mariame Kaba & neta bomani

Zines as a Loving Practice of Abolition with neta bomani

my name is neta. i’m a worker, a PIC (prison industrial complex) abolitionist, an educator, a learner, an archivist and a zine maker. my former teacher, current friend, and your current teacher Melanie asked me to participate in this Digital Love Languages class by sharing what i’m thinking about in addition to some of my work. i spend a lot of my time thinking about zines, but lately i have been thinking a lot about alternative histories of zines as they relate to DIY culture and also how zines operate as poetic technologies of the self, specifically within the realm of Black subjectivity. we can discuss such matters in looking at examples of work i contributed to in addition to two activities. consider this a letter to you and a gesture toward seeking study with each other on these matters and so much more…

  • Please make an account on Glitch.com
  • Glitch is an IDE, an in-browser online coding environment for creating things on the web, like webzines!

Agenda

Welcome ⚘

Code Lace Subtraction is a program I (melanie) made to make lacework out of the structure of code made by my classmates and make poetry from the language they use in their code. This code was originally written by Nahee Kim for a playful website called Boob Blobs

Code for Code Lace Subtraction: https://github.com/melaniehoff/code-lace

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is twitter_screenshot-1024x695.png
A markov chain private twitter bot generated from 15 years of my partners online journal entires

Homework for next week ☽☼

Dear class: a generative text, a hand coded message from ‘you’ to ‘we’

Next week, we will be joined by special guest Emma Norton who will lead Hand Coding Round Robin workshop.

We will be using Glitch IDE to work with Python as well as html/css/javascript!

Our websites we create next week will publish the output from a python script we write. Instead of having text be generated inside of the terminal or jupyter notebook, it will be published to a collaborative series of Glitch websites we’ll make.

  • Create a python program that generates text. The output from the code you write will be part of the collaborative collection of websites we’ll make next week in response to the themes of the class, coding with care & exploring what our digital love languages are and what can they become.
  • Consider adapting Max’s markov chain example or creating a different kind of script.
  • The conceptual prompt for this generative text is something you want to say or share with the class. 2 weeks ago we wrote code to send a message to one person in the class; this week we’ll sharing a re-generating message from you to the whole class.

Let’s share our code with each other

  • upload any .ipynb files you’ve created in the past three weeks to this drive here
  • make sure to rename the .ipynb file with your name in it so we can credit you
  • I’ll upload these to github as well. lmk if you dont want your code to be on github by including “class_only” in the filename.

Source text ideas:

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