DIGITAL LOVE LANGUAGES ♡ Codes of Affirmation

At the School for Poetic Computation Online

Overview

?  As our daily activities and closest relationships become increasingly bound up with corporate systems of surveillance and exploitation, let’s explore and cultivate code as a love language that can be gentle, healing, and intimate. How do we want to live in a post COVID-19 world, and what role do we want technology to play? Digital Love Languages: Codes of Affirmation is a class about building poetic tools for online communion through a re-introduction to computers. This class is also a call to action for expanding computation’s capacity for fostering interdependence and feeling.

?  Together we will build small and personal software for affirming one another across physical distance. Technology will be unpacked as a social process, not only a logic or material, regarding code as a craft and medium capable of expressing the full range of feeling and desire.

?  This course covers the building blocks of programming and natural language processing using Python & Javascript in the browser. Networks of people and computers become fertile sites for ambient and playful communication. We will look to the history of the love letter as a form, from the quill to the sext.
Through coding with langugage and in the browser, we can facilitate a kind of care that happens in small moments of routine.↝

Week 1 ◌ 6.16 ◌ 6.17

• Intentions
• Acknowledgements
• Zoom terror
• TA introductions
• Code of Conduct
• Software notes

Digital Love Languages [[now]] the conditions of a virus of body and mind – of lungs and skin, of exclusion and domination. How does the digital harm and how does it hold?What are your love languages? What are your digital love languages? Have these, if they have, changed in response to COVID and BLM? What kinds of relationships can hold love for you?

Week 2 ◌ 6.23 ◌ 6.24

• Melanie’s introduction
• Folder Poetry Part I
• DLL class folder structures
• Reintroducing ourselves to our computers

Can code express love?