Digital Love Languages

 

 

Overview

Digital Love Languages is a class for reframing our relationship to computing in relation with others. We begin with the premise that there is a world where all our software is made by people who love us and that we can contribute to building it.

Digital Love Languages is an experiment in communion disguised as a class. In this class, we learn about things as a proxy to learn about other things. We learned about digital security to learn about intimacy. We learn about digital coding to learn how we’re socially coded. We learned about coded naming to learn about internal knowing. We learn about learning to learn about living. We engage with code as a craft capable of expressing a full range of feeling and desire while looking to the love letter as form, from the quill to the sext.

Through a series of educational encounters, we build poetic structures for digital touching and practice a re-examination of personal and networked computing. This was a call to action for expanding computation’s capacity for fostering interdependence and feeling. This class will be a crash course in the building blocks of programming, web, and natural language processing using Python & Javascript in the browser. 

 

Outline

Week 1 ◌ 1/26

  • Orientation Lecture
  • What are your digital love languages? Activity
  • Folder Poetry Workshop & Activity
  • Assignment: Love Letter to a Speculative Liberatory Learning Environment in the form of a Folder Poem

 

Week 2 ◌ 2/9

  • Folder Poem Sketch Sharing
  • Weekly DLL Presentation from Daedalus Li
  • Folder Poetry in Class Workshop
  • Codes Words Spells Workshop
    • Variables + Functions in Python
    • Introductiin to natural language processing
  • Assignment: Passing Notes

 

Week 3 ◌ 2/23

  • Passing Notes Sharing
  • Folder Poetry & Codes Words Spells Lecture
  • Hand Coding Round Robin Video lecture from Emma Rae Bruml
  • The Internet is a Folder Poem Workshop
  • Assignment: Codes Words Spells

 

Week 4 ◌ 3/9

  • Codes Words Spells Sharing
  • Special Guest
  • Final Project Discussion

 

Week 5 ◌ 4/6

  • Feedback on your projects
  • Presentation Presentation

 

Week 6 ◌ 4/20

  • Presentations
  • Closing Ritual

 

Weekly Presentations

  • Each week a couple students will present for 5-10 minutes each on a Digital Love Language they are familiar with or interested. This presentation should be well researched and can be performative and interactive. 
  • Examples of Digital Love Languages. You may choose from here or elsewhere. 

 

Grading

Participants will be evaluated on the quality of the culminating project and the assignments that lead up
to it, as well as on the critical feedback they offer in class and on their engagement with the various
readings, screenings and other exercises that are offered.

Participation

It’s important that you participate in class discussions and give thoughtful feedback to your classmates when they show their work and share their ideas. We all come from different perspectives and orientations, there is so much we can all learn from each other if we are open to sharing. Your ideas developed from your unique lived experiences are a gift.

Homework

Every week you will be asked to respond to the readings and discussions from class. The last 3 weeks will be focused towards developing a final project. We will turn in homework using a google form before class starts. If you turn in your homework before midnight on Wednesday, I will be better able to provide you feedback.

Statement of Academic Integrity

Plagiarism is presenting someone else’s work as though it were your own. More specifically, plagiarism is to present as your own: A sequence of words quoted without quotation marks from another writer or a paraphrased passage from another writer’s work or facts, ideas or images composed by someone else.

Statement on Accessibility

Please let me know how I can make this class more accessible for you in any way. Academic accommodations are available for students with documented disabilities. Please contact the Moses Center for Students with Disabilities at 212 998-4980 for further information.

Statement on Counseling and Wellness

Your health and safety are a priority. If you experience any health or mental health issues during this course, we encourage you to utilize the support services of the university or elsewhere. Please let me know if you need help connecting to these resources.