HOW TO MAKE THE COOLEST SELFIES IN YOUR FRIEND GROUP: TEENAGE GIRL PRAXIS IN MANIFESTING YOUR ONLINE FANTASIES WITH JAVASCRIPT

1–3PM

Unlike the rest of the S4AD program, this workshop has limited registration. Please register for this workshop here.

In light of social distancing, we’re seeking the World Wide Web for connection, validation, and pleasure more than ever before. How can we begin to reclaim our cyberspaces as joyful spaces? How do we begin to cultivate freedom in a moment where our physical self is becoming more and more entangled with our electronic image—our data bodies, the architecture of surveillance?

In a study conducted by Dr. Caputo of the University of Urbino, participants were asked to stare into a mirror in dim lighting for ten minutes. Results demonstrated that 66% of participants experienced huge deformations of their own face, 28% saw an unknown person, and 48% saw fantastical and monstrous beings. In this workshop, we will be creating our own “software mirrors” using JavaScript, the language of the web—re-introducing ourselves to our own faces and taking charge of how we look online. Then we’ll take some mirror selfies.

This workshop is created for beginners with some basic familiarity with programming, but will re-introduce the fundamentals in detail, as well as how to work with pixels and RGB colorspace, basic interactivity, Perlin noise and randomness. All examples and projects will be created with p5.js, a free, open-source, beginner-friendly JavaScript coding environment created for visual artists. Learn more about p5.js at https://p5js.org/

Olivia McKayla Ross (August 28, 2001–forever) is a Caribbean American video artist, programmer, and poet from Queens, New York City. Her work is inspired by the relationship between electronic video and vanity—by deep fantasy, Instagram filters, glamour magic, mirrors, and the fantasies and anxieties of video transmission: immersion, absorption, surveillance, and control. How are faith and trust distributed between users and programmer? How is faith monopolized, accumulated, recycled, exchanged, embodied, assigned, and weaponized between people, systems, ideals, and materials? Emboldened by her perspective as a “digital native,” she hopes her work will encourage her fellow teens to nurture a critical relationship with technology. She is a recent alum of the School for Poetic Computation and has taught at Black Girls Code, BUFU, and POWRPLNT. You can connect with her at cyber.doula on Instagram.