Based on the belief that understanding technology equals the power to determine our future, Power Up is an opportunity to explore what it means to live online while simultaneously honing community, creativity, and literacy.
The world is increasingly digital. How can we start to hack our everyday digital tools to build new worlds, become critical thinkers, and collaborate with peers across the world?
Power Up, presented by POWRPLNT, in collaboration with Feminist AI, ESS, The Coding Train, and The Processing Foundation and hosted by Olivia McKayla Ross is a festival of artist-led engagement with technology. This ✨FREE ✨ weekend of programming will include courses that use data as design material, turn your IOS device into a recording studio, and more!
Students will be introduced to art and technology spaces across the US, explore creative code, and become part of the growing community of young people who want to use technology to build a better world.
This program was made possible with support from Salome Asega, Ruby Lerner, Fei Liu, Eyebeam and The Processing Foundation.
How will classes be conducted?
Classes will be conducted online via Zoom, as well as other platforms varying by course. Students will meet on Saturday, October 17th and Sunday, October 18th from 12pm-6pm EST.
Eligible students must:
• Be between the ages of 16 and 22
• Demonstrate an interest in art, technology, and culture
• Have a computer (Mac 10.12 or later, Windows 8.1 or later, or Linux) and an internet connection
Accessibility
ASL and CART will be provided.
REGISTER TODAY!
For questions, please contact digital@powrplnt.org
Program Details Below
More program information will be announced soon!
Manifesting in/with code: A Vision-Boarding Experience
How can we utilize technology to help us manifest a goal? What creative tools can we use to conjure up a vision? In this session, participants will learn creative coding basics using JavaScript fundamentals to create digital vision boards.
Essential Questions
How might we better understand programming basics using creative code?
In what ways might programming support me in visualizing and actualizing my dreams and goals?
What tools are available and accessible to us that can guide our understanding of programming?
How might the projects we create uplift and highlight the community I am part of?
Song Space: Using coding, sound, and design to create interactive environments for the web
Jamie González + p5.js
In this workshop we will be using p5.js, a javascript library/language, to explore music and design so that students have a better understanding of how multi-media practices can invoke design principles, as well as larger themes affecting senses of identity and community.
Essential Questions?
How can we express ourselves with creative coding?
What can creative coding provide for those who interact with it?
What responsibilities come with environment building?
How can music be used to express identity and our communities?
Webs of Care: Building Worlds of Care
Ingrid Raphael
POWRPLNT
Join us as we will be thinking about, and partaking in acts of, care by imagining and envisioning worlds of care that are reciprocal, collaborative, and restorative. Via online tools and artmaking, we’ll collaboratively create a digital compilation: with your individual visualization and reflections of care.
Essential Questions
How are needs, care, and time related?
What physical + online worlds of care can we build?
How do we fit in all of it?
How can we show up safely, in support of, and accounting to, and what are those acts of care?
iOS Audio Creativity
In this workshop we will be using iOS app Loopy HD to explore recording sounds creatively so that you have a better understanding of how to create an audio collage or song from minimal software and hardware.
Essential Questions
How can we tell stories creatively with audio?
How can we maximize an app to reap the benefits of more expensive audio equipment?
How might we use our phones/tablets to build a mobile recording studio?
Where do we start and where do we finish; what is a circle?
Processing The Game of Life
Hailey Mah, Sarah Cheung, Nicci Yin, Stephanie Marie Cedeño (with support from Christine Meinders)
Conway’s Game of Life is a logic game represented through an animation of moving “cells” on a grid. In this beginner-friendly workshop, participants will be introduced to the Game of Life as an entry point for discussing how inequality can affect social outcomes. Participants will be given an animation of the Game of Life implemented as a Processing sketch, and will create new social and cultural rules for the game that result in new animated patterns, framing this research with the social design tool poieto. Through these exercises, participants will gain a critical understanding of the Game of Life and learn how to manipulate video animations with Processing.
Essential Questions
How are our own real-life social conditions informed by those of our neighbours?
How can data be used as a design material?
How can differences in our data change our understanding of an experience?
Passing Notes: How to Flirt (Safely) in Digital Space
Amber Officer-Narvasa and Janine Ko
Supported by Soft Surplus
Join us for a discussion and workshop about intimacy, relationship-building, and pleasure on digital platforms. We’ll build skills for navigating privacy and consent in the text messages, DMs, snaps, and images we share with each other online. Drawing on our collective experiences with intimacy on the internet, we will work together to vision and design the safe, playful, digital platforms of our dreams.
Essential Questions
What does consent and pleasure look like in digital spaces?
How can we learn to navigate risk and privacy while relating with each other on platforms that collect our data?
How can we imagine and design liberatory, playful, and pleasurable messaging platforms that we would want to use?
How can we use the framework of speculative design to imagine and build more loving ways of communicating?