This post contains two letters, the first one dated April 18th, 2021 is a letter to my community and collaborators, the second one dated April 9th, 2021 is a personal letter to my colleagues at the School for Poetic Computation.
To my community
Since the mid-2000s, I have taught in universities, art museums, and non-profit organizations. …
Keynote: Interweaving Poetic Code
New York- and Seoul-based artist and educator Taeyoon Choi and New York-based professor of media studies Alexander R. Galloway join to consider the common underpinnings of textile and code, including those of duality and opposition, from humans and machines to production and philosophy. How may these considerations supersede or sustain such binarisms? What alternative relations are possible? The conversation will be moderated by Amy K.S. Chan, Hong Kong-based professor and scholar researching on the intersections of technoscience and philosophy, as well as gender and literary studies.
This Keynote is part of Poetic Emergences…
Like many others, I’m grieving for the eight people in Atlanta who lost their lives on March 16, 2021. I am hopeless and fatigued reading about the murder. I feel deeply uncomfortable by the police and the media amplifying the narrative of “trying to eliminate the temptation” by murdering innocent women. Wheater or not the massage parlors provided sexual service is beside the point*. There was a murder of innocent people by a white man, and his behavior is justified as having a “bad day”. This narrative reproduces racism and sexism against Asian people, especially women in the service industry.
…
This letter was written collectively by SFPC administrators between October 2020 and February 2021. We initially planned to publish the letter from SFPC’s official communication channel. Considering changes in the organization, I am publishing the latest version from my personal account.
Open letter to SFPC community
In the fall of 2020, the School for Poetic Computation made a decision to pause its public programming. During the resurgence of ongoing protests influenced by the police murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Nina Pop, and many others, Black SFPC students and teachers, and their allies spoke up about…
Between 2014 and 2017, I noticed the atrocities resurfacing in my daily life in the US. This period was a waking moment for me and many others to realize the social change towards equality and freedom (which I believed was happening) has not really happened, at least not evenly. I didn’t think ‘activism’ was the right direction. My limited participation in the activism of my generation: anti-war protests in the early 2000s, the Occupy movement in the 2010s, were unsustainable. I was inspired by Astra Taylor’s prompt to organize “difference between activism and organising, between self-expression and movement-building.” It was…
This is a draft for an illustrated essay. I welcome your comments and criticism studio@taeyoonchoi.com
A Person of Color, for example, East Asians, generally hold racial privilege over Black people in America; an East Asian youth is less likely to experience stop-and-frisk on their way to school compared to Black youth. The same person may experience discrimination at a workplace, but they are less likely to be tokenized in the way a Black colleague may feel through their career. The East Asian person may live through a series of microaggressions and may feel difficult to integrate into society as an…
Dear friends
I’m moving out of NYC at the end of this month after twelve years of incredible friendship and collaboration. I’m moving to South Korea to be closer to my family and live a more sustainable life. I’m very sad to be far away from my friends, colleagues, and chosen family here. I don’t know if this will be a permanent move but I feel this is the right thing to do for now. Here’s my love letter to my friends and community in NYC.
Why am I moving out of NYC? Living here was never financially, emotionally, environmentally…
Hi! My name is Taeyoon. I’m an artist and teacher who works at the School for Poetic Computation in New York City. I’ve been making a series of ‘practical guide to everything’ on my Instagram. I’m posting this series on Medium because it needs a bit more text and links.
To start, here’s a bit of context in which I’m reading and writing this guide.
I’m sitting in a small room in Yamaguchi, a beautiful, bucolic town in the deep mountains of Japan right now. I’m about to start facilitating and teaching in School for Poetic Computation’s week-long immersive with 20 students from Japan and around the world. SFPC Summer 2019 in Yamaguchi program details and curriculum. The peace I feel in this town is at odds with what I read on the news about the region. I’ve been in conversation with my Japanese collaborators about the escalating political disputes between Japan and Korea, Aichi Triennale and protests in Hong Kong. …
There is a lot going on in my geographical, cultural and professional communities at the moment. I live and work in the United States, most recently splitting time between New York and Detroit. I identify both as a Korean and an American who has family and cultural ties to South Korea. I’m working with arts organizations in Japan and Hong Kong at the moment. The disputes between Korea and Japan, Hong Kong and China, the US and the region are a few of concerning issues I face with my friends and colleagues on a daily basis. I’ve been fortunate to…
Taeyoon Choi
immigrant. art. tech. learning. accessibility. inclusion. Co-founder @sfpc. fellow @datasociety. artist http://taeyoonchoi.com
