Sex Education: Refusing Defaults, Inviting Revelations
School for Poetic Computation
Géza, 306 Maujer
Building on the (un)learnings from SFPC: Sex Ed, a two-week intensive workshop series organized by School for Poetic Computation co-directors Melanie Hoff, Neta Bomani and Zainab Aliyu, this afternoon of workshops, talks, and activations invites visitors to re-imagine sex education as a pleasure and queer-centered pedagogical experiment, intentionally departing from the harmful social programming of traditional educational environments.
Hosted by SFPC: Sex Ed co-organizers Melanie Hoff and Neta Bomani in collaboration with select guest teachers and participants, this event offers a safer platonic space in which to collectively reflect on issues related to sexuality, from consent and bodily autonomy to gestational labor and sex work, and how a sex education based on the principles of communal care can inform broader organizing practices behind liberation movement building.
Sex Education: Refusing Defaults, Inviting Revelations is organized in the framework of SIREN (some poetics), a group exhibition and a poetics devoted to technologies of myth and mouth, earth and alarm, gender and language.
Please note that this event includes references to nudity and explicit content of a sexual nature.
Image: You Define Power with Venus Cuffs by Neta Bomani.
Neta Bomani is a learner and educator who is interested in understanding the practice of reading and parsing information as a collaborative process between human and non-human computers. Neta’s work combines social practices, workshops, archives, oral histories, computation, printmaking, zines, and publishing, to create artifacts that engage abolitionist, black feminist, and do-it-yourself philosophies. Neta is one of seven co-directors at the School for Poetic Computation, and one of two co-directors at Sojourners for Justice Press, an imprint of Haymarket Books.
Venus Cuffs is an award winning Nightlife Producer, BDSM Educator, and former Dominatrix. This “Nightlife Mogul” (Paper Magazine) has taken nightlife spaces and transformed them in NYC. Featured in Paper Magazine, Them, Daily Mail, + more.
Melanie Hoff is an artist, educator, and organizer who studies the role that technology plays in social organization and in reinforcing hegemonic structures. As co-director of the School for Poetic Computation, Hex House, and the Cybernetics Library, Melanie strives to cultivate spaces of learning and feeling that encourage honesty and permit people to overcome divisions created by systems of gender, racialization, and class and by the trauma that these systems inscribe upon our bodies.
Karen Tian is a vision scientist and visual artist who studies the neural underpinnings of our perceptual experience. She is a PhD candidate in Cognitive Neuroscience at Boston University and holds a BS in Psychology from Yale.
Daemonum X is a femme leatherdyke and lifestyle Dominant. She is a polyamory and BDSM coach offering strategies for successful relationships. She is the founder and Editrix of FIST, an anthology zine for leatherdykes, as well as Linked, A Polyamory Zine. More of her words on BDSM and power exchange can be found in Them, Autostraddle, and her newsletter. Daemonum X lives in Brooklyn with her two dogs.
The School for Poetic Computation is an experimental school in New York that supports interdisciplinary study in art, code, hardware and critical theory. It is a place for unlearning and learning. It was founded in 2013.
SFPC’s programs challenge the capitalistic, heteronormative and patriarchal canon of social and computer sciences. SFPC attracts self-motivated creative thinkers and radical teachers. All participants are treated as collaborators and we formally encourage the power of learners to determine their experience & education. The unique culture of our institution is one based on communal care and solidarity across social differences. This pedagogical space framed in intimacy ideally allows for participants that are LGBTQIA+, Black, Indigenous, and/or Disabled to feel empowered that their ideas are important, necessary and central.
