COVID has taken our reliance on software to the next level. We now rely on software for managing our days from the moment we wake up until we go to sleep. Software predicts the future based on fixed patterns from the past. It produces procedures instead of experiences and solutions instead of care. On the other hand, fortune-telling is an ancient language of change. It elucidates, unlearns, and reworks patterns. How can the art of fortune-telling guide us to rethink software as systems of healing?

Using different cultures’ patterns surrounding fortune-telling as a source, we will collectively determine patterns for our own fortune-telling Instagram filter in Part One. Then join us for Part Two when we take our patterns and code our own Instagram filter using Spark AR.

Date: June 8, 2021. 7PM.

Formate: Online lecture via Zoom.

Audience: Open to all who are interested in critical software culture. No prior software design or development experience is needed.

Materials: Participants should have a writing utensil, paper, and a personal computer with access to the internet.

This program is supported in part by public funds from the Brooklyn Arts Council, and Pioneer Works, Center For Art and Innovation.

COVID has taken our reliance on software to the next level. We now rely on software for managing our days from the moment we wake up until we go to sleep. Software predicts the future based on fixed patterns from the past. It produces procedures instead of experiences and solutions instead of care. On the other hand, fortune-telling is an ancient language of change. It elucidates, unlearns, and reworks patterns. How can the art of fortune-telling guide us to rethink software as systems of healing?

Using different cultures’ patterns surrounding fortune-telling as a source, we will collectively determine patterns for our own fortune-telling Instagram filter in Part One. Then join us for Part Two when we take our patterns and code our own Instagram filter using Spark AR.

Date: July 1, 2021. 7PM.

Formate: Online lecture via Zoom.

Audience: Open to all who are interested in critical software culture. No prior software design or development experience is needed.

Materials: Participants should have a writing utensil, paper, and a personal computer with access to the internet.

RYAN KUO lives and works in New York City. His works are process-based and diagrammatic and often invoke a person or people arguing. This is not to state an argument about a thing, but to be caught in a state of argument. He utilizes video games, productivity software, web design, motion graphics, and sampling to produce circuitous and unresolved movements that track the passage of objects through white escape routes.
His recent projects aim to crystallize his position as a hateful little thing whose body fills up white space out of both resentment and necessity. These include an AI conversational agent that embodies the blind “faith” that underpins both white supremacy and miserable white liberalism and casts doubt on nonbelievers, and an artist’s book about aspirational workflows, File: A User’s Manual, modeled after software guides for power users.
His 2018 solo commission at bitforms gallery, The Pointer, addressed whiteness as “an unremitting affective failure that erases bodies, including its own, in its search for a neutral point of origin,” and doubled as an admission of his own familiarity with the elaborate contortions needed to assimilate into whiteness.

Website:

https://rkuo.net/

Suggested Reading:

https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/ryan-kuo-interview/

https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/ryan-kuo-race-technology-wendy-chun-63653/