about! ()

“The computer arrived just in time to save — and save very nearly intact, indeed, to entrench and stabilize — social and political structures that otherwise might have been either radically renovated or allowed to totter under the demands that were sure to be made on them. The computer, then, was used to conserve America’s social and political institutions. It buttressed them and immunized them against enormous pressures for change.”

—Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (1976)

“I have described myself as an educational utopian because I believe that certain uses of very powerful computational technology and computational ideas can provide children with new possibilities for learning, thinking, and growing emotionally as well as cognitively.”

—Seymour Papert, Mindstorms (1980)

Computer Class is a one-week seminar-style institute for graduate students and practitioners in artistic, humanistic, and social-scientific fields who are interested in coding, computer history, and critical use of technology. Computer Class is organized around the work of, and debate between, Seymour Papert and Joseph Weizenbaum, both computer scientists at MIT. Papert was a major figure in the field of education and technology, developing the LOGO programming environment starting in the 1960s. Weizenbaum was a major figure in artificial intelligence research in the 1960s.

At Computer Class, we play, dream, doodle, futz, make, break, and debug computer programs. We draw pictures with code. We make our own chatbots. We read theory and philosophy and psychoanalysis. We work with primary documents from the history of computing. We learn new ways of getting on with these strange machines we call computers.

During the week, students discuss primary documents from the history of computing, learn to code using our Ludus programming language, and make their own creative coding projects. Developed by media theorist Prof. Scott Richmond and media artist Matt Nish-Lapidus, Computer Class is a critical, historical, aesthetic, and playful exploration of some of the core concepts of computing and computer culture.

Meet Scott and Matt

> Scott C. Richmond is director of the Centre for Culture and Technology and associate professor of cinema and digital media at the University of Toronto. Their work lies at the intersection of the history of computing, film and media theory, queer and affect theory, and phenomenological philosophy. They are the author of two books, Cinema's Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating (Minnesota, 2016) and Find Each Other: Networks, Affects, and Other Queer Encounters (Duke, under contract). They lead the SSHRC-funded Thinking with Computers project at the University of Toronto. For more see https://scottrichmond.me.

> Matt Nish-Lapidus’ varied practice probes the myth that computers should be useful rather than beautiful through examining contemporary technoculture and its histories, politics, and impacts. His work results in diverse outputs including publications, recordings, installations, performances, software, and objects. Matt has performed and exhibited with ACUD Macht Neu, Electric Eclectics, MOCA (Toronto), InterAccess, ZKM, and more, including many DIY community spaces. You can find Matt online and away-from-keyboard under various aliases and collaborations including emenel and New Tendencies. For more see https://emenel.ca.