Taking Care: Code and Control in a Technological Future

Taeyoon Choi is an artist, organizer, teacher and cofounder of the School for Poetic Computation, an artist-run school in New York City with a motto of “More Poetry, Less Demo.”

In his Distinguished Lecture “Taking Care: Code and Control in a Technological Future”, Choi considers what care means for a technologically-oriented future. Choi will first share from his experiences of over seven years of teaching and co-organizing the School for Poetic Computation. In 2019, the School initiated satellite programs in Detroit, USA and Yamaguchi, Japan. Choi will discuss the lessons he learned working in and with different cultural and geographical contexts, including a proposal for distributed, peer-to-peer learning. In the second half of the lecture, Choi will lead the audience in a participatory activity based on the Distributed Web of Care, an art project and initiative to “code-to-care” and “code carefully”. This project imagines the future of the internet from a perspective of care, focusing on personhood in relation to accessibility, identity, and the environment, with the intention of creating a distributed future that is built with trust and care, where diverse communities are prioritized and supported.