Code Recipes Spells: Feminist computational histories, avant-garde, and creative coding in the 21st-c
April 20th, 2022
4:00 – 5:00 p.m. EST
Professor Margaretha Haughwout presents her pedagogical approach to teaching Digital Studio at Colgate, drawing from feminist computational histories that ground code and computation in labs, and in kitchens, also making important links to a range of 20th-century avant-garde art practices largely rooted in concept, recipe, instruction, structure, algorithm. In this class, art projects are generative, procedural, and dynamic. Students from Digital Studio will also present current work in a salon-style setting.
Margaretha Haughwout collaborates with humans, and the more-than-human, across technologies and ecologies, to tear at the fabric of capitalist modernity and to gesture to possible worlds — worlds that generate abundance, presence and relationship. These possible worlds inspire a radical imagination that counters proprietary regimes, colonial temporalities, and capitalist forms of labor. Her work manifests as speculative fabulation, intervention, participatory event, walking tour, experimental pedagogy, installation, and biological processes.
Haughwout’s active collaborations include the Coven Intelligence Program, with efrén cruz cortés and Suzanne Husky, a coven that uncovers revolutionary ecologies between witches, plants and machines; the Guerrilla Grafters, with Ian Pollock and Tara Hui: who graft fruit bearing branches onto non-fruit bearing, ornamental street trees in the urban environment; Ruderal Witchcraft with Oliver Kellhammer: considering of set of practices specific to planetary, weedy natures that work their way at edges and interstices of public and private property, and which are entangled with a range of other human and non-human outcasts of capitalist modernity; and the Coastal Reading Group with Bibi Calderaro: consisting of artists from different coasts who trouble the subjects of wilderness, speciation, humanness and ways of knowing through diverse engagements with nonhumans. She created and maintains the Food Forest Studio in Central New York, and hosts the annual Grafters X Change with Marisa Prefer, for bioregional eco-artists and fruit tree enthusiasts to continue the work toward abundant Food Forest Futures.
Haughwout has been awarded numerous grants for community based art works, and her personal and collaborative artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Most recently Haughwout’s collaborative work was featured at The Pixelache Festival in Helsinki, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Fransico, Stadwerkstatt in Linz Austria, at the Usdan Gallery at Bennington College, and as a part of SLSA’s Experimental Engagements exhibition at UC California Irvine. Haughwout received her MFA from the University of California Santa Cruz, her Permaculture Design Certificate from the Urban Permaculture Institute, has studied with numerous herbalists including Matthew Wood, holding a certificate from the California School of Herbal Studies. In her classes as Assistant Professor of Digital Studio at Colgate University (on Oneida territory and within the Susquehannah River Watershed), she draws connections to legacies in conceptual art, new media art, and collaboration, in order to foster distributed, artistic approaches to the interconnected issues of our time/s.
