Tuesday, April 23, 2024, 6–8pm
Free or suggested donation
Open to ages 16+.
Bring your own laptops or computational device. Students will need a basic text editor installed. Details will be given in registration email.

Workspace Resident Everest Pipkin will lead a workshop on the history, politics and computational basics of text-based character encoding. Discussions will cover morse code, ASCII, Unicode (including emoji), and alternative text encoding schemes, as well as their social, ethical, and emotional stories.  The second part of the workshop will be a laptops-open play along exploration through software demos and creative exercises. What “is” a character on a computer? How can we play around with the foundational building blocks of digital materials in ways that lets us understand files as materials? How can we think about language as a type of logical encoding that makes computers work?

Biography of the artist

Everest Pipkin is a game developer, writer, and artist from central Texas who lives and works on a sheep farm in southern New Mexico. Their work both in the studio and in the garden follows themes of ecology, tool making, and collective care during collapse. They hold a BFA from University of Texas at Austin, an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and have shown and spoken at The Design Museum of London, The Texas Biennial, The XXI Triennale of Milan, The Photographers Gallery of London, Center for Land Use Interpretation, and other spaces. When not at the computer in the heat of the day, you can find them in the hills spending time with their neighbors— both human and non-human.

Workspace Residency is generously supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Image description: An image from The Barnacle Goose Experiment (2022) by Everest Pipkin. An old-school text-based interface is open, with various lists of items, verbs, experiments, locations and actions available to you, like “cry” or “eat [honey]”. Each one is a link.