I’m teaching a class at UC Santa Cruz this summer — CMPM 180: Moving Text — and I’m looking for students. If you’re at UCSC and you like the idea of making words do strange things on screens, come take it.

It’s a studio class. We’ll write code (mostly P5 and TouchDesigner, but you can use whatever you want) and we’ll read some things — new media theory, concrete poetry, cut-ups, Fluxus scores, title sequences, kinetic poetry, language games. Projects build week by week: a materiality piece, a moving text piece, an NLP piece, an installation, then a final.

A few things I want to say up front:

Grading is contract-based — I care about labor, attendance, and engagement, not how polished or technically impressive your code is.

I’m asking you not to use AI to write your code. The point is to actually learn things and make stuff with your own hands. We’ll talk about why.

You don’t need to know how to program already. We start from hello world.

Summer Session 2, 2026. Cowell Acad 223. Tu/Th. Email me at alexcwd@ucsc.edu with questions.