Melanie Hoff is an artist, educator, technologist, and organizer working within spaces of hacking and performance. Their work cultivates spaces of learning and collective reflection grounded in honesty, poetry, and reconciliation for how we choose to live and what choices have been made for us. Melanie teaches about art, sex, technology, design, and social cybernetics at Harvard, NYU, and Yale. Their work has been exhibited at the New Museum, Queens Museum, Bronx Museum, and elsewhere. They co-direct Hex House, an art space they co-founded in Brooklyn, and formerly co-directed the School for Poetic Computation where they often can be found teaching material they’re endlessly inspired by.
“At CultureHub, I will deepen my work on Dance Poem Revolution, an interactive installation where participants generate poems through movement. Using a custom-built system inspired by and reimagined from the popular game Dance Dance Revolution. The piece generates writing sourced from revolutionary texts, songs, and local histories in response to players’ steps. The project explores how critical theory can be part of an embodied, poetic, joyful, and communal storytelling. Materials generated through workshops will feed back into the game, adding original text and video sources so that the game is shaped by each place it is installed and those who engage with it.”