The Origin of the Word: Language, Lineage, Lovers and Logins - an artist talk with Melanie Hoff

The Origin of the Word: Language, Lineage, Lovers and Logins - an artist talk with Melanie Hoff
Name On Machinic Language - an artist talk with Melanie Hoff
Location H&D studio NDSM-plein 127
Date 2026/02/07
Time 17:00
PeopleOrganisations Melanie Hoff
Type Meetup
Web Yes
Print No

Hackers & Designers is very excited to welcome artist, organizer, and technologist Melanie Hoff in Amsterdam.

Join us on February 7th afternoon for a talk and hang out at our studio!

This artist talk treats language as both body and interface: a lived system of sensation, classification, and access. Moving between code, performance, and participation, Melanie Hoff shares works that remake machinic language as an embodied, communal practice, from Dance Poem Revolution (poems generated through movement) to Consensual Hacking (protocols of permission and pleasure), alongside Partisan Thesaurus, Recursynonym, and Folder Poetry. Together these projects ask how machinic language systems do not just describe the world; they help produce it, granting lineage, mapping desire, and regulating legibility. The talk considers ways to rewrite the languages that write us.

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Melanie Hoff is an artist, organizer, and technologist working within spaces of hacking and performance. Their work cultivates spaces of learning and collective reflection grounded in poetry and reconciliation for how we choose to live and what choices have been made for us. At the core of their practice is an interrogation of intersecting systems of classification and power and a dedication to acts of repair and reimagining. 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 artist's space they co-founded in Brooklyn, and formerly co-directed the School for Poetic Computation where they can often be found teaching from the edges of their research and experimentation.

https://www.melaniehoff.com/