Electronic Graffiti & Hip Hop Pedagogy: The Maker’s Cypher
The cypher is an important element of hip-hop culture, providing a structure for sharing knowledge and information only readily understood by those actively engaged in it. The cypher is a place for people to demonstrate and practice their skills, as well as a place to enact self-definition and theorize one’s own existence in the presence of community. I’m only just realizing just how important this cultural design has been in my quest to create the ultimate (STEAM) learning lab.
SAIC had given me permission to do my independent study in Queens, NY. I was asked to build a computer lab at South Jamaica Houses, commonly referred to as the “40 Projects” and teach computer graphics to local youth, including elementary level (see top image) and middle school kids. After classes, some of the older kids would stick around and we listened to rap music or rapped along to our favorite songs.
This early experience followed me to Boston where, nearly two decades later, I built a STEAM Lab at Boston Arts Academy. On Wednesdays, the Freestyle Rap Club met and performed in the Lab (see above). BAA students had regular access to materials such as Electric Paint, a viscous carbon-based substance that replaces electrical wire in physical computing projects and Touch Boards with touch sensors to make projects interactive.
The year 2015 brought with it two weeks worth of snow days at home and I experimented with video project mapping and connecting devices such as Arduinos to trigger/map videos using devices called actuators (servos) that cause things to move. I realized that the Touch Board was an Arduino and attempted to program it to work with the video projection tool. I emailed the company and we met via Skype to troubleshoot the problem.
What came out of this exchange was a modified Arduino program that became a MIDI object, which is a piece of code that controls input/output on an interface (see above). The code turned the Touch Board into a MIDI interface and, using Electric Paint, anything connected to the Board became a MIDI instrument. Around this time Matt Johnson of Bare Conductive (who makes the Touch Boards) visited the STEAM Lab as did Hank Shocklee, one of the founders of rap group Public Enemy. Both were in the Lab during one of the freestyle rap cyphers.
This was five years ago and the space that was once the STEAM Lab was torn down with the rest of the school to make a new one (in progress). I was able to reflect on the experience in my upcoming book, as part of a much longer journey that began in South Jamaica Homes where I rapped along with students in a computer lab… and likely before that to when I first heard rap music on the radio as a kid. It’s hip hop culture as ontology.
Hip hop becomes an ontology through what we know (epistemology) and this can impact how we teach or pedagogy. In relation to computer science, ontology refers to computer-based resources that represent agreed domain semantics. In my case, the domain semantics emerges as the cypher. Dancers, rappers, and other creative communities of practice use the cypher to set group protocols and interactions that include symbols, heroes, rituals and values from different cultural traditions.