Index Issue Six

Editorial Issue Editorial Special Section: Computing the Corporeal Edited by Nicolas Salazar Sutil and Scott delaHunta Nicolas Salazar Sutil, Section Editorial: Human Movement as Critical Creativity: Basic Questions for Movement Computing Articles John Stell, Mereotopology and Computational Representations of the Body Stamatia Portanova, Putting Identity on Hold: Motion Capture and the Mystery of the Disappearing …

Scenario Theory – Review of Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: on Software and Sovereignty

An ambitious author in the field of new media has to confront the shelf-life problem, the possibility, if not probability, that their theoretical insights might be overlooked as the currency of their objects, almost inevitably, expire. One way to address this problem is to consider how old mythic past futures feed into the present, figured …

Envisioning a Technological Humanism – A Review of Yuk Hui’s, On the Existence of Digital Objects

It is difficult to imagine Yuk Hui’s On the Existence of Digital Objects being written by another author. This is not because the subject matter or questions asked are not of interest to many in the field of digital and media theory, far from it. It is rather that it is hard to identify another …

geographies of (con)text: language and structure in a digital age

Introduction What happens when words become data? Now that almost all language is in some way digitised, ‘data-ised’ and submitted to computation, the ownership, control and organisation of linguistic and other data can have a profound, yet not always intentional or indeed predictable, impact on social, cultural and political discourse, and on personal freedoms and …

Section Editorial: Human Movement as Critical Creativity: Basic Questions for Movement Computing

How is movement? Human movement is a medium of great complexity. Movement mediates a great number of interactional processes, including human and machine communication, transmission and knowledge formation. At the same time, movement can be an embodied medium involved with the expression and processing of thought. Before I move any further, the obvious question is: …

Editorial, Issue Six

Welcome to issue six of Computational Culture. We offer this issue at what is in some ways a particularly lively moment. The discussion of certain large scale software systems and the effects, in political and psycho-social terms, of the detail and scale of their design has become a matter for public concern. Facebook, Twitter and …

Mereotopology and Computational Representations of the Body

Introduction Husserl scholar Donn Welton asks 1 “how does one understand the relationship between a natural scientific description of the body and a phenomenological one?” In this essay I take this question in a computational context. This means asking for an understanding of the relationship between computational descriptions of the body from the natural sciences …

Putting Identity on Hold: Motion Capture and the Mystery of the Disappearing Blackness*

A happy penguin can be a good tap dancer, there is no doubt. Especially if the penguin is a 3D character moved by the steps of motion-captured African American tap dancer Savion Glover, in the Oscar-winning animation Happy Feet by director George Miller (2006). In fact, Mumble the penguin is not only an extremely talented …

Dance Becoming Data Part Two: Conversation Between Anton Koch and Scott delaHunta

September 2017 In early 2014, the first funded phase of Motion Bank came to a close with the publication of the so called on-line scores of the guest choreographers Deborah Hay, Jonathan Burrows/ Matteo Fargion, Thomas Hauert and Bebe Miller. Planning immediately commenced to continue the project, but with a more visible focus on creative …

Dance Becoming Data: Part One Software for Dancers

The starting point for this contribution to the special section of Computational Culture on Computing the Corporeal is a relatively small cluster of research projects starting in 2000, which explored various roles that software and software development might play in the context of contemporary dance creation and performance. The inaugural project for which four choreographers, …

Special Section Editorial: Toward a Geographical Software Studies

Introduction Geographic concepts have always been implicated in calls to study software as a political, cultural, or social phenomena, even if they have not always been named as such. “Software structures and makes possible much of the contemporary world” writes Matthew Fuller in the introduction to Software studies: a lexicon1—a succinct summary of the central …

Welcome to the Polygon: Contested Digital Neighborhoods and Spatialized Segregation on Nextdoor

Introduction Common-sense ideas about where a city’s neighborhoods begin and end rarely coincide entirely with the discrete and unyielding borders plotted on maps or entered into digital data structures. While paper maps depicting urban neighborhoods changed only incrementally and had a limited range of uses (navigation, tourism, government services), today neighborhood boundaries and names propagate …

Out of Bounds: Language limits, language planning, and the definition of distance in the new spaces of linguistic capitalism

Software challenges us to re-inscribe what we comprehend as inscription. And, most importantly, software challenges us to understand new forms of technological politics and new practices of political invention, legibility and intervention that we are only just beginning to comprehend as political at all … These orderings – written down as software – are becoming …

habit + crisis = update, somehow. A review of Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

In the first few pages of Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s Updating to Remain the Same, Chun evokes Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011), particularly Berlant’s articulation of everyday political ways of being as a kind of “impasse”. For Chun, as for Berlant, the present is marked by the becoming ordinary of crisis, making for an “affectively …

“Speculative Environmentality”, review of Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet

A certain wonder at human attempts in the last century to explore outer space (Sputnik; Armstrong’s landing on the moon) might well be part of your historical or long term memory, and perhaps this wonder has been reawakened by the recent arrival on Earth of the visual data from the New Horizons NASA spacecraft that …

Review of Archaeology of Algorithmic Artefacts, by David Link

In a world of superabundant information and advanced technology it can be jarring to remember how much knowledge has been and is forever being lost. We suppose that the historical record is accumulating around us like Wikipedia or the Web itself, and then we realize its closer resemblance to Snapchat. The history of technology in …

Poisoned Fruit: Booby-Trapped “Privacy Guides” as State-Sponsored Propaganda — A Case Study of Obfuscation

Our starting point is an attempt at explicating a seemingly innocuous, irrelevant, or even perhaps just trivially banal question: why does a book about obfuscation, which co-authors Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum describe as being a mere tool 1, albeit one “particularly well suited to the category of people without access to other modes of …

Ctrl Episteme – a review of ‘Control: Digitality as a Cultural Logic’ by Seb Franklin

Computers (or the Internet) did not inaugurate, what Deleuze called, ‘control societies’1. Most of the efforts to theorize society following the advent and proliferation of computers have nonetheless, focused on the socio-economic changes associated with new technologies. Following Deleuze, the desire and frequency for periodization, to demarcate radical differences between the past and the present, …

The Uses and Users of Social Media Data Mining. A review of Post, Mine, Repeat. Social Media Data Mining Becomes Ordinary by Helen Kennedy

With Post, Mine, Repeat (2016), Helen Kennedy offers a critical contribution to public debates about datafication, the uses and ethics of social media data mining and a report on a number of research projects that she has conducted with colleagues over the last years. The core question of the book is how is social media …