a journal of software studies
One of the indubitable strengths of the “Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image” 1 is that it doesn’t offer an answer to what a meme is. In a way, it isn’t even interested in stabilising or fixing the understanding of memes: instead, many of the contributions assembled in it pull at, disorganise …
Continue reading “Review of ‘Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image’”
If you have been watching any of the various series recently produced for the Star Wars franchise, you may have noticed a curious kind of continuity editing: the screens that are used to target weapons and navigate outer space display computer graphics in the style of the 1970s. On these screens appear wireframes rather than …
Sondra Perry’s Typhoon coming on sits right at the middle, as well as on the front cover, of Seb Franklin’s recent book The Digitally Disposed. Perry’s artwork consists of a large projection of an animated fragment of J.M.W. Turner’s 1840’s Slave ship, a painting that depicts the infamous 1781 Zong massacre in which over 130 …
Datafication has been the hallmark of modern governance, all the way back to the definition of statistics as “science of data about the state” in mid-18th century Prussia. Creating reductionist regularity, abstracting from the infinite complexity of local, embodied experience, enabled a new scale and complexity by which the state could organize the life of …
1. Introduction Network science emerges as a term in the late nineteen-nineties and consists of a series of ‘content agnostic’ ways to analyse structures of various kinds as networks or graphs 1. It can be understood as a revival of the much older social network analysis through the influence of physics. 2 The kind of …
It has actually been two years since the last issue of Computational Culture was published. A combination of the pandemic and academic ‘restructuring’ at more than one institution resulted in a delay that seems characteristic of the times. More broadly, the increasing demands on researchers have meant that the normal process of peer review has …
‘Another Analytics is Possible’ says the sticker on my laptop, one of the more intriguing items included in the swag bag of a scholarly conference in London. As a slogan it’s not the most radical, provocative or even comprehensible at first glance. It might be a critique of existing computational analytics – a concern with …
The Software Studies series launched in 2009, under the guidance of editors Matthew Fuller, Lev Manovich, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. For over a decade, the series was dedicated to publishing the best new work that tracks how software is substantially integrated into the processes of contemporary culture and society through the scholarly modes of the humanities …
Welcome to the eighth issue of Computational Culture! This issue, like many other things, has been somewhat hindered by the global pandemic and the inspiration this gave to the latent restructuring ambitions of some university managers. Given that we are currently ‘living with’ rather than fully vaccinatable against either of these problems, we are delighted …
Introduction The once chaotic web of the 1990s has, since 2000, increasingly been converted into centralized platforms that either serve as gated communities with networks of ‘friends’ or commercial services that serve music, TV, videos, books, search results and software while containing and profiling the user. Consuming culture and contributing content means producing data in …
Continue reading “The User as a Character, Narratives of Datafied Platforms”
Introduction Jon Corbett is an artist programmer of Métis (Cree+Saulteaux+English) heritage who has taken on the challenge of adapting and expressing elements of his cultural heritage and indigenous Cree language in computer code. Exploring what he and others have called “indigenous programming” practices (Corbett, Laiti, Lewis, and Temkin 2020),1 Corbett has been developing software in …
Introduction Russia has historically led scientific invention, however, it has consistently failed to commercialise and implement it. This claim, initially voiced by historian of science Loren Graham, discussing the sphere of innovation and business, is subjected to detailed scrutiny in From Russia with Code. A collection of essays edited by Science and Technology scholars Mario …
Continue reading “Learning from Russia’s hi-tech Soviet heritage. Review: From Russia with Code”
Annette Vee’s Coding Literacy is a very timely reflection on current movements and campaigns aimed at broadening access to computer programming. The book’s argument is that computer programming (or coding) can be productively viewed as a form of literacy, and that, in turn, the growing importance of coding is transforming what it means to be …
Introduction Uber, Airbnb, Google, Amazon and Netflix are names that stress how data-driven systems are reshaping the world. Yet these platforms and services would not be possible without the data infrastructure that underpins them. Far from being nebulous and immaterial, “the cloud” is highly material, taking the form of the copper and cables, switches and …
Continue reading “Imperfect Orchestration: Inside the Data Center’s Struggle for Efficiency”
Introduction Breaches, hacks and outages are in the news on a daily basis. Yet dependencies on digital technologies ever deepen. The distribution of renewable energy calls for smart grids, autonomous vehicles for machine vision, ‘just in time’ industrial production for software-driven orchestration. Exposure to computational vulnerabilities has become a quotidian feature of contemporary existence, but …
Continue reading “Creative Malfunction: Finding fault with Rowhammer”
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 …
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 …
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 …
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: …
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 …
Continue reading “Mereotopology and Computational Representations of the Body”
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 …
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 …
Continue reading “Dance Becoming Data Part Two: Conversation Between Anton Koch and Scott delaHunta”
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, …
Continue reading “Dance Becoming Data: Part One Software for Dancers”
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 …
Continue reading “Special Section Editorial: Toward a Geographical Software Studies”
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Continue reading “Review of Archaeology of Algorithmic Artefacts, by David Link”
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 …
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, …
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 …
Editorial Welcome to Issue Five of Computational Culture. The bulk of this issue is taken up with a series of articles published under the rubric of an exploration of rhetoric and computation, guest-edited and carefully introduced by Annette Vee and Jim Brown. We thank them and all the contributors to this issue of the journal …
In his review of the iPhone 6 for The Guardian, the writer, broadcaster, comedian and “Twitter personality” Stephen Fry expressed all kinds of awe and wonderment at the advancements Apple had made. The iPhone 6s are, for Fry, not only ‘utterly gorgeous objects […] of absolutely exquisite dimensions, heft and feel’, but their high end …
Introduction PowerPoint is installed on more than a billion computers.1 It is the indispensable medium for presentation, one of the most ubiquitous software applications in the world. It has likely been used to raise more money than any other tool in history.2 Teachers rely on PowerPoint. Elementary schoolchildren make presentations and so do researchers in …
Continue reading ““One Damn Slide After Another”: PowerPoint at Every Occasion for Speech”
1. Introduction Since the introduction of LOGO in the 1960s, educators and technologists have been creating open-ended, “sandbox” style computational media; what Mizuko Ito has labeled the “construction genre” of educational technology. 1 Examples include MIT’s Scratch, CMU’s Alice, UC-Boulder’s AgentSheets, and a wide variety of similar systems that are designed to teach math and …
Issue Five Introduction Special Issue, Rhetoric and Computation Annette Vee &James J. Brown, Jr., Editors, Special Issue Introduction Steve Holmes, Can we name the tools? Ontologies of Code, Speculative Techné and Rhetorical Concealment John Tinnell, From WIMP to ATLAS: Rhetorical Figures of Ubiquitous Computing Kevin Brock, The ‘FizzBuzz’ Programming Test: A Case-Based Exploration of …
Cybernetics poses questions to history and historiography. It is consequential then for a book on the history of cybernetics, like this one, to embrace the circuitous method of its object of research. Sentences are repeated. Experiments and pioneering ideas echo each other across the chapters, with long-distance short-circuits and micro-epiphanies for the reader’s joy. A …
Prologue: Gödel and Turing In 1936, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society published a paper authored by a young Cambridge Fellow, Alan Turing. This essay, ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’,1 is considered today to be momentous for having stripped what was then the purely mental activity of computation down to its …
Continue reading “Incomputable Aesthetics: Open Axioms of Contingency”
In An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology Anna Munster seeks to emphasise the relational dimensions of networks and claims that we need to understand the radical implications of distributed neural architectures to gain a subtle and nuanced understanding of the contemporary condition. To this end, her book explores artistic projects, everyday …
Used by hundreds of millions on a daily basis, there is finally a comprehensive study out on the MP3 audio standard. Sound theorist Jonathan Sterne not only describes the political economic background of how this technology came into being in the early 1990s but also provides the reader with an interesting history of sound and …
Continue reading “Reflections on the MP3 Format: Interview with Jonathan Sterne”
This fourth issue of Computational Culture is, in the lingo of academic journals, an ‘open’ issue. It wasn’t edited together with a view to following a single matter of concern, or even with a view to underlying ‘disciplinary’ coherence – indeed, as work that situates itself in the loose constellation of analytic concerns represented by …
From the start, in Contagious Architecture, the proposition is this: uncertainty and incomputability are intrinsic to computation. Looking for ways of accounting for a new digital space composed of ‘alien rule’ and ‘internal anomalies’ and of defining an algorithmic aesthetics proper to the contingencies, abstractions and potentialities of code forms the area of concern of …
Continue reading “Algorithmic Thought: a review of Contagious Architecture by Luciana Parisi”
Re-collection. Art, New Media, and Social Memory by Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito asks the question of how our increasingly digital civilisation will persist beyond our lifetimes. The authors focus on the preservation of new media art as a case study in new media’s broader challenge to social memory. Rinehart and Ippolito are well-known names …
Literature is the secretion of civilization, poetry of the ideal. That is why literature is one of the wants of societies. That is why poetry is a hunger of the soul. That is why poets are the first instructors of the people. That is why Shakespeare must be translated in France. That is why Molière …
The Wikipedia article “Criticism of Facebook” was created in August 2007. What was once a few paragraphs about privacy and the risks of posting illicit photographs, is, seven years later, a massive litany of psychological effects, censorship cases, lawsuits, hate groups, Terms of Service disputes and security flaws.1 Among some 20 subject headings and 15,000 …
Continue reading “Review of Reverse Engineering Social Media”
Editorial Issue Four Articles pop Paul Dourish, NoSQL: The Shifting Materialities of Database Technology Irina Kaldrack and Theo Röhle, Divide and Share: Taxonomies, Orders and Masses in Facebook’s Open Graph Benjamin Grosser, What Do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on Facebook Dennis Tenen and Maxwell Foxman, Book Piracy as Peer Preservation Alex Taylor, …
Field Report for Critical Code Studies, 2014 Over the past seven years since the publication of the manifesto on Critical Code Studies (CCS), 1 the early explorers have established that examining code using humanities-style interpretive methodologies is a valuable part of the analysis of software and programming culture and have shown the first signs of …
Continue reading “Field Report for Critical Code Studies, 2014 ”
Introduction Databases make the world. They do so in at least two ways. The first and more trivial of these is that the world is increasingly made up of databases, as digital technologies continue to supplement, surround, or displace other forms of record keeping. The second and more consequential way in which databases make the …
Continue reading “No SQL: The Shifting Materialities of Database Technology”
Ok, it’s fun, but writing a lengthy article like this for that … Wait, a book? – oelmekki, Hacker News discussion about 10 PRINT.1 Aiming to analyze the titular Commodore 64 BASIC one-liner which draws a maze, and referred to as 10 PRINT throughout, the ten authors weave in and out of subjects at will, …
A popular fable goes like this: on May 11th 1997, when a computer called Deep Blue beat the world champion Gary Kasparov in a six-game chess match, researchers in artificial intelligence had to replace their old milestone for another. The event had made it clear that, even if outperforming the world champion in chess, computers …
When our imaginary relationship to our conditions of existence becomes desynchronized with ongoing events, phenomena such as Wikileaks become impossible to comprehend. One snowy Berlin night after the Chaos Computer Congress in 2009, I rather accidentally ended up getting dinner with Jacob Appelbaum and a few other assorted computer security experts. In the context of …
Speaking Code is a book about language – and in particular, the languages of digital technology. The notion of the programming “language” has always acted as a provocation to critical commentary, since the earliest speculations on giant electronic brains and their apparent potential to participate in human society. But increasingly pervasive digital media mean that …
Continue reading “Critical Codes – from forkbomb to brainfuck”
On several occasions over the last few years I have asked new students in digital design to identify and describe the assumptions made in the design process of the touchscreen smartphone. When I ask them what the smartphone would have looked like had it been invented in Denmark where we live, they always look puzzled, …
Since the WTO protests in Seattle and in particular the 2003 Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) meeting in Miami Florida, police agencies around the world have assembled a set of practices and protocols to constrain and immobilize political protestors. Dubbed the Miami Model of protest policing – in recognition of the FTAA summit …
Continue reading “Peer-to-Peer Protesting: Evading the Police Kettle”
Given the number of texts that follow in this, the second issue of Computational Culture, it is, for the sake of readers, at least, incumbent upon an editorial to attempt the virtues of celerity and concision. We will do our best to satisfy such a requirement. The developing field of software studies aims to engage …
Environmental Sensing Surrounded by the San Bernardino National Forest and situated within the San Jacinto Mountain Range in California, there is one particular patch of woods that is distinct in its ecological processes. This forest is equipped with embedded network sensing that digitally detects and processes environmental phenomena, from microclimates to light patterns, moisture levels …
‘To govern, it is necessary to render visible the space over which government is to be exercised’ (Rose, 1999). ‘From the national postal service to the public telephone to the license plate on every registered vehicle, media are at work replacing people with their addresses.’ (Kittler, 1996). Introduction Long before the arrival of popular geo-services …
Continue reading “The Order of Places: Code, Ontology and Visibility in Locative Media”
1. Introduction When asking the question ‘what is an algorithm?’, computer science offers numerous definitions, such as Knuth’s classic ‘a finite set of rules which gives a sequence of operations for solving a specific type of problem’1. From there, we are frequently directed to the underlying principles of mechanical computation, and to the foundational work …
The literature on Google has exploded in the last few years. To the extend of my overview, much of it falls into two categories. The first treats Google as the paradigmatic Internet company, active across a large number of domains. Its tone is either celebratory – lauding innovation and creative destruction 1 – or alarmist …
Every couple of weeks, when I walk into a bookstore (or rather, click through www.amazon.com), I am confronted with a rather massive amount of new books with keywords in their titles ranging from “network”, “web”, “internet”, “social media”, “digital” to the simplest and most direct amongst them, with “Facebook”, “Google”, “Twitter” that act as a …
Continue reading “Review of: Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media”
In 1886, two notorious New York shysters Howe and Hummel published a curious tome entitled Danger!,1 bearing the salacious subtitle A True History of a Great City’s Wiles and Temptations. The Veil Lifted, and Light Thrown on Crime and its Causes and Criminals and Their Haunts. Facts and Disclosures.2 The text starts off with a …
Continue reading “Notes from the Digital Underground: Cyber Illegalism and the New Egoists”
The public access to the web is twenty years old. Through it, digital society has developed throughout the entire world. But has this society become mündig, that is, mature, in the sense that Immanuel Kant used this term to define the age of Enlightenment as an exit from minority, from Unmündigkeit? Certainly not: contemporary society …
Continue reading “Die Aufklärung in the Age of Philosophical Engineering”
As computer software has become increasingly central to commerce and creativity, lawmakers have retrofitted it into preexisting legal regimes to regulate its production and distribution. Currently in the United States, software is eligible for protection under patent law, copyright law, trade secret law and the First Amendment. Legal determinations of technology such as software do …
Continue reading “Text, Speech, Machine: Metaphors for Computer Code in the Law”
The foreword to MIT’s Software Studies series suggests its purpose is to “make critical, historical, and experimental accounts of (and interventions via) the objects and processes of software.”1 Methodologically diverse, the international field of software studies welcomes perspectives from the arts and humanities, the social sciences, as well as computer science and engineering. Recent proposals …
Chile’s Cybersyn project has long needed a thorough, critical history, and now we have one. Eden Medina’s carefully researched book lays out the project’s origins, structure and struggles as a “case study for better understanding the multifaceted relationship of technology and politics.” If there’s a lesson in Medina’s account, it’s that the task of designing …
Continue reading “Review of Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile”
Everyday life relies heavily on networked technologies that allow for a wide range of actions to take place, from the management of medical devices to the withdrawal of money from a cash point. Despite this, what lies behind these technological assemblages – data, code, and software – has received little attention, effectively remaining an off-limits …
Continue reading “Working Towards a Definition of the Philosophy of Software”
Editorial 1: A Billion Gadget Minds Special Issue: A Billion Gadget Minds Michael Wheeler, Thinking Beyond the Brain: Educating and Building, from the Standpoint of Extended Cognition Anna Munster, Nerves of Data: the Neurological Turn in/against Networked Media Ingmar Lippert, Extended Carbon Cognition as a Machine Luciana Parisi and Stamatia Portanova, Soft Thought (in architecture …
Welcome to the first issue of Computational Culture! This is a journal that aims to provide a space for the emerging kinds of thinking and practice, aligned with, but not limited to, the growing field of software studies. Software and computation more broadly has become fundamental to almost every aspect of daily life. As computation …
Over the last year or so, a loose idea, albeit one with ‘hard’ evidence, has been gathering speed – ‘the neurological turn’ in humanities and social science discourses, particularly in analyses of screen and new media technologies and reception. The neurological turn refers mainly to the resorting to neuroscience by non-neuroscientific scholars, journalists and commentators …
Continue reading “Nerves of data: the neurological turn in/against networked media”
Contemporary media is experienced, created, edited, remixed, organized and shared with software. This software includes stand-alone professional media design and management applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, Final Cut, After Effects, Aperture, and Maya; consumer-level apps such as iPhoto, iMovie, or Picassa; tools for sharing, commenting, and editing provided by social media sites such …
Introduction Carbon matters. And it is computed. In a culture. Underlying calculations are configured; and they could be configured otherwise. To open a space for conceptual discussion about carbon, this article attempts to reconstruct the extended and distributed practices of knowing carbon emissions with the help of scholarship from the field of Science and Technology …
Introduction “In floating such an awkward term as wirelessness, I would invite readers to attend mostly to the suffix ness. Ness seems to me to do a better job than wireless of capturing the tendencies, fleeting nuances, and peripheral shades of often barely registered feeling that cannot be easily codified, symbolized, or quantified. As a …
Last week I bought a bagel and drink from Einstein’s Bagels, a food outlet chain in the United States that specialises in such fare. I handed over my credit card and it was duly swiped – no pin numbers there – and no signing either – and then the person who served me said “Michael, …
Continue reading “Review, Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life”
The Filter Bubble pronounces, in populist terms, the agenda that software studies has been developing since the mid 1990s [1]: everything is governed, enframed and molded by software-mediated processes, while the systems/people creating and overseeing such processes have little ability or power to subject them to doubt, debate, analysis, reinterpretation or control by the public, …
We have the Technology In a widely reported article published recently in Science, 1 a series of experimental results were described which together indicate that, in an era of laptops, tablets, and smartphones that come armed with powerful Internet search engines, our organic brains often tend to internally store not the information about a topic, …
Thursday 8th December 2011 5.30-7.30pm Room: New Academic Building, LG01 Goldsmiths New Cross London (how to get to Goldsmiths) Free, All Welcome To Celebrate the launch of the journal Computational Culture the editorial group presents book launch presentations by Olga Goriunova and Adrian Mackenzie. >Computational Culture Computational Culture is an online open-access peer-reviewed journal of …
Immateriality earned its scare quotes in media studies. Consider Geert Lovink’s (2004) critique of vapor theory, Lisa Nakamura’s (2008) work on digital racial formations, Matthew Kirschenbaum’s (2008) notion of a medial ideology, Alexander Galloway’s (2004) emphasis on the material substrate of new media, and Katherine Hayles’s (2005) entanglement of electronic texts with subjectivity. The list …
Continue reading “Review: Programmed Visions: Software and Memory”
An aesthetic of code This article is an introduction to and exploration of the concept of ‘soft thought’. What we want to propose through the definition of this concept is an aesthetic of digital code that does not necessarily presuppose a relation with the generative aspects of coding, nor with its sensorial perception and evaluation. …
Continue reading “Soft thought (in architecture and choreography)”
“By rehearsing the history of cybernetics […]”, Andrew Pickering writes, “I have tried to convey my conviction that there is another way of understanding our being in the world, that it makes sense, and that grasping that other way can make a difference in how we go on” (p. 390). This statement is taken from …
Manual DeLanda has been best known as a significant figure in the introduction of the works of Gilles Deleuze to the English speaking world with numerous examples of scientific phenomenon. Such an approach presents Deleuze as a scientifically informed philosopher who also used science and technology as a pivot to carry out a revolution within …
Continue reading “The Plane of Obscurity — Simulation and Philosophy”