Pluralities of Scale, Thinking Through Technical Development

The chip stands as the cornerstone of today’s digital age, impacting every aspect imaginable. Across nearly every societal process, this inconspicuous piece of technology plays a critical role: mobile phones, laptops, self-driving cars, the banking system, medical equipment, the internet, and even coffee machines all rely wholly or partially on chip technology. The development of …

The Mesh We’re In

With a mildly ironic nod to its philosophical energies, I would say that this book is not only important but necessary. Giving it a notice is the least we can do. The Digital and Its Discontents is, however, a difficult book to review precisely because it is so clearly and concisely written, not only with …

Life-building and Perspectival Vision, an interview with Maria Chehonadskih

The programme of life-building and perspectival vision is what proletarian culture begins to mean when it encounters the experience and events of revolution as they unfold. Maria Chehonadskih, p.232.   Matthew Fuller: In this issue of Computational Culture we are looking at potential overlaps between different approaches to epistemology, specifically, political understandings of it arising …

Translator’s note to “Machine Translation and Benjamin: Pure Language”

When Jae Hyun Lee—a media scholar at Seoul National University whose work on artificial intelligence and algorithmic society explores the philosophical and cultural implications of digital technologies—published “Machine Translation and Benjamin: Pure Language” in 2019, transformer-based language models were still emerging technologies.1 Six years later, after ChatGPT became a household name and countless think-pieces about …

From the First to the Zero Person Perspective: Neutering the Mediated Life of Affinity

‘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 …

Software Studies, Revisited. A Roundtable on the Software Studies Series at MIT Press

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 …

Interview with Jon Corbett

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 …

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, …

Field Report for Critical Code Studies, 2014


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 …

Die Aufklärung in the Age of Philosophical Engineering

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 …