Interface poetics A review of Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound by Lori Emerson.
Review of Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound, by Lori Emerson University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota ISBN: 9780816691265 232 pages, 41 b&w photos 2014 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 […]
Memorious Histories of Open Circuits
A review of Beautiful Data, a history of vision and reason since 1945 by Orit Halpern Duke University Press, 2014. 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 […]
Inner and Outer Networks
Review of Anna Munster, An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology The MIT Press, Cambridge MA ISBN 978-0-262-01895-1 247 pp b&w illustrations 2013 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 […]
Algorithmic Thought: a review of Contagious Architecture by Luciana Parisi
Review of Contagious Architecture, computation, aesthetics and space The MIT Press, Cambridge MA ISBN: 9780262018630 392 pp. 22 b&w illustrations March 2013 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 […]
Re-collecting the Museum
Review of Re-collection. Art, New Media, and Social Memory by Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 2014 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 […]
Review of Reverse Engineering Social Media
Review of Gehl, Robert W. Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014. 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 […]
How Crucial is Rawness? Review of Raw Data is an Oxymoron by Lisa Gitelman (Ed.)
Reaview of “Raw Data” is an Oxymoron, ed. Lisa Gitelman, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2013 As part of the Infrastructures series edited by Geoffrey Bowker and Paul N. Edwards, and with a provocative and engaging title that addresses what the editor of the book, Lisa Gitelman, defines in her acknowledgements as the emerging field of […]
Lost in a Maze of Code
review of: Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013. Pages: 328 ISBN: 978-0262018463 http://10print.org/ Ok, it’s fun, but writing a lengthy article like this for that … Wait, a […]
On Creativity and Calculation: Attempts at and Rejections of Formal Definitions of Creativity
Review of Computers and Creativity Editors: Jon McCormack and Mark d’Inverno Berlin: Springer, 2012. 430 p. 96 illus., 51 illus. in color. ISBN 978-3-642-31727-9 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 […]
Review of “Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet” and “This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information”
Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet by Julian Assange with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jeremie Zimmerman, OR Books, New York, 2013 ISBN 978-1-939293-00-8 This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information by Andy Greenberg. Virgin Books, London, 2012 When our imaginary relationship to our conditions […]
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