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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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Rethinking Execution

The notion of execution and its practices, which gave birth to this book, were first examined by a collective of artists, thinkers and researchers calling themselves “Critical Software Thing” in two workshops in Aarhus, Denmark and Malmö, Sweden between 2015 – 2016.1 With these discussions, the group, interested in thinking things and objects from the …

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New Media, 1989: Cubase and the New Temporal Order

The initial release of the Atari ST musical sequencing program Cubase by the German software company Steinberg in April 1989 marks a significant moment not only for computer music but the development of digital multimedia as a whole. The features established by Cubase, in particular its ‘innovative graphical tracks and timeline interface’ (see Figure 1), …

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Theorising while() Practising: A Review of Aesthetic Programming

Over approximately the past two decades, ‘creative coding’ has gone from a fairly niche, heterogeneous, and often elective unit in media arts education to an increasingly mainstream offering in many arts and design degree programmes. Distinct from the instrumental and disciplinary approaches in computer science where software is ‘engineered’ and technical principles are mastered in …

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What Do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on Facebook

Introduction During a scene in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street film sequel, titled Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,1 the young trader Jake Moore asks investment bank CEO Bretton James a question: “What’s your number? The amount of money you would need to be able to walk away from it all and just live happily-ever-after. See, I find that everybody …

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How Crucial is Rawness? Review of Raw Data is an Oxymoron by Lisa Gitelman (Ed.)

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 data studies, it is no wonder that expectations of this book run undoubtedly high. Organised …

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