Author: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262518511
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
A theoretical examination of the surprising emergence of software as a guiding metaphor for our neoliberal world. New media thrives on cycles of obsolescence and renewal: from celebrations of cyber-everything to Y2K, from the dot-com bust to the next big things—mobile mobs, Web 3.0, cloud computing. In Programmed Visions, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that these cycles result in part from the ways in which new media encapsulates a logic of programmability. New media proliferates “programmed visions,” which seek to shape and predict—even embody—a future based on past data. These programmed visions have also made computers, based on metaphor, metaphors for metaphor itself, for a general logic of substitutability. Chun argues that the clarity offered by software as metaphor should make us pause, because software also engenders a profound sense of ignorance: who knows what lurks behind our smiling interfaces, behind the objects we click and manipulate? The combination of what can be seen and not seen, known (knowable) and not known—its separation of interface from algorithm and software from hardware—makes it a powerful metaphor for everything we believe is invisible yet generates visible, logical effects, from genetics to the invisible hand of the market, from ideology to culture.
Programmed Visions
Author: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262518511
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
A theoretical examination of the surprising emergence of software as a guiding metaphor for our neoliberal world. New media thrives on cycles of obsolescence and renewal: from celebrations of cyber-everything to Y2K, from the dot-com bust to the next big things—mobile mobs, Web 3.0, cloud computing. In Programmed Visions, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that these cycles result in part from the ways in which new media encapsulates a logic of programmability. New media proliferates “programmed visions,” which seek to shape and predict—even embody—a future based on past data. These programmed visions have also made computers, based on metaphor, metaphors for metaphor itself, for a general logic of substitutability. Chun argues that the clarity offered by software as metaphor should make us pause, because software also engenders a profound sense of ignorance: who knows what lurks behind our smiling interfaces, behind the objects we click and manipulate? The combination of what can be seen and not seen, known (knowable) and not known—its separation of interface from algorithm and software from hardware—makes it a powerful metaphor for everything we believe is invisible yet generates visible, logical effects, from genetics to the invisible hand of the market, from ideology to culture.
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262518511
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
A theoretical examination of the surprising emergence of software as a guiding metaphor for our neoliberal world. New media thrives on cycles of obsolescence and renewal: from celebrations of cyber-everything to Y2K, from the dot-com bust to the next big things—mobile mobs, Web 3.0, cloud computing. In Programmed Visions, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that these cycles result in part from the ways in which new media encapsulates a logic of programmability. New media proliferates “programmed visions,” which seek to shape and predict—even embody—a future based on past data. These programmed visions have also made computers, based on metaphor, metaphors for metaphor itself, for a general logic of substitutability. Chun argues that the clarity offered by software as metaphor should make us pause, because software also engenders a profound sense of ignorance: who knows what lurks behind our smiling interfaces, behind the objects we click and manipulate? The combination of what can be seen and not seen, known (knowable) and not known—its separation of interface from algorithm and software from hardware—makes it a powerful metaphor for everything we believe is invisible yet generates visible, logical effects, from genetics to the invisible hand of the market, from ideology to culture.
Programmed Visions
Author: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262294613
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 254
Book Description
A theoretical examination of the surprising emergence of software as a guiding metaphor for our neoliberal world. New media thrives on cycles of obsolescence and renewal: from celebrations of cyber-everything to Y2K, from the dot-com bust to the next big things—mobile mobs, Web 3.0, cloud computing. In Programmed Visions, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that these cycles result in part from the ways in which new media encapsulates a logic of programmability. New media proliferates “programmed visions,” which seek to shape and predict—even embody—a future based on past data. These programmed visions have also made computers, based on metaphor, metaphors for metaphor itself, for a general logic of substitutability. Chun argues that the clarity offered by software as metaphor should make us pause, because software also engenders a profound sense of ignorance: who knows what lurks behind our smiling interfaces, behind the objects we click and manipulate? The combination of what can be seen and not seen, known (knowable) and not known—its separation of interface from algorithm and software from hardware—makes it a powerful metaphor for everything we believe is invisible yet generates visible, logical effects, from genetics to the invisible hand of the market, from ideology to culture.
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262294613
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 254
Book Description
A theoretical examination of the surprising emergence of software as a guiding metaphor for our neoliberal world. New media thrives on cycles of obsolescence and renewal: from celebrations of cyber-everything to Y2K, from the dot-com bust to the next big things—mobile mobs, Web 3.0, cloud computing. In Programmed Visions, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that these cycles result in part from the ways in which new media encapsulates a logic of programmability. New media proliferates “programmed visions,” which seek to shape and predict—even embody—a future based on past data. These programmed visions have also made computers, based on metaphor, metaphors for metaphor itself, for a general logic of substitutability. Chun argues that the clarity offered by software as metaphor should make us pause, because software also engenders a profound sense of ignorance: who knows what lurks behind our smiling interfaces, behind the objects we click and manipulate? The combination of what can be seen and not seen, known (knowable) and not known—its separation of interface from algorithm and software from hardware—makes it a powerful metaphor for everything we believe is invisible yet generates visible, logical effects, from genetics to the invisible hand of the market, from ideology to culture.
Software Studies
Author: Matthew Fuller
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262062747
Category : Computer programs
Languages : en
Pages : 349
Book Description
This collection of short expository, critical and speculative texts offers a field guide to the cultural, political, social and aesthetic impact of software. Experts from a range of disciplines each take a key topic in software and the understanding of software, such as algorithms and logical structures.
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262062747
Category : Computer programs
Languages : en
Pages : 349
Book Description
This collection of short expository, critical and speculative texts offers a field guide to the cultural, political, social and aesthetic impact of software. Experts from a range of disciplines each take a key topic in software and the understanding of software, such as algorithms and logical structures.
Updating to Remain the Same
Author: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262333783
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 261
Book Description
What it means when media moves from the new to the habitual—when our bodies become archives of supposedly obsolescent media, streaming, updating, sharing, saving. New media—we are told—exist at the bleeding edge of obsolescence. We thus forever try to catch up, updating to remain the same. Meanwhile, analytic, creative, and commercial efforts focus exclusively on the next big thing: figuring out what will spread and who will spread it the fastest. But what do we miss in this constant push to the future? In Updating to Remain the Same, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun suggests another approach, arguing that our media matter most when they seem not to matter at all—when they have moved from “new” to habitual. Smart phones, for example, no longer amaze, but they increasingly structure and monitor our lives. Through habits, Chun says, new media become embedded in our lives—indeed, we become our machines: we stream, update, capture, upload, link, save, trash, and troll. Chun links habits to the rise of networks as the defining concept of our era. Networks have been central to the emergence of neoliberalism, replacing “society” with groupings of individuals and connectable “YOUS.” (For isn't “new media” actually “NYOU media”?) Habit is central to the inversion of privacy and publicity that drives neoliberalism and networks. Why do we view our networked devices as “personal” when they are so chatty and promiscuous? What would happen, Chun asks, if, rather than pushing for privacy that is no privacy, we demanded public rights—the right to be exposed, to take risks and to be in public and not be attacked?
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262333783
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 261
Book Description
What it means when media moves from the new to the habitual—when our bodies become archives of supposedly obsolescent media, streaming, updating, sharing, saving. New media—we are told—exist at the bleeding edge of obsolescence. We thus forever try to catch up, updating to remain the same. Meanwhile, analytic, creative, and commercial efforts focus exclusively on the next big thing: figuring out what will spread and who will spread it the fastest. But what do we miss in this constant push to the future? In Updating to Remain the Same, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun suggests another approach, arguing that our media matter most when they seem not to matter at all—when they have moved from “new” to habitual. Smart phones, for example, no longer amaze, but they increasingly structure and monitor our lives. Through habits, Chun says, new media become embedded in our lives—indeed, we become our machines: we stream, update, capture, upload, link, save, trash, and troll. Chun links habits to the rise of networks as the defining concept of our era. Networks have been central to the emergence of neoliberalism, replacing “society” with groupings of individuals and connectable “YOUS.” (For isn't “new media” actually “NYOU media”?) Habit is central to the inversion of privacy and publicity that drives neoliberalism and networks. Why do we view our networked devices as “personal” when they are so chatty and promiscuous? What would happen, Chun asks, if, rather than pushing for privacy that is no privacy, we demanded public rights—the right to be exposed, to take risks and to be in public and not be attacked?
Discriminating Data
Author: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262046229
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 341
Book Description
How big data and machine learning encode discrimination and create agitated clusters of comforting rage. In Discriminating Data, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Correlation, which grounds big data’s predictive potential, stems from twentieth-century eugenic attempts to “breed” a better future. Recommender systems foster angry clusters of sameness through homophily. Users are “trained” to become authentically predictable via a politics and technology of recognition. Machine learning and data analytics thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible. Chun, who has a background in systems design engineering as well as media studies and cultural theory, explains that although machine learning algorithms may not officially include race as a category, they embed whiteness as a default. Facial recognition technology, for example, relies on the faces of Hollywood celebrities and university undergraduates—groups not famous for their diversity. Homophily emerged as a concept to describe white U.S. resident attitudes to living in biracial yet segregated public housing. Predictive policing technology deploys models trained on studies of predominantly underserved neighborhoods. Trained on selected and often discriminatory or dirty data, these algorithms are only validated if they mirror this data. How can we release ourselves from the vice-like grip of discriminatory data? Chun calls for alternative algorithms, defaults, and interdisciplinary coalitions in order to desegregate networks and foster a more democratic big data.
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262046229
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 341
Book Description
How big data and machine learning encode discrimination and create agitated clusters of comforting rage. In Discriminating Data, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Correlation, which grounds big data’s predictive potential, stems from twentieth-century eugenic attempts to “breed” a better future. Recommender systems foster angry clusters of sameness through homophily. Users are “trained” to become authentically predictable via a politics and technology of recognition. Machine learning and data analytics thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible. Chun, who has a background in systems design engineering as well as media studies and cultural theory, explains that although machine learning algorithms may not officially include race as a category, they embed whiteness as a default. Facial recognition technology, for example, relies on the faces of Hollywood celebrities and university undergraduates—groups not famous for their diversity. Homophily emerged as a concept to describe white U.S. resident attitudes to living in biracial yet segregated public housing. Predictive policing technology deploys models trained on studies of predominantly underserved neighborhoods. Trained on selected and often discriminatory or dirty data, these algorithms are only validated if they mirror this data. How can we release ourselves from the vice-like grip of discriminatory data? Chun calls for alternative algorithms, defaults, and interdisciplinary coalitions in order to desegregate networks and foster a more democratic big data.
Technologies of Vision
Author: Steve F Anderson
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262343347
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Book Description
An investigation of the computational turn in visual culture, centered on the entangled politics and pleasures of data and images. If the twentieth century was tyrannized by images, then the twenty-first is ruled by data. In Technologies of Vision, Steve Anderson argues that visual culture and the methods developed to study it have much to teach us about today's digital culture; but first we must examine the historically entangled relationship between data and images. Anderson starts from the supposition that there is no great divide separating pre- and post-digital culture. Rather than creating an insular field of new and inaccessible discourse, he argues, it is more productive to imagine that studying “the digital” is coextensive with critical models—especially the politics of seeing and knowing—developed for understanding “the visual.” Anderson's investigation takes on an eclectic array of examples ranging from virtual reality, culture analytics, and software art to technologies for computer vision, face recognition, and photogrammetry. Mixing media archaeology with software studies, Anderson mines the history of technology for insight into both the politics of data and the pleasures of algorithms. He proposes a taxonomy of modes that describe the functional relationship between data and images in the domains of space, surveillance and data visualization. At stake in all three are tensions between the totalizing logic of data and the unruly chaos of images.
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262343347
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Book Description
An investigation of the computational turn in visual culture, centered on the entangled politics and pleasures of data and images. If the twentieth century was tyrannized by images, then the twenty-first is ruled by data. In Technologies of Vision, Steve Anderson argues that visual culture and the methods developed to study it have much to teach us about today's digital culture; but first we must examine the historically entangled relationship between data and images. Anderson starts from the supposition that there is no great divide separating pre- and post-digital culture. Rather than creating an insular field of new and inaccessible discourse, he argues, it is more productive to imagine that studying “the digital” is coextensive with critical models—especially the politics of seeing and knowing—developed for understanding “the visual.” Anderson's investigation takes on an eclectic array of examples ranging from virtual reality, culture analytics, and software art to technologies for computer vision, face recognition, and photogrammetry. Mixing media archaeology with software studies, Anderson mines the history of technology for insight into both the politics of data and the pleasures of algorithms. He proposes a taxonomy of modes that describe the functional relationship between data and images in the domains of space, surveillance and data visualization. At stake in all three are tensions between the totalizing logic of data and the unruly chaos of images.
Fun and Software
Author: Olga Goriunova
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501318284
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297
Book Description
Fun and Software offers the untold story of fun as constitutive of the culture and aesthetics of computing. Fun in computing is a mode of thinking, making and experiencing. It invokes and convolutes the question of rationalism and logical reason, addresses the sensibilities and experience of computation and attests to its creative drives. By exploring topics as diverse as the pleasure and pain of the programmer, geek wit, affects of play and coding as a bodily pursuit of the unique in recursive structures, Fun and Software helps construct a different point of entry to the understanding of software as culture. Fun is a form of production that touches on the foundations of formal logic and precise notation as well as rhetoric, exhibiting connections between computing and paradox, politics and aesthetics. From the formation of the discipline of programming as an outgrowth of pure mathematics to its manifestation in contemporary and contradictory forms such as gaming, data analysis and art, fun is a powerful force that continues to shape our life with software as it becomes the key mechanism of contemporary society. Including chapters from leading scholars, programmers and artists, Fun and Software makes a major contribution to the field of software studies and opens the topic of software to some of the most pressing concerns in contemporary theory.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501318284
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297
Book Description
Fun and Software offers the untold story of fun as constitutive of the culture and aesthetics of computing. Fun in computing is a mode of thinking, making and experiencing. It invokes and convolutes the question of rationalism and logical reason, addresses the sensibilities and experience of computation and attests to its creative drives. By exploring topics as diverse as the pleasure and pain of the programmer, geek wit, affects of play and coding as a bodily pursuit of the unique in recursive structures, Fun and Software helps construct a different point of entry to the understanding of software as culture. Fun is a form of production that touches on the foundations of formal logic and precise notation as well as rhetoric, exhibiting connections between computing and paradox, politics and aesthetics. From the formation of the discipline of programming as an outgrowth of pure mathematics to its manifestation in contemporary and contradictory forms such as gaming, data analysis and art, fun is a powerful force that continues to shape our life with software as it becomes the key mechanism of contemporary society. Including chapters from leading scholars, programmers and artists, Fun and Software makes a major contribution to the field of software studies and opens the topic of software to some of the most pressing concerns in contemporary theory.
Photography in India
Author: Aileen Blaney
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000211606
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Book Description
Photography’s prominence in the representation and experience of India in contemporary and historical times has not guaranteed it a position of sustained attention in research and scholarship. For a technology as all pervasive as photography, and a country as colossal as India, this scenario is somewhat of an anomaly. Photography in India explores elements of the past, present and future of photography in the context of India through speculation and reflection on photography as an artistic, documentary and everyday practice. The perspectives of writers, theorists, curators and artists are selectively brought to bear upon known as well as previously unseen photographic archives, together with changes in photographic practice that have been synchronous with contemporary India’s rapid urban and rural transformation and the technological shift from chemistry and light to programming and algorithms. Essential reading for anyone interested in Indian photography, this book binds insights into a history of photography with its contemporary development, consolidating wide-ranging thinking on the topic and setting the agenda for future research.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000211606
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Book Description
Photography’s prominence in the representation and experience of India in contemporary and historical times has not guaranteed it a position of sustained attention in research and scholarship. For a technology as all pervasive as photography, and a country as colossal as India, this scenario is somewhat of an anomaly. Photography in India explores elements of the past, present and future of photography in the context of India through speculation and reflection on photography as an artistic, documentary and everyday practice. The perspectives of writers, theorists, curators and artists are selectively brought to bear upon known as well as previously unseen photographic archives, together with changes in photographic practice that have been synchronous with contemporary India’s rapid urban and rural transformation and the technological shift from chemistry and light to programming and algorithms. Essential reading for anyone interested in Indian photography, this book binds insights into a history of photography with its contemporary development, consolidating wide-ranging thinking on the topic and setting the agenda for future research.
Excavating the Memory Palace
Author: Seth Long
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022669531X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254
Book Description
With the prevalence of smartphones, massive data storage, and search engines, we might think of today as the height of the information age. In reality, every era has faced its own challenges of storing, organizing, and accessing information. While they lacked digital devices, our ancestors, when faced with information overload, utilized some of the same techniques that underlie our modern interfaces: they visualized and spatialized data, tying it to the emotional and sensory spaces of memory, thereby turning their minds into a visual interface for accessing information. In Excavating the Memory Palace, Seth David Long mines the history of Europe’s arts of memory to find the origins of today’s data visualizations, unearthing how ancient constructions of cognitive pathways paved the way for modern technological interfaces. Looking to techniques like the memory palace, he finds the ways that information has been tied to sensory and visual experience, turning raw data into lucid knowledge. From the icons of smart phone screens to massive network graphs, Long shows us the ancestry of the cyberscape and unveils the history of memory as a creative act.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022669531X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254
Book Description
With the prevalence of smartphones, massive data storage, and search engines, we might think of today as the height of the information age. In reality, every era has faced its own challenges of storing, organizing, and accessing information. While they lacked digital devices, our ancestors, when faced with information overload, utilized some of the same techniques that underlie our modern interfaces: they visualized and spatialized data, tying it to the emotional and sensory spaces of memory, thereby turning their minds into a visual interface for accessing information. In Excavating the Memory Palace, Seth David Long mines the history of Europe’s arts of memory to find the origins of today’s data visualizations, unearthing how ancient constructions of cognitive pathways paved the way for modern technological interfaces. Looking to techniques like the memory palace, he finds the ways that information has been tied to sensory and visual experience, turning raw data into lucid knowledge. From the icons of smart phone screens to massive network graphs, Long shows us the ancestry of the cyberscape and unveils the history of memory as a creative act.
The Maternal, Digital Subjectivity, and the Aesthetics of Interruption
Author: EL Putnam
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501364812
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
Bringing together philosophies of the maternal with digital technology may appear to be an arbitrary pairing. However, reading them intertextually through select creative practices reveals how both encompass an aesthetics of interruption that becomes a novel means of understanding subjectivity. EL Putnam investigates how the digital performances of certain artists, creators, and technologists rupture existing representations of the maternal, taking advantage of the formal properties of digital media. What results are interruptions of visual and aural constructions through an immanent merging of the performing body with digital technologies. Putnam bases her analysis on close examinations of the way certain makers use the formal properties of digital imagery, such as the gap, the glitch, and the lag, as means of rendering images of the maternal uncanny in order to challenge mediation, constituting an aesthetics of interruption. The result is a radical critical strategy for engaging with digital technology and subsequent understandings of the subject that defy current modes of assimilation.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501364812
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
Bringing together philosophies of the maternal with digital technology may appear to be an arbitrary pairing. However, reading them intertextually through select creative practices reveals how both encompass an aesthetics of interruption that becomes a novel means of understanding subjectivity. EL Putnam investigates how the digital performances of certain artists, creators, and technologists rupture existing representations of the maternal, taking advantage of the formal properties of digital media. What results are interruptions of visual and aural constructions through an immanent merging of the performing body with digital technologies. Putnam bases her analysis on close examinations of the way certain makers use the formal properties of digital imagery, such as the gap, the glitch, and the lag, as means of rendering images of the maternal uncanny in order to challenge mediation, constituting an aesthetics of interruption. The result is a radical critical strategy for engaging with digital technology and subsequent understandings of the subject that defy current modes of assimilation.