Computation
“241508.pdf” is a generic, noise-based post-book reading environment. It is an effortless translation of the text Seven Controlled Vocabularies by the poet Tan Lin into an mp3 file. As a record that obscures the legibility of its source material, it is best put on and forgotten about or used as source material for further derivations. It is a book alternately compressed or decompressed to roughly 1 hour and 6 minutes and written as it is listened to. Originally downloaded freely from Lulu.com, a self-publishing platform, SCV appears to currently only be freely available as a Chinese [Google] translation (at http://is.gd/bP4Ys) ...
Innovation. Meritocracy. The possibility of overnight success. What’s not to love about Silicon Valley?
These days, it’s hard to be unambiguously optimistic about the growth-at-all-costs ethos of the tech industry. Public opinion is souring in the wake of revelations about Cambridge Analytica, Theranos, and the workplace conditions of Amazon workers or Uber drivers. It’s becoming clear that the tech industry’s promised “innovation” is neither sustainable nor always desirable.
Abolish Silicon Valley is both a heartfelt personal story about the wasteful inequality of Silicon Valley, and a rallying call to engage in the radical politics needed to upend the status quo. Going beyond ...
In his letter to Ada Augusta Lovelace of July 2, 1843, Charles Babbage writes: “I like much the improved form of the Bernoulli Note but can judge of it better when I have the Diagram and Notation.” He is referring to the last in a set of notes written by Lovelace that interpreted the Analytical Engine, the first fully automatic and universal computer, invented by Babbage in 1834, although never actually completed during his lifetime. She appended these notes to her translation of an article written by Luigi Federico Menabrea after he had heard Babbage present a paper on the ...
Aesthetic Programming explores the technical as well as cultural imaginaries of programming from its insides. It follows the principle that the growing importance of software requires a new kind of cultural thinking — and curriculum — that can account for, and with which to better understand the politics and aesthetics of algorithmic procedures, data processing and abstraction. It takes a particular interest in power relations that are relatively under-acknowledged in technical subjects, concerning class and capitalism, gender and sexuality, as well as race and the legacies of colonialism. This is not only related to the politics of representation but also nonrepresentation: ...
AI plays a crucial role in the global cultural ecosystem. It recommends what we should see, listen to, read, and buy. It determines how many people will see our shared content. It helps us make aesthetic decisions when we create media. In professional cultural production, AI has already been adapted to produce movie trailers, music albums, fashion items, product and web designs, architecture, etc. In this short book, Lev Manovich offers a systematic framework to help us think about cultural uses of AI today and in the future. He challenges existing ideas and gives us new concepts for understanding media, ...
The Amme Talks is a conversation between poet and machine. In 2003, poet Ulf Stolterfoht and a chatbot named Amme (which means “wet nurse” in German) met in Berlin. For one week, Stolterfoht interrogated Amme: not just a chatbot, actually, but a steel-and-glass construction with a computer interface, which is connected to a glass of milk, a robotic arm that tips over the glass, and a tube that releases water, as if urinating.
Stolterfoht asked Amme—the creation of artist Peter Dittmer—about the nature of authorship and the agency of language; he intended to turn the answers into an essay on poetics. ...
Amor Cringe explores the dually base and beautiful aspects of self-obsessed media culture. In a perennial bohemian style, an unnamed, ungendered protagonist travels from coast to coast and affair to affair, stumbling upon various moments of failure, absurd insight, and flashes of transcendence.
Half traditionally-written and half AI-generated, Amor Cringe is a “deepfake autofiction” novelette about a TikTok influencer that seeks God, created with the intention to be “as cringe as possible.” The result is a painfully self-aware series of encounters that exfoliate the repulsive and fascinating aesthetics of romantic life under social media.
Unprecedented kinds of experience, and new modes of life, are now produced by simulations, from the CGI of Hollywood blockbusters to animal cloning to increasingly sophisticated military training software, while animation has become an increasingly powerful pop-cultural form. Today, the extraordinary new practices and radical objects of simulation and animation are transforming our neoliberal-biopolitical “culture of life”. The Animatic Apparatus offers a genealogy for the animatic regime and imagines its alternative futures, countering the conservative-neoliberal notion of life’s sacred inviolability with a new concept and ethics of animatic life.
It was a joyful moment when I rediscovered my old notebooks. I would not have searched for them without the dOCUMENTA (13) notebook publishing project. When reading these old notes now, I am surprised how many ideas they already contain and how they developed, building unconsciously one on the other. I had no memory of the level of detail in which some of these ideas had already been analyzed in the early notebooks.
The books I found cover a three-year period beginning in late 1992. In my scientific life, this was a crucial time. It was the time when key steps ...
The complex architectures of the new “memory palaces”, from libraries, archives and museums to the IT structures, databases and server farms that feed the flow of data on the network. The transitional situation that we are experiencing, which brings together a book culture with a culture of the screen, is gradually shifting us from a graphic reason to a computational one. In the same way that writing has made it possible to generate a particular mode of thought, where lists, tables and formulas have played a primordial role in the modeling of knowledge. With digital technology, other systems of knowledge ...
Research is everywhere. Architects incite action, design materials and archive cities. They capitalize upon the excess energy of practice to launch unsolicited experiments into the world, or sidestep clients by joining forces with government think tanks. Discussions from classrooms have found currency at town halls, and findings from construction sites have migrated into basement laboratories. Yet for all of its vitality, research eludes definition. The term describes everything and nothing, leaving its assumptions–the drive towards innovation, certainty, and influence, for example–unexamined.
ARPA Journal is a forum for debates on what is applied research in architecture. We scrutinize techniques of inquiry to ...
Artificial Fear Intelligence of Death: In Conversation with Monica Anderson, Erik Davis, R.U. Sirius and Dag Spicer
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The public discourse around AI is oscillating between salvation and the apocalyptic, often referring to images from Science Fiction. Meanwhile, in our smartphones, in search engines or in automatic translation, forms of artificial intelligence are already part of our everyday life. An ongoing artistic research on the topic brought Geneva-based artist Lauren Huret to California, where she conducted interviews with four protagonists of the discourse: Computer scientist and entrepreneur Monica Anderson (Artificial Intuition), computer historian Dag Spicer (Computer History Museum), writer and editor R.U. Sirius (MONDO 2000) and writer Erik Davis (TechGnosis. Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of ...
