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 ...

Before the rise of the Web and our contemporary digital cultures, computer networks had already been imagined, tested, and used worldwide. This special issue retraces some of the technological, cultural and social paths that shaped the development of networks in six different areas of the world. The papers and the final conversation between two leading scholars of this issue touch some crucial topics of network histories from a variety of cultural, geographical and disciplinary perspectives. The issue combines studies and researches based on theoretical and empirical analyses in the U.S., Europe, Brazil and South Africa. Among the most relevant case studies, ...

Diff in June tells a day in the life of a personal computer, written by itself in its own language, as a sort of private log or intimate diary focused on every single change to the data on its hard disk. Using a small custom script, for the entire month of June 2011 Martin Howse registered each chunk of data which had changed within the file system from the previous day’s image. Excluding binary data, one day’s sedimentation has been published in this book, a novel of data archaeology in progress tracking the overt and the covert, merging the legal ...

Emma Rae Norton is interested in the computer mouse and coding slowly by hand.

Around 1950, computers learned how to sort numbers and words. Immediately, many questions arose. What could be done with such a machine? How should its space be set up and governed? Moving the world into the computer meant rethinking many things. Bank transactions, spa guests, and terrorists, to name but a few, had to be “formatted” so that they could be dealt with in the machine. In doing so, managers, programmers, and users created a digital world that offered new ways of classifying things and organizing complex relations. Some people even linked machines, combined data, and shared programs. And computers designed ...

The text of this book was generated by the neural network GPT-2 trained on the complete tutorial data of iFixit. For each sentence, the text-to-image neural network Dall-E 2 generated a corresponding image. The abundance of tutorials is one of the internet’s greatest achievements. Tutorial culture not only runs counter to the monopolist, surveillance platform capitalism most digital technology is part of today. It also represents freely shared knowledge and empowers its users to unravel the black boxes that surround us – two aspects of the early internet imaginary that seem to have prevailed. And yet, they too are bound to ...

When M. Beatrice Fazi claims that “computation is computation,” we know this is so precisely because computation is never simply contained within the skin of computers, but is instead singularly generative. That generativity—in the fullest sense of the term, and perhaps even a little more than that—is the premise of this book, and thinking with Fazi opens onto more-thans precisely because her analyses are so self-contained. Indeed, the thinkers in this collection demonstrate that because “computation is computation,” attendant concepts of media, race, intelligence, digitality, aesthetics, and compression are troped in new ways, yielding novel trajectories.

As the screenshot travels through networks and is stored away safely in the depths of our hard drives or cloud depositories, a collection of written and visual works of PrtScn: The Lazy Art of Screenshot unpacks these digital movements, freezes and many points (and pixels) in between. Some of the perspectives such as personal, artistic, communal, surveillant, archival, disruptive, theoretical and political can be delineated within the contributions, but their overlaps are so evident that clustering them under different sections seemed reductive and redundant…

We think of technology as a basket of broken eggs, which must hatch into chicks. Our contemplation is that we must accept disadvantage as advantage, that we must lead ourselves into a den of a lion, and sleep close to its mane. The starting point was an identification of eternity. It‘s difficult to agree with James Blunt: “Forever is just a minute to me.” For, in the initial analysis, technology is to us what a mustard seed is to a sea. There is, we beg, no specificity to an outlook on technology. But what does an unwholesome consideration entail? How can we ...