Dear_Tony (2013) is an unauthorized, distributed retrospective of the public sculptures of Tony Smith by Christian de Vietri and A.E. Benenson. Addressed as much to the deceased sculptor and his practice as our contemporary audience, Dear_Tony rethinks the artist’s historic investigations into modular construction, phenomenology, and public space within the contexts of digital fabrication, interactivity, and networked communication. At the same time, Dear_Tony is a means to reflect on the form of the retrospective and how its requirements may be adapted to contemporary conditions of viewership. Dear_Tony consists of a digital sculpture by Christian de Vietri, which is composed of extractable models ...

Tech is never simply technology. It never appears in the abstract, any more than the characters “H2O” appear anywhere on water. Tech is always specific. How old should someone be when they first have sex? How old before they get their first cell phone? This sequence unsettles us because it is hard to think about either inevitability. Sex and technology are instruments of desire, the objects and system of adult unfreedom. Children at play are so analog. Young is life before text. We clutched love letters, in the past, when we couldn’t clutch each other. Now our phones get warm ...

The history charted by the museum will be familiar to anyone who’s taken an introductory typography class. It begins with models of cuneiform tablets and Egyptian hieroglyphics, which slowly lead into alphabets by the North Semitic, the Phoenicians, the early- and classical-Greeks, the Etruscans, and then the Modern Roman characters we read in the west today, with significant attention paid to the technologies that made such writing and printing possible. The museum also features rooms dedicated to the development of Cyrillic, Aramaic, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Cherokee, and Indic writing systems. Each room communicates a profound fascination ...

Lives of Data maps the historical and emergent dynamics of big data, computing, and society in India. Data infrastructures are now more global than ever before. In much of the world, new sociotechnical possibilities of big data and artificial intelligence are unfolding under the long shadows cast by infra/structural inequalities, colonialism, modernization, and national sovereignty. This book offers critical vantage points for looking at big data and its shadows, as they play out in uneven encounters of machinic and cultural relationalities of data in India’s socio-politically disparate and diverse contexts. Lives of Data emerged from research projects and workshops at the ...

An optimistic response to a terminal diagnosis finds its apotheosis as a lecture. The all-star news anchor, veteran of all three major television networks, Katie Couric is quoted as waxing, “most of us would slip into a deep depression, but Randy used the experience as teaching material.” Given on September 18th, 2007 at Carnegie-Mellon as a part of a cross-disciplinary lecture series, terminally-ill computer science professor Randy Pausch’s lecture “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” inaugurates an era of viral possibility for the lecture: weaving together self-help maxims, dad jokes and the ethos of computer science interdisciplinarity, this popular incarnation of ...

Paul Ford is a writer, programmer, educator, and technologist. He is currently the co-founder of Postlight, a digital product studio in New York and teaches at the School of Visual Arts. He’s written for publications like Harper’s, New York, Medium, and The Morning News and is a frequent commentator on technology and the internet. In 2015, he published “What is Code?” for Bloomberg Businessweek, an issue-length essay explaining programming to a mass audience. In this episode, Paul and I talk about his childhood interest in computers and books, the early days of the web and building his own blogging software, ...

The 2019/20 issue of The Serving Library Annual is entirely devoted to the late Italian designer, artist, inventor and polymath Bruno Munari. The core of the annual is the first English translation of Obvious Code, the 1971 collection of Munari‘s own writings, sketches and poems about his own work, published by arrangement with Corraini, who issued the book’s anastatic edition in 2017. It includes iconic design objects such as the Abitacolo, ground-breaking artworks such as his 1952 series of hand-made projection slides, and little known rhymes about the art market, as well as an original piece from his “unreadable books” ...

The­ following­ essays­ were­ written­ between­ 2012­ and­ 2020,­ a­ time­ that­ will ­hardly ­be remembered ­for ­any ­groundbreaking­ hardware­ or ­software­ inventions.­  The­ iPhone,­ the­ Tesla­ Roadster,­ Web­ 2.0,­ even­ the­ Infinite­ Scroll­ plug-in­ for­ WordPress­ –­ all­ belong­ to­ the­ glorious­ first­ decade­ of­ the­ new ­millennium. The ­second ­decade­ was ­different, ­it­ was­ about­ talking,­ loud­ and ­clear. “iPad­ keyboards­ provide­ a­ great­ typing­ experience”­ (Apple­ 2020);­ “We­ achieved­ quantum­ supremacy”­ (Google­ 2019);­ “I’ve­ built­ a­ simple­ AI”­ (Zuckerberg­ 2016);­ “Model­ S­ is­ a­ sophisticated­ computer­ on­ wheels”­ (Musk­2015);­ “If­ I ­ever ­say ­the ­word­ ‘user’ ­again, ­immediately ­charge ...

People say writing in a journal or diary is good practice. But what will you write about? You could really write about anything. Maybe it’s a good idea just to write about how you feel. If that’s too confusing or scary, just write about what activities you are planning to do after this, so you stay on track to finishing this flight. • People say music is a key to the soul. If you want to feel a certain feeling more, it could be good to listen to music. Sometimes when you’re sad, it’s good to listen to sad music so you ...

“yoooooowhatuhoe” was developed on a tour of the American West Coast in February 2015. The macro form of the piece was predetermined with special attention paid to temporal ratio between sections, while the material filling out the different sections was generated by procedures ranging from retyping the content of a G-Chat conversation on the Computer MIDI Keyboard to capture the typing habits of the composer and thereby generating pitch and rhythmic data, to using weighted random processes to build dense stacks of pitches.