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 ...

“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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

This title will be available soon. Has the human capacity for thinking and feeling been captured by the ma- chine? This is an issue that Franco Berardi Bifo identifies when he says that we have been learning words from the machine, not the mother, leading to a situation where language and affectivity have been separated. Extending this to intellectual and social behavior, he calls this state of affairs a catastrophe of modern humanism, where we no longer have sufficient attention spans for love, tenderness, and compassion. His concern is that we are becoming more and more distanced from affect through 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, ...

Maroš Krivý and Leonard Ma reassess the livability of Jan Gehl’s livable city; Lina Malfona circles the origins of Apple architecture; Silas Martí tracks the fate of Lina Bo Bardi’s contested Teatro Oficina; and Ife Vanable evaluates the middle in two Mitchell-Lama projects.

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” ...

Everyday we stare at computer screens as we type out emails, write code, upload photos, watch videos, and push around pixels. Billions of pages of information splashed with text and images are accessed daily, composed of colored dots emanating from a screen connected to a computer connected to the Internet. Together, these clusters of colors visually display information that we consume and that we create, colors that make up the viewers’ virtual worlds. What Color Is My Internet? is self portrait of the artist as an internet surfer. The book tells, in visual form, the story of 90 days of Greg ...