a journal of software studies
Editorial 1: A Billion Gadget Minds Special Issue: A Billion Gadget Minds Michael Wheeler, Thinking Beyond the Brain: Educating and Building, from the Standpoint of Extended Cognition Anna Munster, Nerves of Data: the Neurological Turn in/against Networked Media Ingmar Lippert, Extended Carbon Cognition as a Machine Luciana Parisi and Stamatia Portanova, Soft Thought (in architecture …
Welcome to the first issue of Computational Culture! This is a journal that aims to provide a space for the emerging kinds of thinking and practice, aligned with, but not limited to, the growing field of software studies. Software and computation more broadly has become fundamental to almost every aspect of daily life. As computation …
Over the last year or so, a loose idea, albeit one with ‘hard’ evidence, has been gathering speed – ‘the neurological turn’ in humanities and social science discourses, particularly in analyses of screen and new media technologies and reception. The neurological turn refers mainly to the resorting to neuroscience by non-neuroscientific scholars, journalists and commentators …
Continue reading “Nerves of data: the neurological turn in/against networked media”
Contemporary media is experienced, created, edited, remixed, organized and shared with software. This software includes stand-alone professional media design and management applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, Final Cut, After Effects, Aperture, and Maya; consumer-level apps such as iPhoto, iMovie, or Picassa; tools for sharing, commenting, and editing provided by social media sites such …
Introduction Carbon matters. And it is computed. In a culture. Underlying calculations are configured; and they could be configured otherwise. To open a space for conceptual discussion about carbon, this article attempts to reconstruct the extended and distributed practices of knowing carbon emissions with the help of scholarship from the field of Science and Technology …
Introduction "In floating such an awkward term as wirelessness, I would invite readers to attend mostly to the suffix ness. Ness seems to me to do a better job than wireless of capturing the tendencies, fleeting nuances, and peripheral shades of often barely registered feeling that cannot be easily codified, symbolized, or quantified. As a …
Last week I bought a bagel and drink from Einstein’s Bagels, a food outlet chain in the United States that specialises in such fare. I handed over my credit card and it was duly swiped – no pin numbers there – and no signing either – and then the person who served me said "Michael, …
Continue reading “Review, Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life”
The Filter Bubble pronounces, in populist terms, the agenda that software studies has been developing since the mid 1990s [1]: everything is governed, enframed and molded by software-mediated processes, while the systems/people creating and overseeing such processes have little ability or power to subject them to doubt, debate, analysis, reinterpretation or control by the public, …
We have the Technology In a widely reported article published recently in Science, 1 a series of experimental results were described which together indicate that, in an era of laptops, tablets, and smartphones that come armed with powerful Internet search engines, our organic brains often tend to internally store not the information about a topic, …
Immateriality earned its scare quotes in media studies. Consider Geert Lovink’s (2004) critique of vapor theory, Lisa Nakamura’s (2008) work on digital racial formations, Matthew Kirschenbaum’s (2008) notion of a medial ideology, Alexander Galloway’s (2004) emphasis on the material substrate of new media, and Katherine Hayles’s (2005) entanglement of electronic texts with subjectivity. The list …
Continue reading “Review: Programmed Visions: Software and Memory”
An aesthetic of code This article is an introduction to and exploration of the concept of ‘soft thought’. What we want to propose through the definition of this concept is an aesthetic of digital code that does not necessarily presuppose a relation with the generative aspects of coding, nor with its sensorial perception and evaluation. …
Continue reading “Soft thought (in architecture and choreography)”
"By rehearsing the history of cybernetics [...]", Andrew Pickering writes, "I have tried to convey my conviction that there is another way of understanding our being in the world, that it makes sense, and that grasping that other way can make a difference in how we go on" (p. 390). This statement is taken from …
Manual DeLanda has been best known as a significant figure in the introduction of the works of Gilles Deleuze to the English speaking world with numerous examples of scientific phenomenon. Such an approach presents Deleuze as a scientifically informed philosopher who also used science and technology as a pivot to carry out a revolution within …
Continue reading “The Plane of Obscurity — Simulation and Philosophy”