Jill Magid: Failed States (2012)
Filed under book, fiction | Tags: · military, secrecy, transparency
Failed States is an exploration of coincidence and poetics amid the barriers and bureaucracy of governmental power. While on a trip to research the history of snipers in Austin, Texas, artist Jill Magid witnesses a mysterious shooting on the steps of the State Capitol. Twenty-four year old Fausto Cardenas fires several rounds in the air before being arrested. The event becomes the background against which Magid, under the guidance of CT — editor at the Texas Observer and former embedded war correspondent for AP — starts her training to become an embedded journalist with the U.S. military in Afghanistan.
Magid’s non-fiction novel Failed States approaches the themes of transparency, secrecy and publicity through her personal desire to engage the war on terror and its media representation through becoming an eyewitness.
Publisher Publication Studio, Portland, OR
Coproduced by Z33 – House for Contemporary Art, Belgium; Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles; Bucharest Biennial 5; and The Romanian Cultural Institute of Stockholm
ISBN 9781935662044
140 pages
Failed States installation by the artist
Comment (0)Christos H. Papadimitriou: Turing: A Novel About Computation (2003)
Filed under fiction | Tags: · algorithm, computing, history of computing, history of technology, machine, mathematics, technology, turing machine
Our hero is Turing, an interactive tutoring program and namesake (or virtual emanation?) of Alan Turing, World War II code breaker and father of computer science. In this unusual novel, Turing’s idiosyncratic version of intellectual history from a computational point of view unfolds in tandem with the story of a love affair involving Ethel, a successful computer executive, Alexandros, a melancholy archaeologist, and Ian, a charismatic hacker. After Ethel (who shares her first name with Alan Turing’s mother) abandons Alexandros following a sundrenched idyll on Corfu, Turing appears on Alexandros’s computer screen to unfurl a tutorial on the history of ideas. He begins with the philosopher-mathematicians of ancient Greece—”discourse, dialogue, argument, proof… can only thrive in an egalitarian society”—and the Arab scholar in ninth-century Baghdad who invented algorithms; he moves on to many other topics, including cryptography and artificial intelligence, even economics and developmental biology. (These lessons are later critiqued amusingly and developed further in postings by a fictional newsgroup in the book’s afterword.) As Turing’s lectures progress, the lives of Alexandros, Ethel, and Ian converge in dramatic fashion, and the story takes us from Corfu to Hong Kong, from Athens to San Francisco—and of course to the Internet, the disruptive technological and social force that emerges as the main locale and protagonist of the novel.
Alternately pedagogical and romantic, Turing (A Novel about Computation) should appeal both to students and professionals who want a clear and entertaining account of the development of computation and to the general reader who enjoys novels of ideas.
Publisher MIT Press, 2003
Computer Science series
ISBN 0262661918, 9780262661911
284 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-25)
Comment (1)Michel Houellebecq: The Map and the Territory (2010–) [EN, FR, DE, NL]
Filed under fiction | Tags: · art
The Map and the Territory is the story of an artist, Jed Martin, and his family and lovers and friends, the arc of his entire history rendered with sharp humor and powerful compassion. His earliest photographs, of countless industrial objects, were followed by a surprisingly successful series featuring Michelin road maps, which also happened to bring him the love of his life, Olga, a beautiful Russian working—for a time—in Paris. But global fame and fortune arrive when he turns to painting and produces a host of portraits that capture a wide range of professions, from the commonplace (the owner of a local bar) to the autobiographical (his father, an accomplished architect) and from the celebrated (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology) to the literary (a writer named Houellebecq, with whom he develops an unusually close relationship).
Then, while his aging father (his only living relative) flirts with oblivion, a police inspector seeks Martin’s help in solving an unspeakably gruesome crime—events that prove profoundly unsettling. Even so, now growing old himself, Jed Martin somehow discovers serenity and manages to add another startling chapter to his artistic legacy, a deeply moving conclusion to this saga of hopes and losses and dreams.
La carte et le territoire
Publisher Flammarion, Paris, 2010
English edition
Translated by Gavin Bowd
Publisher Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2012
ISBN 0307701557, 9780307701558
288 pages
Review (Alex Clark, The Guardian)
Review (Benjamin Kunkel, London Review of Books)
EPUB (French, updated on 2014-9-14)
EPUB (English, updated on 2014-9-14)
EPUB (Dutch, updated on 2014-9-14)
EPUB (German, updated on 2014-9-14)