Praktyka Teoretyczna, No. 4: Wokół Rzeczy-pospolitej (2011) [Polish]

Nowy numer Praktyki Teoretycznej poświęcony dyskusji nad ostatnią książką Michaela Hardta i Antonia Negriego – 216 stron poważnej i wciągającej lektury.

Wśród jego autorek i autorów znaleźli się m.in. Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, David Harvey, Ewa Majewska, Joanna Bednarek, Mateusz Janik, Gigi Roggero, Anna Curcio, Gerald Raunig, Michał Kozłowski i Sandro Mezzadra.

Editors of the issue: Piotr Juskowiak, Krystian Szadkowski, Maciej Szlinder
Publisher: Międzywydziałowa „Pracownia Pytań Granicznych” UAM, Poznań, December 2011
ISSN: 2081-8130
Creative Commons 3.0 BY SA licence
216 pages

authors

PDF
View online (Issuu.com)

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun: Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011)

“New media thrives on cycles of obsolescence and renewal: from celebrations of cyber-everything to Y2K, from the dot-com bust to the next big things–mobile mobs, Web 3.0, cloud computing. In Programmed Visions, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that these cycles result in part from the ways in which new media encapsulates a logic of programmability. New media proliferates “programmed visions,” which seek to shape and predict–even embody–a future based on past data. These programmed visions have also made computers, based on metaphor, metaphors for metaphor itself, for a general logic of substitutability.

Chun approaches the concept of programmability through the surprising materialization of software as a “thing” in its own right, tracing the hardening of programming into software and of memory into storage. She argues that the clarity offered by software as metaphor should make us pause, because software also engenders a profound sense of ignorance: who knows what lurks behind our smiling interfaces, behind the objects we click and manipulate? The less we know, the more we are shown. This paradox, Chun argues, does not diminish new media’s power, but rather grounds computing’s appeal. Its combination of what can be seen and not seen, known (knowable) and not known–its separation of interface from algorithm and software from hardware–makes it a powerful metaphor for everything we believe is invisible yet generates visible, logical effects, from genetics to the invisible hand of the market, from ideology to culture.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2011
Software Studies series
ISBN 0262015420, 9780262015424
239 pages

Reviews: Jentery Sayers (Computational Culture, 2011), McKenzie Wark (Public Seminar, 2015).

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2019-10-10)

Jacques Khalip, Robert Mitchell (eds.): Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media (2011)

“It has become a commonplace that “images” were central to the twentieth century and that their role will be even more powerful in the twenty-first. But what is an image and what can an image be? Releasing the Image understands images as something beyond mere representations of things. Releasing images from that function, it shows them to be self-referential and self-generative, and in this way capable of producing forms of engagement beyond spectatorship and subjectivity. This understanding of images owes much to phenomenology—the work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty—and to Gilles Deleuze’s post-phenomenological work. The essays included here cover historical periods from the Romantic era to the present and address a range of topics, from Cézanne’s painting, to images in poetry, to contemporary audiovisual art. They reveal the aesthetic, ethical, and political stakes of the project of releasing images and provoke new ways of engaging with embodiment, agency, history, and technology.”

With contributions by Peter Geimer, Jean-Luc Marion, Giorgio Agamben, Mark B.N. Hansen, Vivian Sobchack, Timothy Murray, Cesare Casarino, Kenneth Surin, Forest Pyle, Kevin McLaughlin, Bernard Stiegler

Publisher Stanford University Press, 2011
ISBN 0804761388, 9780804761383
304 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2019-10-7)