Adrian Mackenzie: Cutting Code: Software and Sociality (2006)

“Software has often been marginalized in accounts of digital cultures and network societies. Although software is everywhere, it is hard to say what it actually is. Cutting Code: Software and Sociality is one of the first books to treat software seriously as a full-blown cultural process, and as a subtly powerful material in contemporary communication. From deCSS to Java, from Linux to Extreme Programming, this book analyses software artworks, operating systems, commercial products, infrastructures and programming practices. It explores social forms, identities, materialities and power relations associated with software, and it asks how software provokes the re-thinking of production, consumption and distribution as entwined cultural processes. Cutting Code argues that analysis of code as a mosaic of algorithms, protocols, infrastructures, and programming conventions offers valuable insights into how contemporary social formations invent new kinds of personhood and new ways of acting.”

Publisher Peter Lang, 2006
ISBN 0820478237, 9780820478234
215 pages

Keywords and phrases
bioinformatics, Linux kernel, Java Virtual Machine, deCSS, extreme programming, JUnit, operating system, Sun Microsystems, CORBA, open-source software, software art, Java programming language, ontology, software development, unit tests, Linus Torvalds, RAMOSS, source code, Perl poetry, Unix philosophy

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2019-12-16)

Grant D. Taylor: The Machine That Made Science Art: The Troubled History of Computer Art 1963-1989 (2004)

“This thesis represents an historical account of the reception and criticism of computer art from its emergence in 1963 to its crisis in 1989, when aesthetic and ideological differences polarise and eventually fragment the art form. Throughout its history, static-pictorial computer art has been extensively maligned. In fact, no other twentieth-century art form has elicited such a negative and often hostile response. In locating the destabilising forces that affect and shape computer art, this thesis identifies a complex interplay of ideological and discursive forces that influence the way computer art has been and is received by the mainstream artworld and the cultural community at large. One of the central factors that contributed to computer art’s marginality was its emergence in that precarious zone between science and art, at a time when the perceived division between the humanistic and scientific cultures was reaching its apogee. The polarising force inherent in the “two cultures” debate framed much of the prejudice towards early computer art. For many of its critics, computer art was the product of the same discursive assumptions, methodologies and vocabulary as science. Moreover, it invested heavily in the metaphors and mythologies of science, especially logic and mathematics. This close relationship with science continued as computer art looked to scientific disciplines and emergent techno-science paradigms for inspiration and insight. While recourse to science was a major impediment to computer art’s acceptance by the artworld orthodoxy, it was the sustained hostility towards the computer that persistently wore away at the computer art enterprise. The anticomputer response came from several sources, both humanist and anti-humanist. The first originated with mainstream critics whose strong humanist tendencies led them to reproach computerised art for its mechanical sterility. A comparison with aesthetically and theoretically similar art forms of the era reveals that the criticism of computer art is motivated by the romantic fear that a computerised surrogate had replaced the artist. Such usurpation undermined some of the keystones of modern Western art, such as notions of artistic “genius” and “creativity”. Any attempt to rationalise the human creative faculty, as many of the scientists and technologists were claiming to do, would for the humanist critics have transgressed what they considered the primordial mystique of art. Criticism of computer art also came from other quarters. Dystopianism gained popularity in the 1970s within the reactive counter-culture and avant-garde movements. Influenced by the pessimistic and cynical sentiment of anti-humanist writings, many within the arts viewed the computer as an emblem of rationalisation, a powerful instrument in the overall subordination of the individual to the emerging technocracy.” (Abstract)

Ph.D. Thesis
Landscape and Visual Arts, The Faculty of Architecture, The University of Western Australia, 2004
via MediaArtHistories

PDFs (updated on 2016-2-17)

Lev Manovich: The Language of New Media (2001–) [EN, IT, ES, PL, SR]

“In this book Lev Manovich offers the first systematic and rigorous theory of new media. He places new media within the histories of visual and media cultures of the last few centuries. He discusses new media’s reliance on conventions of old media, such as the rectangular frame and mobile camera, and shows how new media works create the illusion of reality, address the viewer, and represent space. He also analyzes categories and forms unique to new media, such as interface and database.

Manovich uses concepts from film theory, art history, literary theory, and computer science and also develops new theoretical constructs, such as cultural interface, spatial montage, and cinegratography. The theory and history of cinema play a particularly important role in the book. Among other topics, Manovich discusses parallels between the histories of cinema and of new media, digital cinema, screen and montage in cinema and in new media, and historical ties between avant-garde film and new media.”

Keywords and phrases
3-D computer graphics, telepresence, computer animation, digital compositing, computer games, VRML, digital cinema, Myst, computer space, human-computer interface, photorealism, Jurassic Park, virtual worlds, Aspen Movie Map, computer media, SIGGRAPH, CD-ROM, hypermedia, avant-garde, Movie Camera

Foreword by Mark Tribe
Publisher MIT Press, 2001
Leonardo Books series
ISBN 0262133741, 9780262133746
xiii+354 pages

Reviews

Author (archived)
Author
Publisher

The Language of New Media (English, 2001, 20 MB, updated on 2019-8-23)
Il linguaggio dei nuovi media (Italian, trans. Roberto Merlini, 2002, 39 MB, added on 2019-8-23, via)
El lenguaje de los nuevos medios de comunicación (Spanish, trans. Óscar Fontrodona, 2006, 31 MB, added on 2019-8-23, via)
Język nowych mediów (Polish, trans. Piotr Cypryański, 2006, 52 MB, added on 2019-8-23, via)
Jezik novih medija (Serbian, trans. Aleksandar Luj Todorović, 2015, 10 MB, added on 2019-8-23, via)