Ron Eglash: African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design (1999)

Fractals are characterized by the repetition of similar patterns at ever-diminishing scales. Fractal geometry has emerged as one of the most exciting frontiers on the border between mathematics and information technology and can be seen in many of the swirling patterns produced by computer graphics. It has become a new tool for modeling in biology, geology, and other natural sciences.

Anthropologists have observed that the patterns produced in different cultures can be characterized by specific design themes. In Europe and America, we often see cities laid out in a grid pattern of straight streets and right-angle corners. In contrast, traditional African settlements tend to use fractal structures-circles of circles of circular dwellings, rectangular walls enclosing ever-smaller rectangles, and streets in which broad avenues branch down to tiny footpaths with striking geometric repetition. These indigenous fractals are not limited to architecture; their recursive patterns echo throughout many disparate African designs and knowledge systems.

Drawing on interviews with African designers, artists, and scientists, Ron Eglash investigates fractals in African architecture, traditional hairstyling, textiles, sculpture, painting, carving, metalwork, religion, games, practical craft, quantitative techniques, and symbolic systems. He also examines the political and social implications of the existence of African fractal geometry. His book makes a unique contribution to the study of mathematics, African culture, anthropology, and computer simulations.

Publisher Rutgers University Press, 1999
ISBN 0813526140, 9780813526140
272 pages
via Magdalena Mactas

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Georges Perec: The Machine (1972/2009)

One of Georges Perec’s Oulipian works, the radio play The Machine was written “in collaboration with his German translator and close friend, Eugen Helmle, in the heady atmosphere of the Saarbrücken literary circle that met at Helmle’s house. The Machine is an early example of writing inspired by the existence of modern computers (Perec’s other computer-simulation, a stage play entitled [L’Augmentation, appeared in English as The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise in 2011]). It pretends to analyze and recompose, demolish and then rebuild a short lyric by Goethe that is almost indescribably well-known to all speakers and learners of German. To do this, it uses pretty much all the rewriting devices invented to date by Oulipo, and at the outset of Perec’s apprenticeship to a group that included many scientists and mathematicians far more learned than he, it served as a kind of demonstration piece, or Meisterstuck. Its inventiveness, irreverence, and closing sadness has made it just about the best-loved and most frequently rebroadcast example of the Neues Hörspiel, the name given to the experimental reinvention of radio drama that was such a marked feature of German literary culture in the 1960s and 1970s. Perec is nothing it not international.” (from David Bellos’s Introduction to the Review‘s special issue)

First broadcast on 13 November 1968 by Saarländischer Rundfunk, Saarbrücken
First published in German as Die Maschine, Reclam, Stuttgart, 1972
English translation by Ulrich Schönherr
Published in Review of Contemporary Fiction 26(1), Special Issue on Georges Perec, 2009
61 pages (pp 33-93)
via lermontov

Review (M.A. Orthofer, The Complete Review, 2009)
Commentary (Florian Cramer, Words Made Flesh, 2005)
Commentary (Hans Hartje, 1997, in French)
Commentary on a live performance of the English translation (Third Angel, 2012)

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Jennifer Gabrys: Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (2011)

“This is a study of the material life of information and its devices; of electronic waste in its physical and electronic incarnations; a cultural and material mapping of the spaces where electronics in the form of both hardware and information accumulate, break down, or are stowed away. Electronic waste occurs not just in the form of discarded computers but also as a scatter of information devices, software, and systems that are rendered obsolete and fail. Where other studies have addressed “digital” technology through a focus on its immateriality or virtual qualities, Gabrys traces the material, spatial, cultural, and political infrastructures that enable the emergence and dissolution of these technologies. In the course of her book, she explores five interrelated “spaces” where electronics fall apart: from Silicon Valley to Nasdaq, from containers bound for China to museums and archives that preserve obsolete electronics as cultural artifacts, to the landfill as material repository. All together, these sites stack up into a sedimentary record that forms the “natural history” of this study.

Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics describes the materiality of electronics from a unique perspective, examining the multiple forms of waste that electronics create as evidence of the resources, labor, and imaginaries that are bundled into these machines. By drawing on the material analysis developed by Walter Benjamin, this natural history method allows for an inquiry into electronics that focuses neither on technological progression nor on great inventors but rather considers the ways in which electronic technologies fail and decay. Ranging across studies of media and technology, as well as environments, geography, and design, Jennifer Gabrys pulls together the far-reaching material and cultural processes that enable the making and breaking of these technologies.”

Publisher Digital Culture Books, an imprint of the University of Michigan Press, 2011
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License
ISBN 0472035371, 9780472035373
225 pages

Reviews: Nicole Starosielski, Jussi Parikka (Semiotic Review of Books).
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