The Psychogeophysics Handbook (2010, draft)

With psychogeography easily dened as a playful examination of the total effects of geography and place on the individual, [“the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” Guy Debord. Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, 1955]. Psychogeophysics extends such research to embrace geophysics, defined as the quantitative observation of the earth’s physical properties, and its interaction with local spectral ecologies. Geophysics equally encompasses archaeological geophysics, with measurement of such properties allowing for the mapping of previous traces through techniques of particle/wave detection and data forensics.

This extension of psychogeography into geophysics implies a collision between interpretation (fiction) and measurement, with Psychogeophysics proposed as a novel discipline that bridges any such distinction through the medium of code, and offers a speculative take on the future of code as an uncovering of its locative (diagnostic) potentials leading to a new phase of software studies.

By anonymous
20 July 2010

authors
article about psychogeophysics (Anthony Iles, Mute)

PDF

N. Katherine Hayles: My Mother Was a Computer. Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005)

We live in a world, according to N. Katherine Hayles, where new languages are constantly emerging, proliferating, and fading into obsolescence. These are languages of our own making: the programming languages written in code for the intelligent machines we call computers. Hayles’s latest exploration provides an exciting new way of understanding the relations between code and language and considers how their interactions have affected creative, technological, and artistic practices.

My Mother Was a Computer explores how the impact of code on everyday life has become comparable to that of speech and writing: las anguage and code have grown more entangled, the lines that once separated humans from machines, analog from digital, and old technologies from new ones have become blurred. My Mother Was a Computer gives us the tools necessary to make sense of these complex relationships. Hayles argues that we live in an age of intermediation that challenges our ideas about language, subjectivity, literary objects, and textuality. This process of intermediation takes place where digital media interact with cultural practices associated with older media, and here Hayles sharply portrays such interactions: how code differs from speech; how electronic text differs from print; the effects of digital media on the idea of the self; the effects of digitality on printed books; our conceptions of computers as living beings; the possibility that human consciousness itself might be computational; and the subjective cosmology wherein humans see the universe through the lens of their own digital age.

We are the children of computers in more than one sense, and no critic has done more than N. Katherine Hayles to explain how these technologies define us and our culture. Heady and provocative, My Mother Was a Computer will be judged as her best work yet.

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2005
ISBN 0226321479, 9780226321479
290 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-24)

Massimo Banzi: Getting Started with Arduino (2008)

This valuable little book offers a thorough introduction to the open-source electronics prototyping platform that’s taking the design and hobbyist world by storm. Getting Started with Arduino gives you lots of ideas for projects and helps you get going on them right away. To use the introductory examples in this book, all you need is a USB Arduino, USB A-B cable, and an LED. This 128-page book is a greatly expanded follow-up to the author’s original short PDF that’s available on the Arduino website.

Publisher O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2008
Series: Make: Projects
ISBN 0596155514, 9780596155513
Length 118 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (CHM)