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)

Domenico Quaranta (ed.): Collect the WWWorld: The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age, catalogue (2011) [English/Italian]

“The last decade has seen an incredible growth in the production and distribution of images and other cultural artefacts. The internet is the place where all these cultural products are stored, classified, voted, collected and trashed. What is the impact of this process on art making and on the artist? Which kind of dialogue is going on between amateur practices and codified languages? How does art respond to the society of information? This is a book about endless archives, image collections, bees plundering from flower to flower and hunters crawling through the online wilderness.”

With works by Alterazioni Video, Kari Altmann, Cory Arcangel, Gazira Babeli, Kevin Bewersdorf, Luca Bolognesi, Natalie Bookchin, Petra Cortright, Aleksandra Domanovic, Harm van den Dorpel, Constant Dullaart, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Elisa Giardina Papa, Travis Hallenbeck, Jodi, Oliver Laric, Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied, Guthrie Lonergan, Eva and Franco Mattes, Seth Price, Jon Rafman, Claudia Rossini, Evan Roth, Travess Smalley, Ryan Trecartin.

Includes texts by Josephine Bosma, Gene McHugh, Joanne McNeil, Domenico Quaranta.

Publisher LINK Editions, Brescia, September 2011
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
ISBN 9781447839491
160 pages

Publisher
Lulu

PDF, PDF (15 MB, updated on 2016-8-19)

Long April, 1-3 (2011-2012) [Romanian/English]

“The Long April. Texte despre artă is a magazine dedicated to contemporary art, with an emphasis on the art scene from Romania. The magazine is realized through the collective effort of nine authors, each one of them responsible for her own permanent rubric. The magazine offers an image upon contemporary visual arts (in their intersections with other fields, cultural and not only), through the perspective of particular and localized interests of the authors. Reviews of exhibitions, performances or events, interviews with artists or theorists, fragments of academic research, studies or investigations, all these are possible forms to be used, the subjectivity of selection being compensated by the seriousness of approach and the long-term preoccupation with a certain kind of artistic research or critical writing.”

Contributors to Issue 1: Anca Mihuleţ, Andreiana Mihail, Corina L. Apostol, Daria Ghiu, Iulia Popovici, Laura Panait, Livia Pancu, Oana Tănase, and Raluca Voinea.

Publisher The KNOT, Bucharest

Magazine website

Issue 1 (Jul 2011): PDF, HTML, PDFs (updated on 2017-12-2)
Issue 2 (Nov 2011): HTML, PDFs (added on 2017-12-2)
Issue 3 (Aug 2012): HTML, PDFs (added on 2017-12-2)