Scott Wilson, David Cottle, Nick Collins (eds.): The SuperCollider Book (2011)

“SuperCollider is one of the most important domain-specific audio programming languages, with potential applications that include real-time interaction, installations, electroacoustic pieces, generative music, and audiovisuals. The SuperCollider Book is the essential reference to this powerful and flexible language, offering students and professionals a collection of tutorials, essays, and projects. With contributions from top academics, artists, and technologists that cover topics at levels from the introductory to the specialized, it will be a valuable sourcebook both for beginners and for advanced users.

SuperCollider, first developed by James McCartney, is an accessible blend of Smalltalk, C, and further ideas from a number of programming languages. Free, open-source, cross-platform, and with a diverse and supportive developer community, it is often the first programming language sound artists and computer musicians learn. The SuperCollider Book is the long-awaited guide to the design, syntax, and use of the SuperCollider language. The first chapters offer an introduction to the basics, including a friendly tutorial for absolute beginners, providing the reader with skills that can serve as a foundation for further learning. Later chapters cover more advanced topics and particular topics in computer music, including programming, sonification, spatialization, microsound, GUIs, machine listening, alternative tunings, and non-real-time synthesis; practical applications and philosophical insigh”s from the composer’s and artist’s perspectives; and “under the hood,” developer’s-eye views of SuperCollider’s inner workings. A Web site accompanying the book offers code, links to the application itself and its source code, and a variety of third-party extras, extensions, libraries, and examples.”

Foreword by James McCartney
Publisher MIT Press, 2011
ISBN 0262232693, 9780262232692
756 pages

Review: Dave Phillips (Linux Journal).

Publisher

PDF (removed on 2014-2-4 upon request of the publisher)
Code (ZIP)
Book resources (code, video examples)
Book errata

Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey: Evil Media (2012)

“Evil Media develops a philosophy of media power that extends the concept of media beyond its tried and trusted use in the games of meaning, symbolism, and truth. It addresses the gray zones in which media exist as corporate work systems, algorithms and data structures, twenty-first century self-improvement manuals, and pharmaceutical techniques. Evil Media invites the reader to explore and understand the abstract infrastructure of the present day. From search engines to flirting strategies, from the value of institutional stupidity to the malicious minutiae of databases, this book shows how the devil is in the details.

The title takes the imperative “Don’t be evil” and asks, what would be done any differently in contemporary computational and networked media were that maxim reversed.

Media here are about much more and much less than symbols, stories, information, or communication: media do things. They incite and provoke, twist and bend, leak and manage. In a series of provocative stratagems designed to be used, Evil Media sets its reader an ethical challenge: either remain a transparent intermediary in the networks and chains of communicative power or become oneself an active, transformative medium.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2012
ISBN 0262304406, 9780262304405
235 pages

Review: Nicholas Holm (Media Int’l AU, 2013), Neural (2013).
Evil media on Monoskop wiki

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2024-4-13)
HTML (added on 2015-8-28)

See also YoHa, et al., Evil Media Distribution Centre, 2013.

Computational Culture, a Journal of Software Studies, Issue Three (2013)

This issue of the journal treats “the database [as] one of the crucial social technologies of our time. As such, it is in urgent need of technically informed critical analysis, the kind of analysis that has tended to be demoted in favour, for instance, of the more semiotically amenable exploration of the more obviously cultural widgets and interfaces of the front end of Web 2.0 technologies. Yet the history of the development of the database casts an interesting light on otherwise frequently algorithm-centric eulogies to the development of computing.” (from the Editorial)

With contributions by Michael Castelle, Evelyn Ruppert, Anne Helmond, Taina Bucher; reviews by Thor Magnusson, Harry Halpin, Håkan Råberg, Alan F. Blackwell, and Lone Koefoed Hansen.

Editorial group: Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey, Olga Goriunova, Graham Harwood, Adrian Mackenzie
Published in November 2013
Open access
ISSN 2047-2390

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