Christos H. Papadimitriou: Turing: A Novel About Computation (2003)

Our hero is Turing, an interactive tutoring program and namesake (or virtual emanation?) of Alan Turing, World War II code breaker and father of computer science. In this unusual novel, Turing’s idiosyncratic version of intellectual history from a computational point of view unfolds in tandem with the story of a love affair involving Ethel, a successful computer executive, Alexandros, a melancholy archaeologist, and Ian, a charismatic hacker. After Ethel (who shares her first name with Alan Turing’s mother) abandons Alexandros following a sundrenched idyll on Corfu, Turing appears on Alexandros’s computer screen to unfurl a tutorial on the history of ideas. He begins with the philosopher-mathematicians of ancient Greece—”discourse, dialogue, argument, proof… can only thrive in an egalitarian society”—and the Arab scholar in ninth-century Baghdad who invented algorithms; he moves on to many other topics, including cryptography and artificial intelligence, even economics and developmental biology. (These lessons are later critiqued amusingly and developed further in postings by a fictional newsgroup in the book’s afterword.) As Turing’s lectures progress, the lives of Alexandros, Ethel, and Ian converge in dramatic fashion, and the story takes us from Corfu to Hong Kong, from Athens to San Francisco—and of course to the Internet, the disruptive technological and social force that emerges as the main locale and protagonist of the novel.

Alternately pedagogical and romantic, Turing (A Novel about Computation) should appeal both to students and professionals who want a clear and entertaining account of the development of computation and to the general reader who enjoys novels of ideas.

Publisher MIT Press, 2003
Computer Science series
ISBN 0262661918, 9780262661911
284 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-25)

Gerald Raunig: A Thousand Machines: A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement (2008–) [Spanish, English]

“In this “concise philosophy of the machine,” Gerald Raunig provides a historical and critical backdrop to a concept proposed forty years ago by the French philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze: the machine, not as a technical device and apparatus, but as a social composition and concatenation. This conception of the machine as an arrangement of technical, bodily, intellectual, and social components subverts the opposition between man and machine, organism and mechanism, individual and community. Drawing from an unusual range of films, literature, and performance—from the role of bicycles in Flann O’Brien’s fiction to Vittorio de Sica’s Neorealist film The Bicycle Thieves, and from Karl Marx’s “Fragment on Machines” to the deus ex machina of Greek drama—Raunig arrives at an enhanced conception of the machine as a social movement, finding its most apt and concrete manifestation in the Euromayday movement, which since 2001 has become a transnational activist and discursive practice focused upon the precarious nature of labor and lives.”

First published in German as Tausend Maschinen. Eine kleine Philosophie der Maschine als sozialer Bewegung, Turia + Kant, Vienna, 2008.

English edition
Translated by Aileen Derieg
Publisher Semiotext(e), 2010
Intervention series, 5
ISBN 1584350857, 9781584350859
128 pages

Reviews

Publisher (EN)

Mil máquinas. breve filosofía de las máquinas como movimiento social (Spanish, trans. Marcelo Expósito, 2008, added 2014-3-16)
A Thousand Machines: A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement (English, trans. Aileen Derieg, 2010, 19 MB, updated on 2017-6-26)

Computational Culture, a Journal of Software Studies, Issue One: A Billion Gadget Minds (2011)

Computational Culture is an online open-access peer-reviewed journal of inter-disciplinary enquiry into the nature of cultural computational objects, practices, processes and structures.

“This first issue of Computational Culture is loosely based on the proceedings of a workshop held in Central London in October 2010. Entitled ‘A Billon Gadgets Minds: Thinking Widgets, Data and Workflow’, the aim of the workshop was: “To evaluate the ways in which contemporary hardware and software augment and distribute intelligence, as well as the ensemble of social relations which form around thinking practices as they synchronise, mesh, de-couple, breakdown and collapse with variable effects”.” (from Editorial)

With contributions by Michael Wheeler, Anna Munster, Ingmar Lippert, Luciana Parisi and Stamatia Portanova, Lev Manovich, Yuk Hui, Benedikte Zitouni, Michael Batty, Olga Goriunova, Jentery Sayers, M. Beatrice Fazi

Editorial group: Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey, Olga Goriunova, Graham Harwood, Adrian Mackenzie
Published in December 2011
Open access
ISSN 2047-2390

HTML, PDFs