Alexandre Leray, Stéphanie Vilayphiou (eds.): Considering Your Tools: A Reader for Designers and Developers (2013)

“A teaching tool that makes the research accessible to design students and young professionals. This reader will provide them with accessible theory so that they can put the radical changes that are taking place in their profession, into perspective.”

“Today’s creation largely depends on digital tools. Far from being a neutral means to an artistic achievement, those tools are actually opinionated: they carry values and are full of conventions about the way things “ought” to be done. To us, a greater awareness of the role of digital tools is—if important to everybody—crucial in the education of artists and designers. Instead of means, the soft- and hardware tools can become partners to consciously think and converse with, to question and interrogate and to clash with. And because (visual) creation is so tightly coupled with technological development, a larger awareness of these tools can help one speculate about future practices and invent the tools to support them.

Contrary to other contemporary fields of creation, there is little literature on these questions in the sphere of graphic design. This is why we felt it was important to bring together texts and showcases on this topic into one comprehensive corpus: a tool to think about tools.

This publication contains newly commissioned, translated and re-issued texts, distributed over 5 chapters: Discrete Gestures is about how our body is informed by our digital tools; Reading Interfaces takes on different approaches to computer literacy; The Making of the Standards is about the social and technical processes behind the elaboration of norms; Myriadic Composition Tools tackles the question of software as a cultural object through the lens of digital typography; Finally, Shaping Processes discusses methodologies for open and critical collective practices. For each chapter, a short note problematize the questions behind the texts.”

With texts by Isabelle Stengers (0); Gerrit Noordzij, William A. Dwiggins, Evan Roth et al., Donald E. Knuth, Vilém Flusser, Friedrich A. Kittler, George Francis, Pierre Huyghebaert (1); Florian Cramer, Alexandre Leray and Stéphanie Vilayphiou, Olia Lialina, Lev Manovich (2); Denis Jacquerye, Unicode Inc., Anthony Froshaug, Open Source Publishing, Henri de Montrond, Martin Arnaud, Mark Pilgrim, Mailing list www-talk, Eric Schrijver (3); Maurice Girod, Robin Kinross, Femke Snelting and Alexandre Leray, Jacques André et al. (4); Christopher M. Kelty, Matthew Fuller, and Aitor Méndez (5).

Co-editors: Nicolas Malevé, Yvan Monroy Lopez, Lilly Nguyen, Camille Pageard, and Eric Schrijver
Publisher Libre Graphics Research Group, May 2013
Various licenses

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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

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

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology (2013)

“This special issue of Amodern features original research, initially presented in 2012 at the Network Archaeology conference at Miami University of Ohio, on the histories of networks, the discrete connections that they articulate, and the circulatory forms of data, information, and socio-cultural resources that they enable. Drawing from the field of media archaeology, we conceptualize network archaeology as a call to investigate networks past and present – using current networks to catalyze new directions for historical inquiry and drawing upon historical cases to inform our understanding of today’s networked culture. In this introduction, we elaborate how network archaeology opens up promising areas for critical investigation, new objects of study, and prospective sites for collaboration within the productively discordant approach of media archaeology.” (from the Editorial)

With contributions by Braxton Soderman, Nicole Starosielski, Jussi Parikka, Scott Pound, Alan Liu, John Cayley, Adrian Johns, John Cayley, Rory Solomon, Liam Young, Lisa Gitelman, Brian Jacobsen, Veronica Paredes, Shannon Mattern, James Purdon, Sebastian Gießmann, Brooke Belisle, Peter Schaefer, Alex Ingersoll, John Shiga, Kris Paulsen, Sandra Gabriele, Darren Wershler, Kalervo Sinervo, and Shannon Tien.

Edited by Nicole Starosielski, Braxton Soderman and cris cheek
Publisher Concordia University and Lakehead University, October 2013

Media archaeology at Monoskop wiki

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