Katherine Hirt: When Machines Play Chopin: Musical Spirit and Automation in Nineteenth-Century German Literature (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1800s, aesthetics, android, automation, history of literature, language, literature, machine, mechanics, music, music history, musical instruments, philosophy, phonograph
“When Machines Play Chopin brings together music aesthetics, performance practices, and the history of automated musical instruments in nineteenth-century German literature. Philosophers defined music as a direct expression of human emotion while soloists competed with one another to display machine-like technical perfection at their instruments. This book looks at this paradox between thinking about and practicing music to show what three literary works say about automation and the sublime in art.”
Publisher De Gruyter, 2010
Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies series, 8
ISBN 3110232405, 9783110232400
170 pages
via alcibiades_socrates
Abstract of the thesis (2008)
Comment (0)Christopher Steiner: Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · algorithm, automation, code, computing, software, software studies, technology
Long gone are the days of jocks and preppies running the trading desks of Wall Street. For more than a decade, a group of math and technology geeks known as the “quants” have completely transformed the financial markets.
Christopher Steiner traces the stories if these quants and their complete makeover of Wall Street. As more an more colleges became hotbeds of quant knowledge, more engineers and math majors infiltrated the job market. And not just on Wall Street but in countless ither fields.
Steiner explores how algorithms and the science behind them are starting to permeate our daily lives, destroying professions and creating new ones. Sooner than we think our music, our food, our medicine, our blind dates, and more will be governed by procedural equations rather than human intuition.
In many cases these innovations are beneficial. But there will inevitably be troubling side effects, like the Flash Crash of May 2010. Steiner explores what will happen, both good and bad, when algorithims more fully control hospitals, transportation and many other fields.
Publisher Portfolio / Penguin Group US, 2012
ISBN 1101572159, 9781101572153
256 pages
review (Evgeny Morozov, The Wall Street Journal)
review (Wendy M Grossman, ZDNet)
Catherine Liu: Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton (2000)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1700s, automation, history of literature, literature, machine, media archeology, robotics
Anxieties about fixing the absolute difference between the human being and the mechanical replica, the automaton, are as old as the first appearance of the machine itself. Exploring these anxieties and the efforts they prompted, this book opens a window on one of the most significant, if subtle, ideological battles waged on behalf of the human against the machine since the Enlightenment—one that continues in the wake of technological and conceptual progress today.
A sustained examination of the automaton as early modern machine and as a curious ancestor of the twentieth-century robot, Copying Machines offers extended readings of mechanistic images in the eighteenth century through the prism of twentieth-century commentary. In readings of texts by Lafayette, Molière, Laclos, and La Bruyère—and in a chapter on the eighteenth-century inventor of automatons, Jacques Vaucanson—Catherine Liu provides a fascinating account of ways in which the automaton and the preindustrial machine haunt the imagination of ancien régime France and structure key moments of the canonical literature and criticism of the period.
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2000
ISBN 0816635021, 9780816635023
224 pages