Peter Swirski (ed.): The Art and Science of Stanislaw Lem (2006)
Filed under book | Tags: · artificial intelligence, film, literary criticism, literature, robots, science fiction, technology, technoscience
“The Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, whose works include Return from the Stars, The Cyberiad, A Perfect Vacuum, and Solaris, has been hailed as a “literary Einstein” and a science-fiction Bach. The Art and Science of Stanislaw Lem provides an inter-disciplinary analysis of his influence on Western culture and the creative partnering of art and science in his fiction and futorology by American and European scholars who have defined Lem scholarship.
Rather than analyzing Lem solely as a science fiction writer, the contributors examine the larger themes in his work, such as social engineering and human violence, agency and consciousness, Freudianism and the creative process, evolution and the philosophy of the future, virtual reality and epistemological illusion, and science fiction and socio-cultural policy.
This unique collection also includes “Smart Robots,” a previously unpublished essay by Lem.”
Contributors include Peter Butko, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr, Katherine Hayles, Jerzy Jarzebski, Michael Kandel, Stanislaw Lem, Paisley Livingston, Krzysztof Loska, and Peter Swirski.
Publisher McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006
ISBN 0773575073, 9780773575073
208 pages
PDF (updated on 2014-12-29)
Comment (0)Stewart Brand: The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (1987)
Filed under book | Tags: · artificial intelligence, communication, computer graphics, computing, human-computer interaction, information, media, music, new media, programming, publishing, robotics, science fiction, speech, technology, television
A magical mystery tour through the world of MIT’s Media Laboratory, then headed by Nicholas Negroponte and in its third year of existence. Chapter 11 develops the dictum “information wants to be free.”
Publisher Viking, New York, 1987
ISBN 0670814423
285 pages
Review (Visual Resources, 1989)
Review (AI Magazine, Lee S. Brownston, 1990)
PDF (50 MB, updated on 2014-3-26 to an OCR’d version via Marcell Mars)
Comment (0)Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey: Evil Media (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · algorithm, art, artificial intelligence, business, code, computing, data, database, event, governance, information, interaction, interface, knowledge, labour, language, machine, management, market, media, media theory, memory, military, networks, philosophy, political theory, politics, power, programming, software
“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
PDF (updated on 2024-4-13)
HTML (added on 2015-8-28)
See also YoHa, et al., Evil Media Distribution Centre, 2013.
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