Warren Sack: The Software Arts (2019)

“In The Software Arts, Warren Sack offers an alternative history of computing that places the arts at the very center of software’s evolution. Tracing the origins of software to eighteenth-century French encyclopedists’ step-by-step descriptions of how things were made in the workshops of artists and artisans, Sack shows that programming languages are the offspring of an effort to describe the mechanical arts in the language of the liberal arts.

Sack offers a reading of the texts of computing—code, algorithms, and technical papers—that emphasizes continuity between prose and programs. He translates concepts and categories from the liberal and mechanical arts—including logic, rhetoric, grammar, learning, algorithm, language, and simulation—into terms of computer science and then considers their further translation into popular culture, where they circulate as forms of digital life. He considers, among other topics, the “arithmetization” of knowledge that presaged digitization; today’s multitude of logics; the history of demonstration, from deduction to newer forms of persuasion; and the post-Chomsky absence of meaning in grammar. With The Software Arts, Sack invites artists and humanists to see how their ideas are at the root of software and invites computer scientists to envision themselves as artists and humanists.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2019
ISBN 9780262039703, 0262039702
xx+375 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (19 MB)

Glass Bead, 2: Site 1: Logic Gate, the Politics of the Artifactual Mind (2017) [English/French]

“The first issue of the journal was dedicated to repositioning art in the landscape of reason. This issue is focused on the fabric of reason itself, and the ways in which it is currently altered by the emergence of artificial intelligence.

While the capacities of thought are being externalized in machines that increasingly mirror human intelligence, the question of the technical artifactuality of mind and its political ramifications becomes particularly pressing.

For us, far from being limited to the computational instantiation of intelligence, understanding the politics of these developments in artificial intelligence requires acknowledging that mind has always been artifactual.

Site 1: Logic Gate, the Politics of the Artifactual Mind proposes to explore the formal, philosophical and scientific dimensions of this question, so as to consider the role art might play in the lucid unfolding of its possibilities.”

With contributions by Danielle Macbeth, Gary Tomlinson, Matt Hare, Ben Woodard, Nina Power, Matteo Pasquinelli, Benjamin Bratton, Nora Khan, Hito Steyerl, Ian Cheng, Catarina Dutilh Novaes, Reviel Netz, Peli Grietzer, Lee Gamble, Dhanveer Singh Brar, T’ai Smith, and James Trafford.

Edited by Fabien Giraud, Jeremy Lecomte, Vincent Normand, Ida Soulard, and Inigo Wilkins
Publisher Glass Bead, November 2017

HTML, PDFs (English)
HTML, PDFs (French)
See also Issue 1

Hans Freudenthal: Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse, Part I (1960)

This book introduces an artificial language designed to be understandable by any possible intelligent extraterrestrial life form, for use in interstellar radio transmissions. The Dutch mathematician Hans Freudenthal considered that such a language should be easily understood by beings not acquainted with any Earthling syntax or language. Lincos was designed to be capable of encapsulating “the whole bulk of our knowledge.”

Publisher North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1960
Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics series
224 pages
via keriokleptes

Reviews: S.W.P. Steen (British J Phil of Science, 1962), E.E. Dawson (Mind, 1964), Louis Narens (J Symbolic Logic, 1973).
Survey: Vincenzo Latronico (ACME, 2007).
Commentary: Vincenzo Latronico (Bulletins of The Serving Library, 2017).

Wikipedia
WorldCat

PDF (10 MB)
See also CosmicOS inspired by Lincos.