A Peer-Reviewed Journal About, 8(1): Machine Feeling (2019)

27 September 2019, dusan

“Digital culture has become instrumental for capturing and managing what Raymond Williams would once have called “structures of feeling”. The journal issue A Peer-Reviewed Journal About Machine Feeling alludes to this, and points to a material analysis of aesthetics and culture, including its technical and social forms, and in the way that this concept was originally employed as an acknowledgment of the importance of the hard to capture dimensions of everyday life. What potential new sensibilities and structures of feeling may arise in such normalized registers of our habits? What new cultural and social forms and practices emerge in the coming together of machine learning and structures of feeling? In each their own way, the authors in this journal explore these questions.”

Edited by Christian Ulrik Andersen and Geoff Cox
Publisher Digital Aesthetics Research Centre, Aarhus University, Aarhus, 15 August 2019
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License
ISSN 2245-7755
219 pages

With contributions by Mitra Azar, Daniel Chávez Heras, Michela De Carlo, Iain Emsley, Malthe Stavning Erslev, Tomas Hollanek, Rosemary Lee, Carleigh Morgan, Carman Ng, Irina Raskin, Tiara Roxanne, Rebecca Uliasz, Maria Dada, Tanja Wiehn, and Brett Zehner.

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Thor Magnusson: Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic, and Signal Inscriptions (2019)

16 September 2019, dusan

Sonic Writing explores how contemporary music technologies trace their ancestry to previous forms of instruments and media. Studying the domains of instrument design, musical notation, and sound recording under the rubrics of material, symbolic, and signal inscriptions of sound, the book describes how these historical techniques of sonic writing are implemented in new digital music technologies. With a scope ranging from ancient Greek music theory, medieval notation, early modern scientific instrumentation to contemporary multimedia and artificial intelligence, it provides a theoretical grounding for further study and development of technologies of musical expression. The book draws a bespoke affinity and similarity between current musical practices and those from before the advent of notation and recording, stressing the importance of instrument design in the study of new music and projecting how new computational technologies, including machine learning, will transform our musical practices.

Sonic Writing offers a richly illustrated study of contemporary musical media, where interactivity, artificial intelligence, and networked devices disclose new possibilities for musical expression. Thor Magnusson provides a conceptual framework for the creation and analysis of this new musical work, arguing that contemporary sonic writing becomes a new form of material and symbolic design–one that is bound to be ephemeral, a system of fluid objects where technologies are continually redesigned in a fast cycle of innovation.”

Publisher Bloomsbury Academic, New York & London, 2019
ISBN 9781501313851, 1501313851
xiv+290 pages

Reviews: Gregory Taylor (Cycling ’74, 2019), Diana Chester (Interference, 2019).

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Amodern, 8: Translation-Machination (2018)

29 June 2019, dusan

Amodern 8 explores the contexts and implications of translation as mechanism, media, technique, and transmission. Our tethering of “translation” to “machination” marks our intention to move beyond the habit of situating MT and computer-generated language in the familiar crisis poses of fakery, treason, and inauthenticity. Rather than regarding the machine as marking the limits of translation – an assumption that risks walling off translation practice from media and communication studies concerns, while still absorbing its products – our aim is to continue to investigate the possibilities and configurations of translation as machined, and translation as machining meaning, historically and in the contemporary moment.”

With contributions by Rita Raley, Otso Huopaniemi, John Cayley, Christine Mitchell, Tiffany Chan, Mara Mills, Jentery Sayers, Avery Slater, Quinn DuPont, Andrew Pilsch, Nick Montfort, Jane Birkin, Karin Littau, and Joe Milutis.

Edited by Christine Mitchell and Rita Raley
Publisher Concordia University and Lakehead University, January 2018
Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 3.0 Unported License

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