Matthew Fuller: How To Be a Geek: Essays on the Culture of Software (2017)

“Computer software and its structures, devices and processes are woven into our everyday life. Their significance is not just technical: the algorithms, programming languages, abstractions and metadata that millions of people rely on every day have far-reaching implications for the way we understand the underlying dynamics of contemporary societies.

In this innovative new book, software studies theorist Matthew Fuller examines how the introduction and expansion of computational systems into areas ranging from urban planning and state surveillance to games and voting systems are transforming our understanding of politics, culture and aesthetics in the twenty-first century. Combining historical insight and a deep understanding of the technology powering modern software systems with a powerful critical perspective, this book opens up new ways of understanding the fundamental infrastructures of contemporary life, economies, entertainment and warfare.

In so doing Fuller shows that everyone must learn ‘how to be a geek’, as the seemingly opaque processes and structures of modern computer and software technology have a significance that no-one can afford to ignore. This powerful and engaging book will be of interest to everyone interested in a critical understanding of the political and cultural ramifications of digital media and computing in the modern world.”

Publisher Polity, 2017
ISBN 9781509517152, 1509517154
x+233 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

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Kim West: The Exhibitionary Complex: Exhibition, Apparatus and Media from Kulturhuset to the Centre Pompidou, 1963-1977 (2017)

This doctoral thesis “studies the new Information Center model of the art museum that was developed by a group of artists, curators, architects, and activists connected to Moderna Museet in Stockholm between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s. Through close readings of Moderna Museet’s unrealized Kulturhuset project, and a series of related attempts at rethinking the exhibition and the museum in relation to new information technologies, systems, and networks, it traces the origins, the critical implications, and the effects of this model, according to which the museum should function at once as a catalyst for the active forces in society, a vast experimental laboratory, and a broadcasting station.

In this study, the museum is understood as an exhibitionary apparatus, the specific characteristics of which are configured in relation to other apparatuses for display, distribution, and interaction, which together form an exhibitionary complex, caught in a process of gradual integration with the expanding network of cybernetic media. The study asks under what conditions the exhibitionary apparatus might preserve its particular modes of social and aesthetic experience, while acting as a transformative force on and through the new information environments.”

PhD dissertation in Aesthetics, School of Culture and Education, Södertörn University
Publisher Södertörn University, Stockholm, 2017
Open access
ISBN 9789187843761
359 pages

Review: Anders Kreuger (Kunstkritikk, 2017).

DiVA

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Sean Cubitt: Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies (2016)

“While digital media give us the ability to communicate with and know the world, their use comes at the expense of an immense ecological footprint and environmental degradation. In Finite Media Sean Cubitt offers a large-scale rethinking of theories of mediation by examining the environmental and human toll exacted by mining and the manufacture, use, and disposal of millions of phones, computers, and other devices. The way out is through an eco-political media aesthetics, in which people use media to shift their relationship to the environment and where public goods and spaces are available to all. Cubitt demonstrates this through case studies ranging from the 1906 film The Story of the Kelly Gang to an image of Saturn taken during NASA’s Cassini-Huygens mission, suggesting that affective responses to images may generate a populist environmental politics that demands better ways of living and being. Only by reorienting our use of media, Cubitt contends, can we overcome the failures of political elites and the ravages of capital.”

Publisher Duke University Press, 2016
Cultural Politics Books series
ISBN 9780822362920. 0822362929
256 pages
via wX

Publisher
WorldCat

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