Narrating some lesser known episodes from the deep history of digital machines, Alexander R. Galloway explains the technology that drives the world today, and the fascinating people who brought these machines to life. With an eye to both the computable and the uncomputable, Galloway shows how computation emerges or fails to emerge, how the digital thrives but also atrophies, how networks interconnect while also fray and fall apart. By re-building obsolete technology using today's software, the past comes to light in new ways, from intricate algebraic patterns woven on a hand loom, to striking artificial-life simulations, to war games and back boxes. A description of the past, this book is also an assessment of all that remains uncomputable as we continue to live in the aftermath of the long digital age.
Narrating some lesser known episodes from the deep history of digital machines, Alexander R. Galloway explains the technology that drives the world today, and the fascinating people who brought these machines to life. With an eye to both the computable and the uncomputable, Galloway shows how computation emerges or fails to emerge, how the digital thrives but also atrophies, how networks interconnect while also fray and fall apart. By re-building obsolete technology using today's software, the past comes to light in new ways, from intricate algebraic patterns woven on a hand loom, to striking artificial-life simulations, to war games and back boxes. A description of the past, this book is also an assessment of all that remains uncomputable as we continue to live in the aftermath of the long digital age.
A journey through the uncomputable remains of computer history
Alexander R. Galloway is Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He is author or coauthor of several books, including The Interface Effect, Protocol and Gaming.
Galloway's work is conceptually sharp, visually compelling and
completely attuned to the political moment.
*New York Times*
An engaging methodological hybrid of the Frankfurt School and UNIX
for Dummies. Galloway brings the uncool question of morality back
into critical thinking.
*Village Voice*
Praise for Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture:
This is contemporary media theory at its best.
*Lev Manovich, Professor of Computer Science, CUNY Graduate
Center*
The Interface Effect builds on the work of Marxist critical
theorists such as Fredric Jameson, new media scholars such as Wendy
Chun, and Galloway's own work in earlier books such as Protocol. An
interface, for him, becomes a technique for thought: an
'allegorical device' that makes the social world accessible in an
age of information. The Interface Effect raises many critical
questions about the ways that contemporary human beings mediate a
historical present that invariably eludes us.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
Employing a sustained, powerful methodology, The Interface Effect
sparkles with original insights. Galloway is interested not only in
the effects that interfaces have, but also in them as themselves
the results of cultural, technological, economic, and political
forces. This double movement provides a way to connect the
historical with the political, and the technological with both.
This book is essential reading for anyone interested in new media
studies, contemporary theory, and digital technologies.
*N. Katherine Hayles, Professor of Literature, Duke University*
Galloway's theorisation of the computer as a mode of mediation
offers rich possibilities for the critical analysis of the
digital.
*Radical Philosophy*
The Interface Effect fuses sophisticated contemporary theory with a
detailed knowledge of the technics and techniques of digital media.
Galloway is an important voice, and the book is sure to have a wide
uptake among those interested in new media theory and contemporary
aesthetics.
*Jodi Dean, Professor of Political Science, Hobart and William
Smith Colleges*
Praise for The Exploit:
Essential reading for all theorists, artists, activists, techheads,
and hackers of the Net.
*McKenzie Wark, Professor of Culture and Media, The New School*
Alexander Galloway's Uncomputable is a brilliant counter-history of
some of the technological worlds we are all currently inhabiting.
In this enthralling genealogy of computation, we encounter a
refreshingly unfamiliar constellation of marginalized or overlooked
practices, theories, artifacts and individual innovators.
*Jonathan Crary*
How to translate political struggle into algorithm? How to
transpose material entanglement into executable operations? What is
the relation between passion, heartbreak and mathematics and what
are the losses incurred by moving in-between them? Alexander
Galloway's intelligent and delicate treatise draws out the tensions
between matter and thought, the invisible and the sharp impact of
historical manifestation, the palpable and the operational and
these other, unspeakable things and situations, that keep evading
through the cracks, shining.
*Hito Steyerl*
Through a series of wonderfully surprising hidden histories of
computation, Galloway provides a radically different perspective on
the digital age and computational media, illuminating its
limitations and its possibilities.
*Michael Hardt*
At a historical moment characterized by totalizing forms of
data-capture, rabid machine learning algorithms, and the
colonization of everyday life by the logics of computation and
capital, Galloway asks a pointed question: "What if things were
otherwise?" Using case studies from across the arts, humanities,
and sciences, Uncomputable shows the alternate pathways of history,
and provides a glimpse towards a theory, practice, and politics of
radical refusal whose timeliness could not be more relevant.
*Trevor Paglen*
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