Please join me at a book launch event for Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age, hosted by the Aesthetics and History of Media working group at King’s College London. This event will take place on Zoom, at 12pm EST (5pm GMT) on Tuesday November 23.
We will begin with a short presentation by me, followed by responses from Beatrice Fazi, Seb Franklin, and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan.
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Narrating some lesser known episodes from the deep history of digital machines, Alexander 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.
M. Beatrice Fazi is Reader in Digital Humanities in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities (University of Sussex). Her work explores questions located at the intersection of philosophy, technoscience and culture, and her research interests include media philosophy and theory, digital aesthetics, continental philosophy, computation and artificial intelligence, critical and cultural theory. She is the author of Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics.
Seb Franklin is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature in the Department of English at King’s College London. He is the author of The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value and Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic.
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is Senior Lecturer in the History and Theory of Digital Media in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. He is a media theorist and historian of science researching how digital technologies shape science, culture, and the environment. His book, From Information Theory to French Theory, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.