The Cory Arcangel Hack: Digital Culture and Aesthetic Practice

My friend Eivind Røssaak wrote a book about Cory Arcangel, and I was honored to contribute a short preface. NYC friends, please join the three of us at Artbook @ MoMA PS1 in Long Island City on Saturday, November 15 at 4pm for a book talk.

The Cory Arcangel Hack: Digital Culture and Aesthetic Practice
Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore
Saturday, Nov. 15, 4-5:30pm

Things I Have No Interest In

University administration

The antihumanism-to-computationalism pipeline

Paul Thomas Anderson

.epub

The Turing Test

Topology

Hamlet

Saying "rest in power"

Journalism

Misspelling tl;dr. No, it's not TL;DR or tldr; or tl:dr. Yes, there are reasons.

Digital scholars who can't code are you kidding me

History not repeating but sometimes rhyming

Interdisciplinarity

Benjamin Bratton

Group chat

Perfection--Optimization--Absolution

I am happy to be included in Informatics of Domination, just recently published. Each contributor's task was to comment on a pair of terms from Donna Haraway's famous informatics of domination chart from 1985. Each contributor could also opt to propose a third term. I wrote on Haraway's two terms perfection and optimization, adding a third term, absolution. Thanks to Zach Blas, Melody Jue, and Jennifer Rhee for putting the volume together.

Perfection, optimization, and absolution are all terms that originate in moral and metaphysical discourse. Something may realize itself, it may be guided or adjusted, and it will eventually unloosen and dissolve. Perfection refers to something having been fully accomplished, to something in a state of completion. From a Latin root verb meaning “to make,” perfection entails a process of production. To perfect something is to intervene positively in its development, to push it in a particular direction, to craft it and finish it and make it shine. Perfection connotes maturity, development, flawlessness, purity, completion. In this sense, perfection will always have a target in its sights, the target of the ideal form. The perfect soul, or the perfect body, or the perfect society—all these things must be built and polished and pushed toward whatever ideal has been determined (the ideal soul, the ideal body, the ideal society). A metaphysical logic is particularly legible here; the developmental goal or end is the thing that most characterizes perfection, over and above the particular quality of the goal.

Similarly, optimization refers to the most favorable state. The word is derived from a root meaning “best.” Yet optimization is more sober and pragmatic than perfection. Universals matter less here; identities are not determined in absolute terms, but rather provisionally, nominally. Ignoring thorny questions about essence or purity, optimization means playing the cards as they lay, making the best use of one’s predicament, whatever it may be. If perfection is theological in spirit, always aspiring to some higher end, optimization tends to be more stubbornly secular and mundane. The best is not eternal, or essential, and certainly not given by God, even if kings and elites try to claim divine authority. Rather, the optimal is simply one arrangement among others. The optimal is the most efficient organization, the most pleasing assemblage, or the most suitable configuration. Continue reading →

Vincent Hollier -- Prehistory of Black Digital Studies

(I started researching the material below in 2018 and had mostly given up for lack of success in confirming the historical sources. Yet considering the times we live in, it seems relevant and necessary to pass along these fragments and unfinished investigations in the hopes that someone else might undertake a proper study of Vincent Hollier, who by all accounts was an interesting fellow and an important pioneer. I was able to make email contact briefly with Hollier in early summer 2020, yet he didn't respond in depth to my interview queries and I decided not to pester him further. Hollier passed away last month at the age of 77.)

Source: Jacky Lindsey

First, the basic coordinates. Anthony Wilden published a book in 1972 called System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange. A lost gem that few people read anymore, System and Structure is an unclassifiable cocktail of cybernetics and continental theory that contains one of the first significant philosophical reflections on the digital and the analog.* Wilden's book would go on to influence another key text in this discourse, "Shame in the Cybernetic Fold" by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank. In fact I first learned of Wilden's book by reading Sedgwick and Frank's essay.

Now the important part: Inserted as an appendix between chapters seven and eight of System and Structure is a six-page graphical essay by one Vincent Hollier titled "Appendix II: Analog and Digital" (196-201). Hollier's appendix is significant because it is one of the earliest instances of Digital Studies composed by an African American.

Vincent Hollier, "Appendix II: Analog and Digital," p. 196.

My colleague Charlton McIlwain has written on the history of African Americans and computing in his book Black Software, extending that history earlier than one might expect, while also undoing the notion that Black Americans were mostly non-participants in computer history. Perhaps the story of Vincent Hollier might add another page to that history. Is Hollier's the first work of Black Digital Studies? I'm no historian. And certainly the quest for origins is a fruitless endeavor, if not also politically suspect. Regardless, Hollier's graphical essay is doubtless an important early contribution from an era with a relative paucity of archival sources. Continue reading →

Uncomputable in Chinese

Happy to see Uncomputable translated into Chinese, just recently published by Nanjing University Press. The book is now available in Chinese, Italian, and Korean translations.

The Uses of Disorder

The notable scholar David Golumbia died last year at the age of 60. At the time of his passing, he had completed the manuscript for what would become his final book, a formidable analysis and critique of the digital age titled Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology. Please find below my review of the book published at boundary 2 online, where Golumbia had worked for several years as an editor. Few scholars of digital media were as pugnacious and insightful as David. He will be missed.

Does disorder have a politics? I suspect it must. It has a history, to be sure. Disorder is quite old, in fact, primeval even, the very precondition for the primeval, evident around the world in ancient notions of chaos, strife, or cosmic confusion. But does disorder have a politics as well? As an organizing principle, disorder achieved a certain coherence during the 1990s. In those years technology evangelists penned books with titles like Out of Control (the machines are in a state of disorder, but we like it), and The Cathedral and the Bazaar (disorderly souk good, well-ordered Canterbury bad). The avant argument in those years focused on a radical deregulation of all things, a kind of full-stack libertarianism in which machines and organisms could, and should, self-organize without recourse to rule or law. Far from corroding political cohesion, as it did for Thomas Hobbes and any number of other political theorists, disorder began to be understood in a more positive sense, as the essential precondition for a liberated politics. Or as the late David Golumbia writes in Cyberlibertarianism, the computer society of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries culminated in “the view that ‘centralized authority’ and ‘bureaucracy’ are somehow emblematic of concentrated power, whereas ‘distributed’ and ‘nonhierarchical’ systems oppose that power.” And, further, Golumbia argues that much of the energy for these kinds of political judgements stemmed from a characteristically ring-wing impulse, namely a conservative reaction to the specter of central planning in socialist and communist societies and the concomitant endorsement of deregulation and the neutering of state power more generally. Isaiah Berlin’s notion of negative liberty had eclipsed all other conceptions of freedom; many prominent authors and technologists seemed to agree that positive liberty was only ever a path to destruction. Or as Friedrich Hayek put it already in 1944, any form of positive, conscious imposition of order would inevitably follow “the road to serfdom.” Liberty would thus thrive not from rational order, but from a carefully tended form of disorder.

Continue reading at boundary 2 online

Spring seminar -- The Politics of Code

Announcing my Spring doctoral seminar on The Politics of Code. The course is open to all doctoral students at NYU, plus consortium students in the NYC area. Contact me if you have questions.

The Politics of Code

This doctoral seminar focuses on political analyses of computational media. We begin with an overview of cybernetics, information theory, systems theory, distributed networks, and theories of postmodernity. Next, we examine the rise of immaterial labor in the service economies and the extension of codified labor practices into the realm of daily life. The seminar will also consider the ramifications of data capture and the formation of coded objects and bodies. Finally, we explore networked struggle and, through it, a political theory of the present moment. The course will favor both close readings of specific technologies as well as social and cultural claims about the computer age.

The Desire Called Synthesis

Please find below my response to A Questionnaire on Art and Machine Learning published in the current issue of October magazine. The text was also translated into German and published as "Ein Begehren namens Synthese," in TEXT+KRITIK: Das Subjekt des Schreibens--Über Große Sprachmodelle, edited by Hannes Bajohr and Moritz Hiller.

Today's artificial intelligence is a tool for generating new numbers from patterns in massive piles of old numbers. Given the recent ebullience around AI, it's important not to lose sight of this. These tools are no doubt dazzling, but they are essentially next-word predictors, or next-pixel predictors. I stress today's because the history is important. Modern research into artificial intelligence began, in the decades after World War II, by using approaches grounded in logic and symbolic rationality. After this early approach largely failed, leading to an "AI winter," engineers eventually retooled with data-driven and empirical methods. Concurrent with this new wave came an unprecedented proliferation of human data via emailing, blogging, the authoring of HTML, the snapping of digital photos, etc., much of which was posted publicly or accessible internally to the cloud platforms that hosted it all. This data furnished the fuel for today's data-centric AI.

One consequence of this history is a shift in the balance between data and algorithms. Software development entails a variety of different kinds of input data (global variables, input files and databases, graphical elements for the user interface, essentially anything that can't be generated procedurally). At the same time, development requires a complex set of procedures (function calls, simple arithmetical and logical operations, if/then control structures). For many years, the normal way to do software development was to have a relatively small amount of data and a relatively large number of procedures. "Normal" is often a contested word, to be sure. But I mean everything from when Linus Torvalds built the Linux kernel to when Cory Arcangel wrote the assembly code for Super Mario Clouds. Today's AI essentially rearranges the previous proportion. Instead of a few variables and data inputs appended to a more prolonged set of procedures, we find massive amounts of data paired with a relatively small codebase. Sure, the code repository at OpenAI or Google is large, but their data stores are almost immeasurably larger. In fact, you or I could program a simple machine-learning algorithm in just a few hundred lines of code. Today's AI is not algorithmically elaborate, even if it remains data intensive. The data is heavy and the procedures are light. Continue reading →