(Previously) ...Next, the mea culpa. It concerns Badiou's position on the Continuum Hypothesis. In 1878 Georg Cantor offered a hypothesis about the continuum, essentially a hypothesis about the nature of continuous number. More specifically the hypothesis concerned Cantor's famous two sizes of infinity and the relation between them. After establishing the position of the smaller infinity, the infinity of rational or arithmetical number, Cantor hypothesized that the "next highest" number would be his larger infinity, the infinity of real or geometric number. I write next highest in scare quotes because the question of size and even counting itself stops making intuitive sense after transgressing the threshold of finitude.

If you're looking for a more technical statement of the CH, here is a helpful one by Mary Tiles from her excellent book The Philosophy of Set Theory: An Historical Introduction to Cantor's Paradise (p. 1):

"2^ℵ₀ = ℵ₁, which has come to be known as Cantor's continuum hypothesis, thus says that the number of points on a line is the second infinite cardinal number: there are none in between ℵ₀ and 2^ℵ₀."

Okay, so the CH has a long history in mathematics and I'll be the first to admit that my knowledge of the underlying math is wobbly at best. But let's establish the basics at the outset. Continue reading →

Now that Andrew and I have posted all episodes of the Being & Event podcast, I wanted to return to two details from the series and offer a bit more explanation. The first (here below) will expand on something from Episode 3. The second, in a future post, will address something I said about Badiou, which, it turns out, has been directly contradicted by Badiou himself! In other words, a mea culpa is in order. More on that soon.

To recap, in Episode 3, I made three observations about Badiou to help structure the discussion. The first observation was a point about politics, that Badiou is essentially a modernist, and specifically that he is a political modernist. The second was a point about math: that Badiou gives us not just a description of mathematics but a definition of mathematics. I articulated that definition across different episodes in the podcast series, and also wrote about it here, giving it the name Badiou's Principle. The third point was about technology, a point that may be posed as a question: Is Badiou a digital philosopher? I want to say yes, at least to some degree. And that question deserves a longer post all on its own. Regardless, any discussion of whether or not Badiou is a digital philosopher stumbles over an awkward truth. Badiou hardly ever talks about the digital. Badiou hardly ever ever about computers. This philosopher, known the world over for his overweening interest in mathematics and formalization, has only rarely addressed the most important instance of mathematical formalism in the world today, namely digital computation. Why is this? Continue reading →

For my German friends.. here is an interview conducted by Oliver Leistert and Mary Shnayien and recently published in Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft.

«Ob man etwas tun kann oder nicht, ist eine rein mechanische oder materielle Frage»

Zu den Politiken und Effekten von Internetprotokollen und den Möglichkeiten ihrer Historisierung

Galloway-interview-in-Zeitschrift-für-Medienwissenschaft.pdf

Uncomputable has recently been translated and published in Korean by Rose & Camellia. My friend Taeyoon Choi has written a letter of introduction for the book for Korean audiences.

알렉산더 R. 갤러웨이의 『계산할 수 없는』이 한국어로 출간된다는 소식을 듣고 무척 기뻤다. 나의 멘토이자 소중한 동지인 갤러웨이와는 짧지 않은 시간 동안 코딩과 액티비즘, 미학과 철학 그리고 추상화와 실천의 접점에서 대화를 이어갔다. 우리의 인연은 내가 예술가 활동을 시작하던 2008년 봄, 뉴욕 첼시에 위치한 아이빔 아트 앤 테크놀로지 센터Eyebeam Art and Technology Center의 레저던시에 참여했던 경험에서 출발한다. 당시 갤러웨이는 몇 명의 프로그래머, 디자이너들과 함께 이 책에서 소개되는 크릭슈필Kriegspiel 게임을 만들고 있었다. 기 드보르Guy Debord가 디자인한 보드 게임을 온라인 게임으로 새로 만든다는 이야기를 듣고 고전 게임 매니아들인가보다 생각했지만, 갤러웨이의 게임과 소프트웨어, 네트워크 연구에 담긴 미학적, 정치적 의미에 대해 조금씩 알게 되면서 그의 작업 전반에 걸쳐 흥미를 가지게 되었다. [Continue Reading]

This talk has been *rescheduled* -- it's now happening on April 25 at 5pm Pacific (8pm Eastern). I'll be focusing specifically on building/rebuilding things (based on material from Uncomputable).

Please join the Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford for a presentation titled "Crystals, Genes, and Wool: Three Case Studies in Algorithmic Re-enactment" by Alexander R. Galloway, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. This free event will take place on Zoom on Tuesday, April 25th, from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm PDT.

An algebraic textile pattern from 1947, a cellular automata simulation from 1953, a tabletop game from 1977 – in this online workshop, we will explore three lost or otherwise overlooked pieces of code from the deep history of computational culture. Using an experimental method dubbed "algorithmic re-enactment," we will study these artifacts in their own historical context, while also bringing them to life again using current tools.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford. Please see the flyer and brief bio below for more information, and RSVP here to receive a Zoom link by email.

Launch Event -- Zoom Registration

Please join us on April 10 to launch the Being & Event Podcast. Over nine episodes, Andrew Culp & Alexander R. Galloway offer a close reading of philosopher Alain Badiou's major treatise Being and Event (1988) followed by special guest interviews.

Listen to the first two episodes via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other platforms.

New episodes will be released weekly during Spring 2023.

What does it mean to think and act “on the bias”? Inherently formal and spatial, if not also graphical, the diagonal line has played any number of important roles: from the diagonal of the unit square (which nearly destroyed Pythagoreanism and, later, played an important role in Plato’s Meno), to the modern intervention of Georg Cantor’s diagonal argument (where in 1891 he demonstrated that the real numbers are uncountable), to the structuralism of A.J. Greimas and Jacques Lacan, to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s postmodern machine, defined as a diagonal that cuts through an assemblage. More recently Sara Ahmed has used what she called “oblique or diagonal lines” to characterize queerness, and indeed the diagonal—whether alone or via synonyms like the oblique, the slanted or askew, the non-orthogonal—has come to indicate differences and deviations of all kinds. (Continue reading at ASAP/Journal)

Read a recent dialogue I had with artist Andrew Woolbright, just published in the March edition of The Brooklyn Rail.

On Andrew's prompting, I made a new Barricelli image of cellular automata to illustrate the piece. Andrew gave me a custom color palette to use, and I tweaked the parameters to better sync with the conversation (particularly the bit about smooth vs. striated).

This was recorded in person straight to tape, so please excuse all my disorganized grammar!

Announcing my Spring graduate seminar on The Digital and the Analog. The course is open to all graduate students at NYU, plus consortium students in the NYC area. Contact me if you have questions.

I gave a two-person talk with Nan Z. Da last fall at U. Michigan on the theme of "Digitality and Intent." Here is my text for the talk, slightly revised and expanded.

In prepping for this event, Nan and I decided on the theme of "Digitality and Intent" as a way to address one of the hard problems in computational approaches to literary study, namely the relationship between measured textual features and human intentionality. So let me begin by adopting the naive posture: what does "intent" mean? I propose to think about intent along three different lines.

In the context of digital inscription, intent might first appear as measurable qualities of users. One might pose the question "what is a user's intent?" And the answer typically revolves around the notion of features. A feature is simply some differential that is measurable. And the assumption among engineers is that these features inscribe user intent; the features are authorship in some basic sense. I stress that features really are any kind of differential whatsoever -- provided the differential can be positively measured. In mathematical terms, intent might be inscribed as a vector (or set of vectors), given that vectors are a simple way to register a differential. (Vectors are taught in school as having "a direction and a magnitude," although most computer languages store vectors simply as a pair of two points, starting point and ending point, which accomplishes the same thing.) And I still think McKenzie Wark wrote the definitive theoretical book on this, with her A Hacker Manifesto (2004), which elaborates the concepts of vector and vectoralist.

Given these features captured as measurement vectors, data science is often described as a "multidimensional" science. After all, a dimension is just an axis on which to measure. So if you have 17 measurement axes, you have 17 vectors, and you have a 17-dimensional space. This might not make much intuitive sense to everyday human experience, but a 17-dimensional space is completely normal in data science, just as an 88-dimensional space is normal in piano sheet music. The recent success of AI has a lot to do with these kinds of high-dimensional spaces (and the Linear Algebra necessary to calculate and transform them). Of course there are many problems with this approach, which I will merely hint at without attempting to resolve: Are you measuring accurately? Is your measurement model distorted by unwanted biases? Do measurements (no matter how complex and nuanced) effectively capture users' intent? Continue reading →