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.

Register Here

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.

I'm excited to announce three new essays that will be published in the next few months. I'll link to the texts once they become available.

"Golden Age of Analog," Critical Inquiry 48, no. 2 (Winter 2022)—Why in the digital age have some of our best thinkers turned toward characteristically analog themes?

"The Gender of Math," differences 32, no. 3 (2021)—Math has a gender issue...but how and why? On the problem of essential bias in mathematics, algorithms, and digital media.

"The Origin of Geometry," Grey Room 86 (Winter 2022)—What is a point? Here I address point as unity, puncture, and mark (or in the Greek tradition monas, stigme, and semeion).

Just arrived. Proud parent of a bouncing baby book! 

Please join Jacob Gaboury and me for a book talk next month. Webcast here --> https://nyu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUrduGopjIvHNTXD75_l1Y3oVgPJX9dPwR3

It will be "criss cross" format -- I'll introduce his new book and he'll do the same for mine.

Here's some more ephemera from the process of researching and writing Uncomputable. These images pertain to section IV of the book, titled "Computable Creatures," which explores the cellular automata work of Nils Aall Barricelli from the early 1950s. For these chapters I wrote a simple Processing sketch that mimicked Barricelli's original experiments. Here are some of the many failures -- and one or two successes -- in the process of debugging and fine tuning Barricelli's algorithm.

Note these images are meant to be read from top to bottom. They represent a temporal snapshot of evolutionary time. Color fields and textures represent discrete "creatures." According to Barricelli the creatures are alive, they evolve, mutate, and even die.

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First group.. these are the failures..

Some nice biodiversity through the first few hundred generations, but then disorganized static starts to take over. Barricelli was clear on this point: avoid monoculture but also avoid chaos. Find a balance between the two extremes. Continue reading →

(From e-flux journal)

Upon reading Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s 2019 essay “An Ecology of Operations: Vigilance, Radar, and the Birth of the Computer Screen,” I ended up having an extended email dialogue with the author, which has been condensed and edited here. What struck me most about Geoghegan’s essay was a fundamental question: Are computers a visual medium, like cinema or photography, or are computers better understood in nonvisual terms? While a term like “surveillance” evokes visual metaphors of watching and monitoring within computational capitalism, what if digital media operate more through “capture” and other nonvisual metaphors, as Phil Agre has argued?

Geoghegan and I began by discussing the relation between computation and visuality, but it soon became clear that we had very different positions on the nature of the digital and the analog. The conversation turned toward a slightly different set of questions: What is the digital? What is the analog? Both terms appear elementary at the outset. Yet they turn out to be teeming with technical and philosophical nuance. Conventionally speaking, digital technologies represent the world via discrete units, while analog technologies operate through continuous variation. At the same time, discrete and continuous techniques are some of the oldest in human culture, evident in poetry, music, metaphysics, politics, and many other areas. So do the narrow definitions of digital and analog tech also migrate into domains like aesthetics and philosophy? Would a digital aesthetics follow the principle of discrete units? Would a digital philosophy be discrete as well? And what would that mean in practice?

Digital devices are ubiquitous in contemporary life, yet, as this dialog reveals, some of the most basic questions of the digital age have yet to be answered.

Continue reading in e-flux journal

Guy Debord's "Game of War" is a huge part of Uncomputable. He provides the framing narrative in the preface. And section five on "Crystalline War" is largely devoted to Debord and his unexpected turn to game design. While I don't really talk about Kriegspiel in the book -- I wanted to focus on Debord's process, not my process -- I never could have written about Debord's game if I hadn't tried to rebuild it in software. So here's some ephemera collected over the course of designing and coding the Kriegspiel game software.

My deep gratitude to Mushon Zer-Aviv, whose art work appears below.

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Let's start with some early prototypes..

Developing the prototype. We eventually changed to different art work for the game pieces. Continue reading →

Happy to announce the re-launch of Kriegspiel. Fully rewritten from the ground up for iOS and macOS. Beta testing is now open! Please get in touch if you want to help as a tester.

Excited to learn that Uncomputable is now printed! I'm still waiting to see a physical copy, but it should be soon. You can pre-order the book for 40% off at the Verso website. Planning some fun release events with friends and colleagues -- more on that soon. Anyone who wants to teach chapters from the book this term or next, please feel free to reach out. I'm happy to Zoom in to your class.

In the meantime here's some ephemera from the researching and drafting of the book.. which as you can see took me in some strange and interesting directions. This is from section two, which focuses on the intersection of weaving and computation through the work of Ada K. Dietz.

Planning out the loom tie-up and treadling for the weaving "AKDietz-2-3-O" by Ada K Dietz.

Analyzing and planning the weave for "AKDietz-6-2-SW" by Ada K Dietz. This was the most sophisticated work in her series of algebraic weaving patterns.

"AKDietz-6-2-SW" by Ada K Dietz -- I had to weave it twice to get it right ... but finally success! (The image on page 96 of Uncomputable actually has a glaring error -- which I decided to leave as an easter egg for attentive readers..)Hard at work on my "computer."

I've been finishing an essay for a friend about Friedrich Kittler and the "media a priori" of philosophy. It's an idea I have had on the back burner for several years. Ever since Wolfgang Ernst told me the story of Heidegger's radio--a burgundy Grundig 88, which he belatedly allowed into his otherwise techno-primitive hillside cabin during the Cuban Missile Crisis on fears of nuclear catastrophe--I've thought a lot about the technologies beneath and behind philosophy. I'm thinking of Freud's mystic writing-pad, or Nietzsche's typewriter (which Kittler devoted a whole chapter to in Discourse Networks). But that's just the start... Why not also Sarah Kofman's camera obscura, Du Bois's data vis, Derrida's Macintosh, Deleuze's VCR...a parade of philosophy's media a priori. Continue reading →