[ok-london] Computational Culture: Double Book Launch and Launch of Computational Culture, a journal of software studies

[Matthew Fuller]

Computational Culture: Double Book Launch and Launch of Computational 
Culture, a journal of software studies


Thursday 8th December 2011
5.30-7.30pm

Room: New Academic Building, LG01
Goldsmiths
New Cross London

Free, All Welcome

To Celebrate the launch of the journal Computational Culture, the editorial 
group presents book launch presentations by Olga Goriunova and Adrian 
Mackenzie.

>Computational Culture
Computational Culture is an online open-access peer-reviewed journal of 
inter-disciplinary enquiry into the nature of the culture of computational 
objects, practices, processes and structures.  The journal’s primary aim 
is to examine the ways in which software undergirds and formulates 
contemporary life. Computational processes and systems not only enable 
contemporary forms of work and play and the management of emotional life 
but also drive the unfolding of new events that constitute political, 
social and ontological domains. In order to understand digital objects such 
as corporate software, search engines, medical databases or to enquire into 
the use of mobile phones, social networks, dating, games, financial systems 
or political crises, a detailed analysis of software cannot be avoided.
Issue One, A Billion Gadget Minds, is published in November: 
http://www.computationalculture.net/

>Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet
Olga Goriunova
Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies

In this book, Goriunova offers a critical analysis of the processes that 
produce digital culture. Digital cultures thrive on creativity, developing 
new forces of organization to overcome repetition and reach brilliance. In 
order to understand the processes that produce culture, the author 
introduces the concept of the art platform, a specific configuration of 
creative passions, codes, events, individuals and works that are propelled 
by cultural currents and maintained through digitally native means. Art 
platforms can occur in numerous contexts bringing about genuinely new 
cultural production, that, given enough force, come together to sustain an 
open mechanism while negotiating social, technical and political modes of 
power.
Software art, digital forms of literature, 8-bit music, 3D art forms, 
pro-surfers, and networks of geeks are test beds for enquiry into what 
brings and holds art platforms together. Goriunova provides a new means of 
understanding the development of cultural forms on the Internet, placing 
the phenomenon of participatory and social networks in a conceptual and 
historical perspective, and offering powerful tools for researching 
cultural phenomena overlooked by other approaches.
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415893107/
Olga Goriunova is Senior Lecturer in Media Practices at London Metropolitan 
University, curator of the recent show Funware (Arnolfini, Mu, Baltan) and 
an editor of Computational Culture.

>Wirelessness, Radical Empiricism in Network Cultures
Adrian Mackenzie

The MIT Press

How has wirelessness—being connected to objects and infrastructures 
without knowing exactly how or where—become a key form of contemporary 
experience? Stretching across routers, smart phones, netbooks, cities, 
towers, Guangzhou workshops, service agreements, toys, and states, wireless 
technologies have brought with them sensations of change, proximity, 
movement, and divergence. In Wirelessness, Adrian Mackenzie draws on 
philosophical techniques from a century ago to make sense of this most 
contemporary postnetwork condition. The radical empiricism associated with 
the pragmatist philosopher William James, Mackenzie argues, offers fresh 
ways for matching the disordered flow of wireless networks, meshes, 
patches, and connections with felt sensations.

For Mackenzie, entanglements with things, gadgets, infrastructures, and 
services—tendencies, fleeting nuances, and peripheral shades of often 
barely registered feeling that cannot be easily codified, symbolized, or 
quantified—mark the experience of wirelessness, and this links directly 
to James's expanded conception of experience. "Wirelessness" designates a 
tendency to make network connections in different times and places using 
these devices and services. Equally, it embodies a sensibility attuned to 
the proliferation of devices and services that carry information through 
radio signals. Above all, it means heightened awareness of ongoing change 
and movement associated with networks, infrastructures, location, and 
information.

The experience of wirelessness spans several strands of media-technological 
change, and Mackenzie moves from wireless cities through signals, devices, 
networks, maps, and products, to the global belief in the expansion of 
wireless worlds.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12285

Adrian Mackenzie is Reader and Codirector at the Centre for Science Studies 
at Lancaster University, U.K, author of Cutting Code, software and society 
and Transductions, bodies and machines at speed and an editor of 
Computational Culture.



Presented by the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of 
London
http://www.gold.ac.uk/cultural-studies/


_________________________________
Dr. Matthew Fuller
David Gee Reader in Digital Media

Centre for Cultural Studies
Goldsmiths College
University of London
New Cross
London SE14 6NW

e: m.fuller at gold.ac.uk
t: +44 (0)20 7919 7206
w: http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cultural-studies/staff/m-fuller.php