Cookies UI

computation

Life with computers has changed the way we see and think. A thorough understanding of the import of that change is difficult to attain. We tend to focus on the epiphenomena rather than the deep structure of computational culture. We are immersed in brands, in products, in the spectacle and the experience mediated by computers and screens, but we rarely consider data as such, or what a system is. And yet, data and system are the concepts that affect our way of seeing and thinking and make them radically different after the recent ubiquity of computers.

Date
Images

Animal painting is popular again; the evidence is on YouTube. But it was popular in the Fifties and Sixties too and taken seriously by some in the art world and certainly by some biologists. Congo, the painting chimpanzee was a star.

Date
October, 2009

A particular figure of absence seems to possess a suspicious connotative efficacy in its deployment within language and as a visual figure. What is at stake in the use of the empty square? A clue to answering lies in the relation of two series which can be used to describe the mechanisms of computation. These are: the series of creation, including invention, birth, production, etc.; and the series of rule, including conditionality, boundary, possibility, etc. The two series are clearly gendered opposites that correlate with Oedipal principles.

Date
Images

Thus Arriving At The Possibility Of Computation. The invention of the computer is traced to what came to be called the Turing Machine after the author of the 1936 paper “On Computable Numbers, With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” in which it was proposed. The tragic life of the Alan Turing is here figured as an embodiment of his invention

Date
May, 2004

The Turing machine (and thus, the computer) resembles the generalized semiotic structure. It consists of the conjunction of two series inside of a container. One series is made up of states out of a set of finite possibilities, the order of which proceeds by means of a determinate set of rules. The other is a series of symbols arranged in time along a potentially infinite ribbon of inscription, where the value of the symbols is dependent on their order. The machine is a conjunctive emptiness, which produces in movement.

Date