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technophilosophy

Parametric Protest

The Occupy protests embodied a structure of dissemination and of identification that is also in evidence in computational media. This essay describes the style of sloganeering used by occupy protesters that we now would recognize as "meme culture" and connects that structure with the parametric structure of computation. 

Thinkings: How Computers Change The Way We See By Altering The Way We Think

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.

Rules, Games, Theories

These essays are from the catalog of "The Rules of the Game | The Game of the Rules." They attempt to frame the constellation of game, software and political allegory that were at the center of that project. An edition of 100 copies of the catalog were printed and distributed at the Whitney ISP exhibition at Artist Space.

Do You Feel Me Now?

The reception of Bridget Riley's paintings in the 60s serve as an example for thinking about how a notion like kinesthetic empathy might be used to explain a viewers relationship to painting. It suggests a path away from an insistently integrative ego that is incapable of an empathetic attitude towards the other constructed within an unbridgeable difference. Heteropathic identifications with unidealized images of the other interrupts the stubborn refusal of difference. Our experience of a variety of art forms demonstrates this possibility.

A C[o]unt of the Womb

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.

10 concepts of computation (arranged in order of increasing outrageousness)

The ideational threads that weave their way through this list summarize the obsessions that motivated my work during the five previous years. There is a trajectory here: from a concern for the abstract, theoretical underpinnings of computer technology, to the intertwining of technical and cultural logics in the lives and politics of the people who create and use computers.

The Container Object as a Structure of Concept and Computation

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.