Heretical Computing
Digital and analog, what do these terms mean today? One common response to the question of the digital is to make reference to things like Twitter, Playstation, or computers in general. Indeed the definition of “digital” is too often eclipsed by a kind of fever-pitched industrial bonanza around the latest technologies and the latest commercial ventures. In this seminar we will define the digital and analog explicitly, not merely by reference to actually existing media technologies, but also, and perhaps more importantly, through encounters with a series of theorists and philosophers. Yet digital and analog modes of representation, while dominant, do not begin to exhaust the many varieties of being and doing. In pursuit of a type of “heretical computing,” we will explore the outer limits of technics through forms of hypertrophic digitality and exotic analogicity. What is more digital than the digital? What is more analog than the analog? Or the reverse: is it possible to degrow the digital down into something else entirely? Our focus will ultimately turn to techniques of encryption, compression, entropy, indeterminancy, opacity, and generic science.
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Heretical Computing
Mon, Nov 16, 20206:30 pm to 8:30 pm -
Tue, Nov 17, 20206:30 pm to 8:30 pm
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Wed, Nov 18, 20206:30 pm to 8:30 pm
Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programmer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, he is the author of several books on digital media and critical theory, including The Interface Effect. His collaboration with Eugene Thacker and McKenzie Wark, Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation was published by the University of Chicago Press. With Jason E. Smith, Galloway co-translated the Tiqqun book Introduction to Civil War. For ten years he worked with RSG on Carnivore, Kriegspiel, and other software projects. Galloway’s last book was a monograph on the work of François Laruelle. He is currently finishing a new manuscript on the deep history of computation.
- Aria Dean, “On the Black Generic.”
- Galloway and LaRiviere, “Compression in Philosophy.”
- Brian Massumi, “On the Superiority of the Analog.”
- Kaja Silverman, “The Miracle of Analogy” (excerpt).
- Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image.”
- Calvin Warren, “The Catastrophe: Black Feminist Poethics, (Anti)form, and Mathematical Nihilism.”
- Anthony Wilden, “Analog and Digital Communication.”