On Manovich

I’m sure I’m not the only one annoyed by the seemingly constant interruptions to my work caused by my computer trying to update some part of the software that runs on it. As Cory Doctorow shows so clearly, the tech industry will not actually leave us to our own devices. I ...
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Wendy Chun, on software and the machine

Is the relation between the analog and the digital itself analog or digital? That might be one way of thinking the relation between the work of Alexander Galloway and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. I wrote elsewhere about Galloway’s notion of software as a simulation of ideology. Here I take up Chun’s of software as ...
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On Galloway

Take the tv show, 24. In what sense could one say that the show is ‘political’? It certainly appears so in a ‘red state’ sort of way. The Jack Bauer character commits all sorts of crimes, including torture, in the name of ‘national security.’ But perhaps there’s more to it. Galloway draws ...
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Lazzarato and Pasolini

I have a passing acquaintance with the work of Felix Guattari, but the person who perhaps knows his work best is Maurizio Lazzarato. His recently translated book Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity (Semiotext(e), 2014) shows the ongoing usefulness of the “anti-sociology” (120) that Guattari elaborated, both alone and in ...
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