Life in Code and Software

Mediated Life in a Complex Computational Ecology

ISBN: 978-1-60785-283-4
edited by David M. Berry

Introduction: What is Code and Software?

This book explores the relationship between living, code and software. Technologies of code and software increasingly make up an important part of our urban environment. Indeed, their reach stretches to even quite remote areas of the world. Life in Code and Software introduces and explores the way in which code and software are becoming the conditions of possibility for human living, crucially forming a computational ecology, made up of disparate software ecologies, that we inhabit. As such we need to take account of this new computational environment and think about how today we live in a highly mediated, code-based world. That is, we live in a world where computational concepts and ideas are foundational, or ontological, which I call computationality, and within which, code and software become the paradigmatic forms of knowing and doing. Such that other candidates for this role, such as: air, the economy, evolution, the environment, satellites, etc., are understood and explained through computational concepts and categories. (more...)

Thinking Software

Eric W. Weisstein: What is a Turing Machine?

David Barker-Plummer: Turing Machines

Achim Jung: A Short Introduction to the Lambda Calculus

Luciana Parisi & Stamatia Portanova: Soft Thought (in architecture and choreography)

David M. Berry: Understanding Digital Humanities

Edsger W. Dijkstra: Go To Statement Considered Harmful

Alan M. Turing: Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Martin Gardner: The Fantastic Combinations of John Conway's New Solitaire Game 'Life'

David Golumbia: Computation, Gender, and Human Thinking

Alan M. Turing: Extract from On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungs Problem

Video of a Turing Machine - Overview

Kevin Slavin: How Algorithms Shape Our World

Video shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture.

Code Literacy ('iteracy')

David M. Berry: Iteracy: Reading, Writing and Running Code

Ian Bogost: Procedural Literacy: Problem Solving with Programming, Systems, & Play

Cathy Davidson: Why We Need a 4th R: Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic, algoRithms

Jeannette M. Wing: Computational Thinking

Stephan Ramsay: On Building

Edsger W. Dijkstra: On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computing Science

Louis McCallum and Davy Smith: Show Us Your Screens

A short documentary about live coding practise by Louis McCallum and Davy Smith.

Jeannette M. Wing: Computational Thinking and Thinking About Computing'

Wing argues that computational thinking will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, she adds computational thinking to everyones' analytical ability.

why the lucky stiff: Hackety Hack: Learning to Code

why the lucky stiff (or _why) is a computer programmer, talking about learning to code.

Decoding Code

David M. Berry: A Contribution Towards a Grammar of Code

Mark C. Marino: Critical Code Studies

Lev Manovich: Software Takes Command

Dennis G. Jerz: Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original "Adventure" in Code and in Kentucky

Aleksandr Matrosov, Eugene Rodionov, David Harley, and Juraj Malcho, J.: Stuxnet Under the Microscope

Ralph Langner: Cracking Stuxnet, a 21st-century Cyber Weapon

A fascinating look inside cyber-forensics and the processes of reading code to understand how it works and what it attacks.

Stephen Ramsay: Algorithms are Thoughts, Chainsaws are Tools

A short film on livecoding presented as part of the Critical Code Studies Working Group, March 2010, by Stephen Ramsay. Presents a "live reading" of a performance by composer Andrew Sorensen.

Wendy Chun: Critical Code Studies

Wendy Chun giving a lecture on code studies and reading source code.

Federica Frabetti: Critical Code Studies

Federica Frabetti giving a lecture on code studies and reading source code.

David M. Berry: Thinking Software: Realtime Streams and Knowledge in the Digital Age

As software/code increasingly structures the contemporary world, curiously, it also withdraws, and becomes harder and harder for us to focus on as it is embedded, hidden, off-shored or merely forgotten about. The challenge is to bring software/code back into visibility so that we can pay attention to both what it is (ontology/medium), where it has come from (media archaeology/genealogy) but also what it is doing (through a form of mechanology), so we can understand this ‘dynamic of organized inorganic matter’.

Software Ecologies

Gabriella Coleman: The Anthropology of Hackers

Felix Guattari: The Three Ecologies

Robert Kitchin: The Programmable City

Bruno Latour: The Whole is Always Smaller Than Its Parts- A Digital Test of Gabriel Tarde’s Monads

Mathew Fuller and Sonia Matos: Feral Computing: From Ubiquitous Calculation to Wild Interactions

Jussi Parikka: Media Ecologies and Imaginary Media: Transversal Expansions, Contractions, and Foldings

David Gelernter: Time to Start Taking the Internet Seriously

Adrian Mackenzie: The Problem of Computer Code: Leviathan or Common Power?

Adrian Mackenzie: Wirelessness as Experience of Transition

Thomas Goetz: Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops

Christian Ulrik Andersen & Søren Pold: The Scripted Spaces of Urban Ubiquitous Computing: The Experience, Poetics, and Politics of Public Scripted Space

B.J. Fogg, Gregory Cuellar, and David Danielson: Motivating, Influencing, and Persuading Users

Alexander R. Galloway: "Deleuze and Computers" - Alexander R. Galloway

"Deleuze and Computers" - a lecture by Alexander R. Galloway at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on December 2nd, 2011.