Category: Software Studies

  • Wendy Chun on Software Code

    In her book Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011), Wendy Hui Kyong Chun develops her concept of “programmability” to argue that almost all social and economic institutions and procedures of life under capitalism are now shaped by software that pilots the unfolding of the future by intimately knowing data patterns and making extrapolations from the…

  • Hayles on Writing and Software Code

    In his book Does Writing Have a Future?, the luminary media theorist Vilém Flusser lays out an intellectual project of connecting the future of software code with the history of writing. The code of the future will become more like the writing of the past – or rather, in the future there will be an…

  • Paloque-Bergès and Sondheim on the Poetics of Code

    In her book Poétique des codes sur le réseau informatique: une investigation critique, Camille Paloque-Bergès examines the history of the writing practices of software code poetry. Her ultimate emphasis is on the concept of Codeworks which was originated by the theorist, artist, and poet Alan Sondheim. Codeworks is the literary writing of informatic code. It…

  • From Sociology to Media Studies to Software Studies, part one

    Friedrich Kittler was the founder of German media theory and media archaeology. I disagree with Kittler’s statement that there is no software and his belief that the numerical logic of the low-level hardware that Alan Turing and John von Neumann conceptualized in the 1930s-1940s is determining and decisive. In my view, just because the kernel or…

  • Die Software der Zukunft, von Alan N. Shapiro

    Übersetzung von Marcel Marburger This is the first section of the book Die Software der Zukunft by Alan N. Shapiro, published by the Walther König Verlag in 2014. Prolog Meine Vorgehensweise ist prinzipiell transdisziplinär. Transdisziplinarität ist nicht dasselbe wie Interdisziplinarität. Ich denke, dass Interdisziplinarität ineffizient ist, weil sie impliziert, dass es lediglich Dialoge und Kooperationen…

  • Transdisciplinary Code and Objects, by Alan N. Shapiro

    Baudrillard’s Impossible Exchange In Impossible Exchange, Baudrillard separates his system of thought from ‘neo-Marxist critical theory’, which, on the whole, is also a subject-centered perspective (although one could definitely find an ‘object-centered perspective’ in the original texts of ‘Frankfurt School’ thinkers like T.W. Adorno). “Critical thought,” writes Baudrillard, “sees itself as holding up a mirror…