Here, engineering documents were as likely a source of inspiration as Gilles Deleuze or Marshall McLuhan, resulting in a ‘material turn’ constituted by highly engaging work such as Alex Galloway’s protocological network theory or the more recent forensic hard drive analysis of Matthew Kirschenbaum. Software Studies: A Lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller, should be considered as explicitly positioned in relation to this transition and its concerns.
I very much conceived of Mechanisms as a contribution to software studies, so it's nice to be in such good company.
2 comments:
Funny how a harddrive and stone tablet have so much in common. They both are material man-contrived objects that have data inscribed, involving translation of these "symbols", if you will. to real wold human logistic comunication. In the broad perspective of data preservation, much has not changed in the last 6000 years or so.
Uncle Jamison
Spring of 1973, just outside of Berkeley, I recall being introduced to a "personal computer". The question at that time was "what do we do with this thing?" It had no software, only the BIOS language to allow a boot, and a feeble kind of program to allow the machine to flash a series of lights in any pre-arranged sequence as desired, obviously a batch file of some sort. Infancy.
The beautiful outcome of all this was watching local communities in the East bay such as " Orinda", just near Berkeley, gradually turn from small, sleepy no-name towns, to thriving cutting edge software development arenas. Who knew? The information age came upon us as a non-predictable result of the technology of "memory preservation and encoding of bits and bytes, aka data". The software created such as basic operating systems just to make the "thing" do something almost accidentily,luckily, stumbled into the fruition that I`m sure no one would have predicted.
JK
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