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Uncomputable:Play and Politics In the Long Digital Age
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A journey through the uncomputable remains of computer history
Narrating some lesser known episodes from the deep history of digital machines, Alexander R. Galloway explains the technology that drives the world today, and the fascinating people who brought these machines to life. With an eye to both the computable and the uncomputable, Galloway shows how computation emerges or fails to emerge, how the digital thrives but also atrophies, how networks interconnect while also fray and fall apart. By re-building obsolete technology using today's software, the past comes to light in new ways, from intricate algebraic patterns woven on a hand loom, to striking artificial-life simulations, to war games and back boxes. A description of the past, this book is also an assessment of all that remains uncomputable as we continue to live in the aftermath of the long digital age.
Reviews
Galloway's work is conceptually sharp, visually compelling and completely attuned to the political moment.
An engaging methodological hybrid of the Frankfurt School and UNIX for Dummies. Galloway brings the uncool question of morality back into critical thinking.
Praise for Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture:
This is contemporary media theory at its best.
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The Interface Effect builds on the work of Marxist critical theorists such as Fredric Jameson, new media scholars such as Wendy Chun, and Galloway’s own work in earlier books such as Protocol. An interface, for him, becomes a technique for thought: an 'allegorical device' that makes the social world accessible in an age of information. The Interface Effect raises many critical questions about the ways that contemporary human beings mediate a historical present that invariably eludes us.
Los Angeles Review of Books -
Employing a sustained, powerful methodology, The Interface Effect sparkles with original insights. Galloway is interested not only in the effects that interfaces have, but also in them as themselves the results of cultural, technological, economic, and political forces. This double movement provides a way to connect the historical with the political, and the technological with both. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in new media studies, contemporary theory, and digital technologies.
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Galloway’s theorisation of the computer as a mode of mediation offers rich possibilities for the critical analysis of the digital.
Radical Philosophy -
The Interface Effect fuses sophisticated contemporary theory with a detailed knowledge of the technics and techniques of digital media. Galloway is an important voice, and the book is sure to have a wide uptake among those interested in new media theory and contemporary aesthetics.
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Praise for The Exploit:
Essential reading for all theorists, artists, activists, techheads, and hackers of the Net. -
Alexander Galloway's Uncomputable is a brilliant counter-history of some of the technological worlds we are all currently inhabiting. In this enthralling genealogy of computation, we encounter a refreshingly unfamiliar constellation of marginalized or overlooked practices, theories, artifacts and individual innovators.
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How to translate political struggle into algorithm? How to transpose material entanglement into executable operations? What is the relation between passion, heartbreak and mathematics and what are the losses incurred by moving in-between them? Alexander Galloway's intelligent and delicate treatise draws out the tensions between matter and thought, the invisible and the sharp impact of historical manifestation, the palpable and the operational and these other, unspeakable things and situations, that keep evading through the cracks, shining.
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Through a series of wonderfully surprising hidden histories of computation, Galloway provides a radically different perspective on the digital age and computational media, illuminating its limitations and its possibilities.
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At a historical moment characterized by totalizing forms of data-capture, rabid machine learning algorithms, and the colonization of everyday life by the logics of computation and capital, Galloway asks a pointed question: “What if things were otherwise?” Using case studies from across the arts, humanities, and sciences, Uncomputable shows the alternate pathways of history, and provides a glimpse towards a theory, practice, and politics of radical refusal whose timeliness could not be more relevant.