Description
Book SynopsisTechnology is a host of social, material, and epistemic transformation techniques, tools, and methods. The common perception of digital technology today is that it is determined, even over-determined. This volume suggests a different view: the digital is indeterminate. Mobilising insights from philosophy, art and architecture theory, mathematics, computer science and anthropology, it situates digital indeterminacy within the wider context of material and immaterial processes, causations, triggerings, modes of unintended conditioning, and their performative working.
Part I, Social-Digital Technologies juxtaposes arguments for machinic/algorithmic indeterminacy to those of (over)determination in blockchain, cognitive augmentation, and digital ideology. Part II Spatial, Temporal, Aural and Visual Technologies delves deeper into received ideas about non-digital technologies such as those used for building spatial structures, manufacturing instruments and constructing the visual space. Part III Epistemic Technologies analyses the use of plasticity in cognitive science, contingency in thinking habits, ontogenesis in experimental computing, and divination techniques with an inbuilt margin of indeterminacy. The book’s tripartite structure reflects technology’s inherent capacity to transform knowledges, practices, and ‘the past’.
Table of ContentsPrologue: Normalising Catastrophe or Revealing Mysterious Sur-Chaotic Micro-Worlds?, Natasha Lushetich, Iain Campbell and Dominic Smith
Part I: Social-Digital Technologies
1. Information and Alterity: From Probability to Plasticity, Ashley Woodward
2. Transcendental Instrumentality and Incomputable Thinking, Luciana Parisi
3. Digital Ontology and Contingency, Aden Evens
4. Blockchain Owns You: From Cypherpunk to Self-Sovereign Identity, Alesha Serada
5. The Double Spiral of Chaos and Automation, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi
Part II: Spatial, Temporal, Aural and Visual Technologies
6. Allagmatics of Architecture: From Generic Structures to Genetic Operations (and Back), Andrej Radman
7. Computation and Material Transformations: Dematerialisation, Re-materialisation and Dematerialisation in Time-Based Media, Oswaldo Emiddio Vasquez Hadjilyra
8. How the Performer Came to be Prepared: Three Moments in Music’s Encounter with Everyday Technology, Iain Campbell
9. The Given and the Made: Thinking Transversal Plasticity with Duchamp, Brecht and Troika’s Artistic Technologies, Natasha Lushetich
10. Ananke’s Sway: Architectures of Synaptic Passages, Stavros Kousoulas
Part III: Epistemic Technologies
11. Outline to an Architectonics of Thermodynamics: Life’s Entropic Indeterminacy, Joel White
12. Irreversibility and Uncertainty: Revisiting Prigogine in the Digital Age, Peteer Müürsepp
13.“At the Crossroads…”: Essence and Plasticity in Catherine Malabou’s Philosophy of Plasticity, Stephen Darren Dougherty
14. Ugly David and the Magnetism of Everyday Technologies: On Hume, Habit, and Hindsight, Dominic Smith
15. Adjacent Possibles: Indeterminacy and Ontogenesis, Sha Xin Wei
Epilogue: Schrödinger’s Spider in the African Bush: Coping with Indeterminacy in the Framing of Questions to Mambila Spider Divination, David Zeitlyn
