Description
Book SynopsisIn
Listening in the Afterlife of Data, David Cecchetto theorizes sound, communication, and data by analyzing them in the contexts of the practical workings of specific technologies, situations, and artworks. In a time he calls the afterlife of data—the cultural context in which data’s hegemony persists even in the absence of any belief in its validity—Cecchetto shows how data is repositioned as the latest in a long line of concepts that are at once constitutive of communication and suggestive of its limits. Cecchetto points to the failures and excesses of communication by focusing on the power of listening—whether through wearable technology, internet-based artwork, or the ways in which computers process sound—to pragmatically comprehend the representational excesses that data produces. Writing at a cultural moment in which data has never been more ubiquitous or less convincing, Cecchetto elucidates the paradoxes that are constitutive of computation
Trade Review“David Cecchetto makes an insightful, exciting, and original intervention in the possibility (or impossibility) of relating to humans and machines and, in pure pragmatist spirit, thinking and doing. Addressing urgent questions about the role, use, and scope of computational data within contemporary society and culture, Cecchetto challenges established orthodoxies that interpret relationships between the universal and the particular within communication.
Listening in the Afterlife of Data will have a great impact in media and sound studies. It is a precious resource.” -- M. Beatrice Fazi, author of * Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics *
“Rich in paradoxical thought, David Cecchetto’s book explores the incommunication at the heart of communication. Doubling the paradox doubling, he finds that incommunication nevertheless always communicates something. Challenging and intensely rewarding, this book is highly recommended for any interested in data, communication, and listening as an aesthetic response as well as an acoustic sense.” -- N. Katherine Hayles, author of * Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction. Incommunication 1
1. Networking Sound and Medium Specificity 21
2. Listening and Technicity 44
3. Incomputable and Integral Incommunications 62
4. Algorithms, Art, and Sonicity 84
5. Listening and Technicity (Once and for All, Again and Again) 105
Postscript. Epidemiological Afterlives 124
Appendix. Aural Incommunications Seminar Prompt 131
Notes 135
Bibliography 155
Index 163
