What does a thirteenth-century Majorcan missionary have to do with logical machines? Were the astrolabes of the late Middle Ages really only used to calculate the orbits of stars and planets, or were they philosophical instruments? Was the first avant garde in Russia more interested in Jesuit affect theory or H.G. Wells's time machine? Where do radar angels live? These excursions into the relationships between the arts, the sciences and technology lead neither to a revised history of art nor to a revised history of the media; they question our understanding of what we have defined as art and what we have seen as the media.

"Our endeavour is not to explain the history of the media as a consecutive retrospective, but to move from reflections about the deep time history of arts and sciences to speculations that reach into the present. The contributors to the third volume in the Variantology Series expand our ideas of the interplay between arts, technology, and science in at least three important ways: 1. Themes. Fireworks as a time-based praxis of performance, magnetised chess automata, paper-cuts, thermometers, radical interventions in the natural landscape by humans, and the com pass are revealed as areas where discoveries can be made that lead to much broader and richer concepts of what art and media are. 2. Regions. As we move with the authors from Europe to the Far East and back again it becomes absolutely clear that the history of the media cannot be written with only the former industrial metropolises of the world in our sights, beginning and ending there. 3. Time. The evolution of the Chinese culture of science and technology takes us into dimensions that add unsuspected energies and historical possibilities to the concept of deep time. Brecht's verdict from the 1920s that Chinese civilisation has already forgotten about innovations that the West proudly celebrates as innovations of the Modern Age, is given new meaning."--Publisher's description.

In seiner Arbeit entwickelt David Link (scheinbar) interaktive Werke, die sich an den Schnittstellen von Kunst, Wissenschaft und Technologie bewegen. Für LoveLetters_1.0 hat Link einen der frühesten programmierbaren Rechner, den Ferranti Mark 1, originalgetreu nachgebaut und ein ebenso frühes Computerprogramm, 1952 an der University of Manchester von Christopher Strachey entwickelt, rekonstruiert. Der Rechner wirft unter Verwendung eines Zufallsgenerators entstandene Liebesbriefe aus. Anonym adressiert an eine »Süße Liebe« oder eine »Prachtente«, sprechen sie die Leser überraschend menschlich-zärtlich an. Geoff Cox beleuchtet in seiner Einführung die Frage, die bereits der scheinbar widersprüchliche Titel des Notizbuchs, Das Herz der Maschine, nahelegt, nämlich ob die Maschine die menschliche Fähigkeit zu denken und zu fühlen an sich gerissen habe. David Link (*1971) ist Künstler und Medienarchäologe; er lebt und arbeitet in Köln. Geoff Cox ist derzeit wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Digital Urban Living Research Center der Universität Aarhus, Dänemark. Sprache: Deutsch/Englisch

Expanded, updated, and fully revised—the definitive introduction to electronic music is ready for new generations of students. Essential and state-of-the-art, The Computer Music Tutorial, second edition is a singular text that introduces computer and electronic music, explains its motivations, and puts topics into context. Curtis Roads’s step-by-step presentation orients musicians, engineers, scientists, and anyone else new to computer and electronic music. The new edition continues to be the definitive tutorial on all aspects of computer music, including digital audio, signal processing, musical input devices, performance software, editing systems, algorithmic composition, MIDI, and psychoacoustics, but the second edition also reflects the enormous growth of the field since the book’s original publication in 1996. New chapters cover up-to-date topics like virtual analog, pulsar synthesis, concatenative synthesis, spectrum analysis by atomic decomposition, Open Sound Control, spectrum editors, and instrument and patch editors. Exhaustively referenced and cross-referenced, the second edition adds hundreds of new figures and references to the original charts, diagrams, screen images, and photographs in order to explain basic concepts and terms. Features New chapters: virtual analog, pulsar synthesis, concatenative synthesis, spectrum analysis by atomic decomposition, Open Sound Control, spectrum editors, instrument and patch editors, and an appendix on machine learning Two thousand references support the book’s descriptions and point readers to further study Mathematical notation and program code examples used only when necessary Twenty-five years of classroom, seminar, and workshop use inform the pace and level of the material

Fun and Software offers the untold story of fun as constitutive of the culture and aesthetics of computing. Fun in computing is a mode of thinking, making and experiencing. It invokes and convolutes the question of rationalism and logical reason, addresses the sensibilities and experience of computation and attests to its creative drives. By exploring topics as diverse as the pleasure and pain of the programmer, geek wit, affects of play and coding as a bodily pursuit of the unique in recursive structures, Fun and Software helps construct a different point of entry to the understanding of software as culture. Fun is a form of production that touches on the foundations of formal logic and precise notation as well as rhetoric, exhibiting connections between computing and paradox, politics and aesthetics. From the formation of the discipline of programming as an outgrowth of pure mathematics to its manifestation in contemporary and contradictory forms such as gaming, data analysis and art, fun is a powerful force that continues to shape our life with software as it becomes the key mechanism of contemporary society. Including chapters from leading scholars, programmers and artists, Fun and Software makes a major contribution to the field of software studies and opens the topic of software to some of the most pressing concerns in contemporary theory.

"... Consider the idea of history and the artwork's moment in time; the intersection of geography and history in regional practice, illustrated by examples from Eastern Europe, Australia, and New Zealand; the contradictory scales of evolution, life cycles, and bodily rhythms in bio art; and the history of the future--how the future has been imagined, planned for, and established as a vector throughout the history of new media arts." --book jacket.

The aesthetic and political implications of working with code as procedure, expression, and action. Speaking Code begins by invoking the “Hello World” convention used by programmers when learning a new language, helping to establish the interplay of text and code that runs through the book. Interweaving the voice of critical writing from the humanities with the tradition of computing and software development, in Speaking Code Geoff Cox formulates an argument that aims to undermine the distinctions between criticism and practice and to emphasize the aesthetic and political implications of software studies. Not reducible to its functional aspects, program code mirrors the instability inherent in the relationship of speech to language; it is only interpretable in the context of its distribution and network of operations. Code is understood as both script and performance, Cox argues, and is in this sense like spoken language—always ready for action. Speaking Code examines the expressive and performative aspects of programming; alternatives to mainstream development, from performances of the live-coding scene to the organizational forms of peer production; the democratic promise of social media and their actual role in suppressing political expression; and the market's emptying out of possibilities for free expression in the public realm. Cox defends language against its invasion by economics, arguing that speech continues to underscore the human condition, however paradoxical this may seem in an era of pervasive computing.