

Programmed Visions: how do we analyze, organize, and build with the undead? - walterbell
http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2011/09/26/book-review-programmed-visions-by-wendy-hui-kyong-chun/

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walterbell
From a longer review of the same book:

[http://computationalculture.net/review/review-programmed-
vis...](http://computationalculture.net/review/review-programmed-visions-
software-and-memory)

"Software is at once knowable (e.g., through programming languages) and not at
all (e.g., computer performance exceeds human perception). Code is
simultaneously accessible (e.g., “view source”) and nebulous (e.g., subject to
an array of both machine and human interpretations). Media represent both
permanence (e.g., they can always be upgraded) and decay (e.g., they always
have to be upgraded).

... our embodied interactions with screens are habituated (e.g., through
interface design), and “our computers execute in unforeseen ways” (9). The
visible and invisible coalesce at our fingertips, and whatever is on display
is always elsewhere—read here, written there.

... When the ENIAC was being developed during the 1940s, male analysts would
speak commands at female operators, who would then translate those commands
into input for the “Giant Brain.” In this real-time interaction between man,
woman, and machine, women can be read more or less as software. They directly
executed commands before there was a command line or a graphical user
interface.

... technologies that store everything discretely and act as universal
archives. The fetish for the former eclipses the ways in which the latter is
really about “the undead of information”—its persistent de- and regeneration,
its repeated resuscitation, and its simultaneous presence and absence (172,
177).

... how exactly do we develop interfaces that are more productively spectral?
How and for whom do we create software that is inclined to surprise? What are
some existing examples, and how would learning from them affect coding,
designing, and architecting practices? In short, how do we analyze, organize,
and build with the undead?"

