书籍 Programmed Visions的封面

Programmed Visions

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

出版社

The MIT Press

出版时间

2011-04-28

ISBN

9780262015424

评分

★★★★★
书籍介绍

New media thrives on cycles of obsolescence and renewal: from celebrations of cyber-everything to Y2K, from the dot-com bust to the next big things -- mobile mobs, Web 3.0, cloud computing. In Programmed Visions, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that these cycles result in part from the ways in which new media encapsulates a logic of programmability. New media proliferates "programmed visions," which seek to shape and predict -- even embody -- a future based on past data. These programmed visions have also made computers, based on metaphor, metaphors for metaphor itself, for a general logic of substitutability. Chun argues that the clarity offered by software as metaphor should make us pause, because software also engenders a profound sense of ignorance: who knows what lurks behind our smiling interfaces, behind the objects we click and manipulate? The combination of what can be seen and not seen, known (knowable) and not known -- its separation of interface from algorithm and software from hardware -- makes it a powerful metaphor for everything we believe is invisible yet generates visible, logical effects, from genetics to the invisible hand of the market, from ideology to culture.

用户评论
Software study蛮有意思的,可以让新媒体研究进入学术研究。但是wendy chun虽然有哲学积淀还是偏社会学角度切入,还是Kittler比较有趣。 byebye Brown
I love Wendy Chun, her books are amazing and hearing her talk is such an enjoyable experience for the mind.
书的两大论述方向是阐释对软件的fetish(即把软件看作运算过程的发起和执行者)及追溯电脑发展过程中和基因学的互动,及二者如何塑造新自由主义经济中empowered yet precarious的主体。总觉得这之间还有一层有待实现的论述。作者自己也在第二篇后记中提到软件和种族的共性,即假设可见之物和不可见之力之间的对应性(indexicaity,system of equivalence)。这种对应性表现为指令和行动、文本(代码/基因)和表达之间的的因果关系,而建立这种因果关系才能让当下的某种秩序持续重生、未来可测。作者用enduring ephemeral来概括新媒介带来的视觉知识库,但这种不断重生的速朽何以既是视觉和权力之间的粘合剂、又是抵达既定未来之外世界的通道,期待在之后作品中看到。
點名簿。
a present based on the past