Roots, Reverberations
Parallel genealogy: amateur, academic, experimental, free - trajectories to consider
Software as field /"realised instrumentality"
"Software is seen as a tool, something you do something with. It is neutral grey, or optimistically blue. On the one hand, this ostensive neutrality can be taken as it's ideological layer, as deserving of critique as any such myth. But this interpretation itself one that emphasises only critique can block a more inventive engagement with software's particular qualities and propensities. Working with specifities of software at the multiple scales at which it occurs is a way to get past this dichotomy" (pp 3)
Technologisation of the senses and structuring of relations by technology carried out by naturalised means
Naturalised means - Optimal solution is often one that is most amenable to technical description (based on normalised pre-cursors). However, when software is used in interrogable or hackable way, "it allows and encourages those networked or enmeshed within it to gain traction on its multiple scales of operation" (pp 4)
Theoretical blockage
Software(s) perceived immateriality is cited as a cause for the 'blockage'.
Ways to unblock/ forward:
1. "Gather together forms of knowledge that couple software with other kinds of thinking is hopefully a way of enlarging the capacity of hackability itself to be hacked from all directions" (pp 4)
2. Consider Software(s) Materiality: It is operative at many scales - the particular characteristics of a language or form of interface "How it describes or enables certain kinds of programmability or use; how its compositional terms inflect and produce certain kinds of effects such as glitches, cross platform compatibility, or ease of sharing and distribution; how through both artifact and intent, events can occur at the level of models of user subjectivity or forms of computational power, that exceed those of pre-existing social formatting or demand new figures of knowledge" (pp 4)
3. Look beyond the 'Information and Communications Technology' model (shunt content from point A - B) which aims critical faculties at what happens around or through software. What of the neglected aspect of computation? Which involves possibilities for virtuality, simulation, abstraction, feedback and autonomous processes. What is software? What does it do? What can it be coupled with?
Computation - paradoxical domain
Computation (internal) = toy world of conformity. Software is computation but it must come into combination with what lies outside of code - "gains it's power as a social or cultural artifact and process by mans of better and better accommodation to behaviours and bodies which happen on it' outside" (pp 5)
1. It is this paradox, the ability to mix the formalised with the messy - non-mathematical formalisms, linguistic, visual objects and codes, vents occurring tat every scale from the ecological to the erotic and political - which gives software it's powerful effects and which folds back into software in it's existence as culture.
Parallels, Precursors
A. Free and OS
Results in new ways of thinking about `SW because process of writing SW opens up process of talking and thinking about it.
B. Art & Design: Objects, devices and other materials have a politic
[..]" that they engage in the arrangement and composition of energies, allow, encourage or block certain kinds of actions"
1. Shifting focus from epistemology to way in which things are embedded and produce certain kinds of knowledge and possibility of interaction with the world - useful
Stuff behind Stuff
A. Software is now unevenly a part of popular/ mass culture
A/1. Knowledge of how to make it, engage with it and use it more generally increasing.
B. Programming is a live process of engagement between thinking with and working on materials and the problem space. This amounts to new forms of intelligence and the requirement for new forms of intelligence.
