Chun 2011

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011.

" All new media objects allegedly rely on—or, most strongly, can be reduced to —software, a visibly invisible or invisibly visible essence. Software seems to allow one to grasp the entire elephant because it is the invisible whole that generates the sensuous parts. Based on and yet exceeding our sense of touch—based on our ability to manipulate virtual objects we cannot entirely see—it is a magical source that promises to bring together the fractured field of new media studies and to encapsulate the difference this field makes. To know software has become a form of enlightenment: a Kantian release from self-incurred tutelage." (1)

"if software illuminates an unknown, it does so through an unknowable (software). This paradox—this drive to grasp what we do not know through what we do not entirely understand—this book argues, does not undermine, but rather grounds software’s appeal. Its combination of what can be seen and not seen, can be known and not known—its separation of interface from algorithm, of software from hardware—makes it a powerful metaphor for everything we believe is invisible yet generates visible effects, from genetics to the invisible hand of the market, from ideology to culture." (2)

"Computers—understood as software and hardware machines —this book argues, are mediums of power. This is not only because they create empowered users, but also and most importantly, because software’s vapory materialization and its ghostly interfaces embody—conceptually, metaphorically, virtually—a way to navigate our increasingly complex world." (2)

"To be apprehended, software’s dynamic porousness is often conceptually transformed into well-defined layers. Software’s temporality, in other words, is converted in part to spatiality, process in time conceived in terms of a process in space." (3)

shift in software from a service to a thing

Enlightenment era distinction between subject/object, internal/external being broken down; information is now always external to the thing that embodies it

"Software as thing has led to all “information” as thing. Software as thing reconceptualizes society, bodies, and memories in ways that both compromise and extend the subject, the user. Importantly, software as thing cannot be reduced to software as a commodity: software as “thing” is a return to older definitions of thing as a “gathering,” as pertaining to anything

related to “man.” Treating software as a thing means treating it, again, as a neighborhood, as an amalgamation." (6)

"Software as thing is a response to and product of changing relations between subjects and objects, of challenges brought about by computing as a neoliberal governmental technology." (6)

Foucault, governmentality - the conduct of conduct

"Computers embody a certain logic of governing or steering through the increasingly complex world around us. By individuating us and also integrating us into a totality, their interfaces offer us a form of mapping, of storing files central to our seemingly sovereign—empowered—subjectivity. By interacting with these interfaces, we are also mapped: data-driven machine learning algorithms process our collective data traces in order to discover underlying patterns (this process reveals that our computers are now more profound programmers than their human counterparts)." (9)

"New media, like the computer technology on which it relies, races simultaneously toward the future and the past, toward the bleeding edge of obsolescence. Software as thing is inseparable from the externalization of memory, from the dream and nightmare of an all-encompassing archive that constantly regenerates and degenerates, that beckons us forward and disappears before our very eyes." (11)