The Machine in the Text, and the Text in the Machine
“The Machine in the Text, and the Text in the Machine” is a review essay on Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2008), by N. Katherine Hayles, and Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. Both works make remarkable contributions for the emerging field of digital literary studies and for the theory of digital media. While Hayles analyses the interaction between humans and computing machines as embodied in electronic works, Kirschenbaum conceptualizes digitality at the level of inscription and establishes a social text rationale for electronic objects. The emergence of electronic literature can be seen in a growing body of digitally born artifacts. Most of these works are now published online and they are produced, distributed, and executed by digital machines. The parallel evolution of electronic computers and communication networks during the past twenty years has transformed writing and reading practices, and has deeply altered the electronic landscape itself. Mutations in media technologies have originated not only new sets of relations between print codex and computer display, but they have also redefined the ecology of all other media. These momentous changes are part of a large cluster of social and cultural transformations that characterize contemporary culture, which can be accurately described as a software culture. In their new books, N. Katherine Hayles and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum refine our understanding of electronic literature and digital materiality. In this review essay I look at their critical approaches and try to explain why both books make outstanding contributions to the field of new media studies. Literature as Human-Machine Intermediation Linking subjectivity with computational media is a highly contested project in which the struggle for dominance plays a central role: should the body be subject to the machine, or the machine to the body? The stakes are nothing less than whether the embodied human becomes the center for humanistic inquiry within which digital media can be understood, or whether media provide the context and ground for configuring and disciplining the body. [Hayles 2008a, 87] In The Language of New Media (2001), Lev Manovich defined new media as the result of the combination of modern media and computers. He synthesized the features of new media in five principles: numerical representation, modularity (these are the two basic material principles of data processing upon which the other three depend), automation, variability, and cultural transcodification. Manovich’s fifth principle — which describes the social effects of the intertwining of computer and cultural layers — provided a sound theoretical basis for the relatively new field of software studies, i.e., for the cultural analysis of the interactions between computer programs and human practices (cf. [Manovich 2008]). Software mediation is perhaps the main cultural aspect of digital culture because all human-machine interactions are enabled and shaped by features of the software. N. Katherine Hayles’s approach in Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2008) follows a similar software and cultural analytics rationale. A survey of contemporary electronic literature in English functions, at the same time, as a theoretical investigation into the aesthetic and cultural materiality of digital media. Hayles analyses digital genres and
Global mapping of artificial intelligence in Google and Google Scholar
The worldwide presence of AI needs to be quantified. This study proposes a descriptive approach and the use of multiple methods and data. An extensive electronic corpus of books was utilized to see the worldwide drift of intellectuals’ minds toward AI and identified related terms, their future trends, and convergence. Using the best bigram proposed by Ngrams Viewer, this study explores the human mind through Google query data, linking popular regions, countries, and related topics to the concept of AI. URL datasets were collected using two popular search engines (SEs), Google and Google Scholar (GS). A URL analysis identified key entities (organizations, institutes, and countries) and their yearly trends. Top-level domains revealed the global web ecology and the annual information growth of AI in SE environments. Information gathered through one approach was fed into the other, revealing a complementary relationship. AI is popular across the globe, and has left traces in many different countries. In this field, GS dominates Google, in relation to the number of sites and domains it includes. Top results reveal the popularity of AI among professionals, artists, programmers, and researchers. The pros and cons of the approaches are also discussed. In addition, this study aims to predict the impact of AI on society, as interpreted through the lenses of well-established theories. The dominance of AI may trap society into aspiring toward an easy life, dependent on intelligent machines. Consistent policies are needed to smooth out future economic cycles in the AI field.
Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics
Art and Value is the first comprehensive analysis of art's political economy to be found in classical, neoclassical and Marxist economics. It provides a critical-historical survey of the theories of art's economic exceptionalism, of art as a merit good, and of the theories of art's commodification, the culture industry and real subsumption. Through an exacting critique of mainstream and Marxist theories of art's economics, the book arrives at a new and highly original Marxist theory of art's economic exceptionalism.