Computational Thinking: Lecture 7: Consuming

Computational Thinking

Joel Gethin Lewis

Lecture 7: Consuming

Review where we are in the lectures.
Ant Farm, A Hole in Space and The secret war between uploading and downloading.
Genes and Memes and the Alt Right.
William Gibson and Atemporality.
Disney eating the Commons and Relational Aesthetics.
Aaron Swartz, Mark Fisher, Rutger Bregman and Timothy Morton.
Bonus: The EM Spectrum, how long a nanosecond is, Hedy Lamarr and Frequency Hopping.

Ant Farm. Spatial Agency article. Video of Media Burn on Ubuweb - which is a brilliant resource for avant-garde art in general.
Hole in Space by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz. Video excerpt.
Great book on media consumption/creation: The Secret War between Uploading and Downloading by Peter Lunenfeld.

Genes allow living things to pass on biological information between generations.
Memes allow humans to pass on information between each other, across time.
Kill all Normies by Angela Nagle is an interesting book on the spread of online culture into the real world - from 4chan to the "alt-right".

Along with Iain M. Banks and Jorge Luis Borges, William Gibson is one of my favourite authors. Neuromancer is essential reading, as are the rest of his books.
Several quotes of his are amongst my favourites: "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed", "The street finds its own use for things".
My favourite of all, are his statements on Atemporality: "Very creative people get atemporal early on. Are relatively unimpressed by the "now" factor, by latest things. Access the whole continuum."

It is ironic that Disney has continually extended copyright in the United States in order to protect Mickey Mouse, as it draws so strongly from the Commons for many of its films.
Relational Aesthetics was a book written in 1998 by Nicolas Bourriaud that documented the work of artists that wanted to produce work outside of the traditional gallery system, or perhaps work that was impossible to sell. See "WTF is… Relational Aesthetics?" or the work of Tino Sehgal.

Aaron Swartz was the co-founder of Reddit, hacker and activist. He was a believer in the Digital Commons. For more about his life, watch The Internet's Own Boy.
Mark Fisher was a writer and cultural theorist. His works Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? and The Weird and the Eerie have been particularly useful to me.
Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman is another book that I would recommend, in a similar vein.
Finally, Timothy Mortons Hyperobjects has been very helpful to think of more effective ways of thinking about Global Warming.