Software Studies

Workshop / conference, February 25-26, 2006, Rotterdam, in conjunction with an book publication project for MIT Press http://www.softwarestudies.org [ Book "Software Studies", edited by Matthew Fuller, MIT Press, 2007]

Results from essay presentations and feedback from the workshop were published as [http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-studies Software Studies: A Lexicon

Software Studies Workshop

Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam Saturday 25 and Sunday 26th February, 2006

This project is entitled software studies for two reasons. Firstly it proposes that software can be seen as an object of study and an area of practice for art and design theory and the humanities, for cultural studies and science and technology studies and for an emerging reflexive strand of computer science. Secondly, it takes the form of a series of short ‘studies’: creative and critical texts on particular algorithms, logical structures and digital objects. Such objects can be drawn from any layer of computational culture – from the front, to the back end.

Software is often a blind spot in the theorisation and study of computational and networked digital media. It is the very grounds and ‘stuff’ of media design. In a sense, all intellectual work is now ‘software study’, in that software provides its media and its context, but there are very few places where the specific nature, the materiality, of software is studied except as a matter of engineering. As software becomes a putatively mature part of societal formations, or at least enters a phase where generations are now born into it as an infrastructural element of daily life and specialist practice, as such it gathers and makes palpable a whole range of associations, interpretative frameworks, qualitative dimensions of relationality, aesthetic and political bottlenecks and amplifiers and logico-cultural dimensions and aporias.

Software as a field is largely seen as a question of realized instrumentality. Software is seen as a tool, something that you do something you do with. It is ‘neutral’, grey not simply as a matter of style but of common sense. On the one hand, this can be taken as its ‘ideological’ layer, as deserving of critique as any such myth. Alternately, it can be seen as something that blocks a real and more inventive engagement with its particular qualities and propensities. Equally therefore, another theoretical blockage that this workshop seeks to overcome is the oft-supposed ‘immateriality’ of software. Instead, we propose to develop cases of an understanding of the materiality of software being operative at many scales. Whereas much work published in the area of ‘new media’ largely adopts an ICT model (the shunting of ‘content’ from A to B) for its understanding of phenomena such as the internet or even games, this project aims, amongst other things, to emphasise the neglected aspect of computation, which involves the possibilities of virtuality, simulation, abstraction and autonomous processes.

As such the project aims at folding the internalist / externalist question of science studies inside out, the mechanisms of the one conjugating the subject of the other: what does software-enabled scholarship, in software, art and literary practice have to say about its own medium? The purpose of this interaction is not therefore to stage some revelation of a supposed hidden truth of software, to unmask its esoteric reality, but to see what it is and what it can be coupled with: a rich seam of paradoxical conjunctions in which the speed and rationality of computation meets with its ostensible outside.

This workshop proposes a wide-ranging exercise in the rapid-prototyping of potential critical, inventive and speculative approaches to software. The results of the workshop, alongside contributions by others, will provide the working material for a book to be published in 2007.

Confirmed Participants

• Gerard Albert, CWI
• Morten Breinbjerg, Institute for Aesthetics, University of Aarhus
• Sawad Brooks homepage
• Ted Byfield Parsons School of Design and ICANNwatch
• Wendy Chun, Department of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University
• Florian Cramer, homepage
• Cecile Crutzen, Open University, Netherlands
• Matthew Fuller, Media Design, PZI/WdKA
• Andrew Goffey, Editor, Fibreculture issue, contagion and the diseases of information
• Steve Goodman School of Social Sciences, media and Cultural Studies, University of East London and Hyperdub
• Olga Goriunova, Runme.org
• Jaromil, http://www.dyne.org/
• Erna Kotkamp, University of Utrecht
• Joasia Krysia, Institute for Digital Art and Technology
• Graham Harwood Mongrel
• Wilfried Hou Je Bek SocialFiction.Org
• Sebastian Luetgert Textz.com
• Adrian Mackenzie Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University
• Lev Manovich Homepage
• Michael Murtaugh Media Design, PZI/WdKA and automatist.org
• Jussi Parikka, University of Turku
• Marko Peljhan Makrolab
• Rolf Pixley Anomalous Research
• Soeren Pold, Institute for Aesthetics, University of Aarhus
• Derek Robinson
• Grzesiek Sedek Kurator homepage
• Alexei Shulgin, Runme.org
• Matti Tedre, Department of Computer Science, University of Joensuu
• Simon Yuill, hompage

Also participating in the Software Studies project

• Alison Adam Department of Computing, University of Salford
• Geoff Cox, Institute for Digital Art and Technology
• Chris Csikszentmihalyi Computing Culture Group, MIT Media Lab
• Marco Deseriis, The Thing, Rome, and Department of Culture and Communication, NYU
• Ron Eglash Department of Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• Friedrich Kittler, Humboldt University
• Michael Mateas, School of Literature, Communication and Culture, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Nick Montfort, Homepage, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania
• Warren Sack, Department of Film and Digital Media, University of California, Santa Cruz
• Remko Scha Institute of Artificial Art and Institute for Language, Logic and Computation, University of Amsterdam
• Adrian Ward, homepage
• Richard Wright, Futurenatural

For information about this workshop, please contact Leslie Robbins l.j.drost-robbins AT hro.nl Cost, attendance for the weekend: 30euros. (Free for students / staff of PZI / WdKA / HRO)