Fazi - Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics

Contingent Computation

MEDIA PHILOSOPHY

SERIES EDITORS

Eleni Ikoniadou, Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the London Graduate School and the School of Performance and Screen Studies, Kingston University

Scott Wilson, Professor of Cultural Theory at the London Graduate School and the School of Performance and Screen Studies, Kingston University

The Media Philosophy series seeks to transform thinking about media by inciting a turn towards accounting for their autonomy and eventness, for machine agency, and for the new modalities of thought and experience that they enable. The series showcases the transcontinental work of established and emerging thinkers whose work engages with questions about the reshuffling of subjectivity, of temporality, of perceptions and of relations vis--vis computation, automation, and digitalisation as the current 21st century conditions of life and thought. The books in this series understand media as a vehicle for transformation, as affective, unpredictable, and non-linear, and move past its consistent misconception as pure matter-of-fact actuality.

For Media Philosophy, it is not simply a question of bringing philosophy to bear on an area usually considered an object of sociological or historical concern, but of looking at how developments in media and technology pose profound questions for philosophy and conceptions of knowledge, being, intelligence, information, the body, aesthetics, war, death. At the same time, media and philosophy are not viewed as reducible to each other's internal concerns and constraints and thus it is never merely a matter of formulating a philosophy of the media; rather the series creates a space for the reciprocal contagion of ideas between the disciplines and the generation of new mutations from their transversals. With their affects cutting across creative processes, ethico-aesthetic experimentations and biotechnological assemblages, the unfolding media events of our age provide different points of intervention for thought, necessarily embedded as ever in the medium of its technical support, to continually re-invent itself and the world.

The new automatism is worthless in itself if it is not put to the service of a powerful, obscure, condensed will to art, aspiring to deploy itself through involuntary movements which none the less do not restrict it.

Eleni Ikoniadou and Scott Wilson

Software Theory: A Cultural and Philosophical Study, Federica Frabetti

Media After Kittler, edited by Eleni Ikoniadou and Scott Wilson

Chronopoetics: The Temporal Being and Operativity of Technological Media, Wolfgang Ernst, translated by Anthony Enns

The Changing Face of Alterity: Communication, Technology and Other Subjects, edited by David J. Gunkel, Ciro Marcondes Filho and Dieter Mersch

Technotopia: A Media Genealogy of Net Cultures, Clemens Apprich, translated by Aileen Derieg

Recursivity and Contingency, Yuk Hui (forthcoming)

Contingent Computation

Abstraction, Experience, and
Indeterminacy in
Computational Aesthetics

London New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

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Copyright 2018 by M. Beatrice Fazi

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: HB 978-1-78660-608-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fazi, M. Beatrice, 1981 author.

Title: Contingent computation : abstraction, experience, and indeterminacy in computational aesthetics / M. Beatrice Fazi.

Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018. | Series: Media philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018023183 (print) | LCCN 2018033860 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786606099 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786606082 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: ComputersPhilosophy. | Aesthetics.

Classification: LCC QA76.167 (ebook) | LCC QA76.167 .F39 2018 (print) | DDC 004.01dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018023183