Digital Arts and Culture
Just got back from presenting my paper The Other Software at DAC09 as part of the Software / Platform Studies Track. This was my first presentation of a peer-reviewed paper at an academic conference and it was somewhat of a trial by fire, but I think it went well and at least there were some positive tweets in response. The paper is a criticism of the materialist approach taken by Friedrich Kittler in his famous essay There is No Software. I believe all the papers from the conference (and there are many wonderful ones) are going to be posted at escholarship.org and I’ll post a link once they’re up.
I’ll be participating in the SoftWhere Software Studies Workshop next week at UCSD. This is one of the first events in the US focused on the meaning and goals of the emerging discipline of Software Studies. Most of the workshop is closed, but there is a public PechaKucha style presentation on Wednesday, May 21st, from 12:30-5:00pm. From the description: “Software studies is a research field that examines software and cyberinfrastructure using approaches from humanities, cultural criticism, and social sciences. The public session will feature a rapid series of short presentations by key national and international figures in this emerging field… Attendees can expect a collage of diverse perspectives on what it means to live in software society and how to study it.”
There are a lot of brilliant people involved and it proves to be a fun couple of days. More information at softwarestudies.com.