{"title":"Technologies Of Lived Abstraction","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into 'Technologies of Lived Abstraction', a compelling series exploring the intersection of technology and human experience. Perfect for readers fascinated by media studies and social theory. Browse the collection now.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"contagious-architecture-book-luciana-parisi-9780262018630","title":"Contagious Architecture","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA proposal that algorithms are not simply instructions to be performed but thinking entities that construct digital spatio-temporalities.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eContagious Architecture\u003c\/i\u003e, Luciana Parisi offers a philosophical inquiry into the status of the algorithm in architectural and interaction design. Her thesis is that algorithmic computation is not simply an abstract mathematical tool but constitutes a mode of thought in its own right, in that its operation extends into forms of abstraction that lie beyond direct human cognition and control. These include modes of infinity, contingency, and indeterminacy, as well as incomputable quantities underlying the iterative process of algorithmic processing. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe main philosophical source for the project is Alfred North Whitehead, whose process philosophy is specifically designed to provide a vocabulary for modes of thought exhibiting various degrees of autonomy from human agency even as they are mobilized by it. Because algorithmic processing lies at the heart of the design practices now reshaping our world--from the physical spaces of our built environment to the networked spaces of digital culture--the nature of algorithmic thought is a topic of pressing importance that reraises questions of control and, ultimately, power. \u003ci\u003eContagious Architecture\u003c\/i\u003e revisits cybernetic theories of control and information theory's notion of the incomputable in light of this rethinking of the role of algorithmic thought. 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This is the first book of Lazzarato's in English that fully exemplifies the unique synthesis of sociology, activist research, and theoretical innovation that has generated his best-known concepts, such as \"immaterial labor.\" The book (published in France in 2009) is also groundbreaking in the way it brings Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari to bear on the analysis of concrete political situations and real social struggles, while making a significant theoretical contribution in its own right.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eLazzarato draws on the experiences of casual workers in the French entertainment industry during a dispute over the reorganization (\"reform\") of their unemployment insurance in 2004 and 2005. He sees this conflict as the first testing ground of a political program of social reconstruction. The payment of unemployment insurance would become the principal instrument for control over the mobility and behavior of the workers. The flexible and precarious workforce of the entertainment industry prefigured what the entire workforce in contemporary societies is in the process of becoming- in Foucault's words, a \"floating population\" in \"security societies.\" Lazzarato argues further that parallel to economic impoverishment, neoliberalism has produced an impoverishment of subjectivity-a reduction in existential intensity. 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Sonic weapons of this sort include the \"psychoacoustic correction\" aimed at Panama strongman Manuel Noriega by the U.S. Army and at the Branch Davidians in Waco by the FBI, sonic booms (or \"sound bombs\") over the Gaza Strip, and high-frequency rat repellants used against teenagers in malls. At the same time, artists and musicians generate intense frequencies in the search for new aesthetic experiences and new ways of mobilizing bodies in rhythm. In \u003ci\u003eSonic Warfare\u003c\/i\u003e, Steve Goodman explores these uses of acoustic force and how they affect populations.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eTraversing philosophy, science, fiction, aesthetics, and popular culture, he maps a (dis)continuum of vibrational force, encompassing police and military research into acoustic means of crowd control, the corporate deployment of sonic branding, and the intense sonic encounters of sound art and music culture.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eGoodman concludes with speculations on the not yet heard-the concept of unsound, which relates to both the peripheries of auditory perception and the unactualized nexus of rhythms and frequencies within audible bandwidths.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49728033358097,"sku":"NGR9780262517959","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50005445607697,"sku":"CIN0262517957G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50132122239249,"sku":"GOR008010496","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51681869627665,"sku":"GOR014354410","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52865375797521,"sku":"GOR012013634","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0262517957.jpg?v=1751164859"},{"product_id":"aesthesia-of-networks-book-anna-munster-9780262018951","title":"An Aesthesia of Networks","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe experience of networks as the immediate sensing of relations between humans and nonhuman technical elements in assemblages such as viral media and databases.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003eToday almost every aspect of life for which data exists can be rendered as a network. Financial data, social networks, biological ecologies: all are visualized in links and nodes, lines connecting dots. A network visualization of a corporate infrastructure could look remarkably similar to that of a terrorist organization. In \u003ci\u003eAn Aesthesia of Networks\u003c\/i\u003e, Anna Munster argues that this uniformity has flattened our experience of networks as active and relational processes and assemblages. She counters the network anaesthesia that results from this pervasive mimesis by reinserting the question of experience, or aesthesia, into networked culture and aesthetics.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRather than asking how humans experience computers and networks, Munster asks how \u003ci\u003enetworks\u003c\/i\u003e experience--what operations they perform and undergo to change and produce new forms of experience. Drawing on William James's radical empiricism, she asserts that networked experience is assembled first and foremost through relations, which make up its most immediately sensed and perceived aspect. Munster critically considers a range of contemporary artistic and cultural practices that engage with network technologies and techniques, including databases and data mining, the domination of search in online activity, and the proliferation of viral media through YouTube. These practices--from artists who undermine data to musicians and VJs who use intranetworked audio and video software environments--are concerned with the relationality at the core of today's network experience.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49999898804497,"sku":"GOR006155532","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0262018950.jpg?v=1751164756"},{"product_id":"gilbert-simondon-and-the-philosophy-of-the-transindividual-book-muriel-combes-9780262537476","title":"Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn accessible yet rigorous introduction to the influential French philosopher Gilbert Simondon's philosophy of individuation.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003eGilbert Simondon (1924-1989), one of the most influential contemporary French philosophers, published only three works: \u003ci\u003eL'individu et sa gen se physico-biologique \u003c\/i\u003e(The individual and its physico-biological genesis, 1964) and\u003ci\u003e L'individuation psychique et collective\u003c\/i\u003e (Psychic and collective individuation, 1989), both drawn from his doctoral thesis, and \u003ci\u003eDu mode d'existence des objets techniques\u003c\/i\u003e (On the mode of existence of technical objects, 1958). It is this last work that brought Simondon into the public eye; as a consequence, he has been considered a thinker of technics and cited often in pedagogical reports on teaching technology. Yet Simondon was a philosopher whose ambitions lay in an in-depth renewal of ontology as a process of individuation--that is, how individuals come into being, persist, and transform. In this accessible yet rigorous introduction to Simondon's work, Muriel Combes helps to bridge the gap between Simondon's account of technics and his philosophy of individuation.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSome thinkers have found inspiration in Simondon's philosophy of individuation, notably Gilles Deleuze and F lix Guattari. Combes's account, first published in French in 1999, is one of the only studies of Simondon to appear in English. Combes breaks new ground, exploring an ethics and politics adequate to Simondon's hypothesis of preindividual being, considering through the lens of transindividual philosophy what form a nonservile relation to technology might take today. Her book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Simondon's work.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51727066398993,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":51727067447569,"sku":"CIN0262537478A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0262537478.jpg?v=1750738480"},{"product_id":"without-criteria-book-steven-shaviro-9780262195768","title":"Without Criteria","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51885272203537,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51885272367377,"sku":"GOR012547217","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53615873360145,"sku":"CIN0262195763G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780262195768.jpg?v=1754566294"},{"product_id":"semblance-and-event-book-brian-massumi-9780262525367","title":"Semblance and Event","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn investigation of the occurrent arts through the concepts of the semblance and lived abstraction.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003eEvents are always passing; to experience an event is to experience the passing. But how do we perceive an experience that encompasses the just-was and the is-about-to-be as much as what is actually present? In \u003ci\u003eSemblance and Event\u003c\/i\u003e, Brian Massumi, drawing on the work of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and others, develops the concept of semblance as a way to approach this question. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt is, he argues, a question of abstraction, not as the opposite of the concrete but as a dimension of it: lived abstraction. A semblance is a lived abstraction. Massumi uses the category of the semblance to investigate practices of art that are relational and event-oriented--variously known as interactive art, ephemeral art, performance art, art intervention--which he refers to collectively as the occurrent arts. Each art practice invents its own kinds of relational events of lived abstraction, to produce a signature species of semblance. 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Her thesis is that algorithmic computation is not simply an abstract mathematical tool but constitutes a mode of thought in its own right, in that its operation extends into forms of abstraction that lie beyond direct human cognition and control. These include modes of infinity, contingency, and indeterminacy, as well as incomputable quantities underlying the iterative process of algorithmic processing.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e The main philosophical source for the project is Alfred North Whitehead, whose process philosophy is specifically designed to provide a vocabulary for \"modes of thought\" exhibiting various degrees of autonomy from human agency even as they are mobilized by it. 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In \u003ci\u003eMoving without a Body\u003c\/i\u003e, Stamatia Portanova considers what really happens when the physicality of movement is translated into a numerical code by a technological system. Drawing on the radical empiricism of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead, she argues that this does not amount to a technical assessment of software's capacity to record motion but requires a philosophical rethinking of what movement itself is, or can become.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Discussing the development of different audiovisual tools and the shift from analog to digital, she focuses on some choreographic realizations of this evolution, including works by Loie Fuller and Merce Cunningham. Throughout, Portanova considers these technologies and dances as ways to think-rather than just perform or perceive-movement. She distinguishes the choreographic thought from the performance- a body performs a movement, and a mind thinks or choreographs a dance. Similarly, she sees the move from analog to digital as a shift in conception rather than simply in technical realization. Analyzing choreographic technologies for their capacity to redesign the way movement is thought, \u003ci\u003eMoving without a Body\u003c\/i\u003e offers an ambitiously conceived reflection on the ontological implications of the encounter between movement and technological systems.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52593948754193,"sku":"NLS9780262551175","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780262551175.jpg?v=1761068587"},{"product_id":"rhythmic-event-book-eleni-ikoniadou-9780262548878","title":"The Rhythmic Event","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52662224388369,"sku":"NLS9780262548878","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780262548878.jpg?v=1762269011"},{"product_id":"semblance-and-event-book-brian-massumi-9780262134910","title":"Semblance and Event","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn investigation of the occurrent arts through the concepts of the semblance and lived abstraction.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003eEvents are always passing; to experience an event is to experience the passing. 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