Technology is therefore social before it is technical (or I am a programmer!)

“What is it that Foucault call a machine, be it abstract or concrete (he speaks of the machine-prison, but equally of the machine-school, the machine-hospital, and so on)? The concrete machines are the two-form assemblages or mechanism, whereas the abstract machine is the informal diagram. In other words, the machines are social before being technical. Or, rather, there a human technology which exists before a material technology. No doubt the latter develops its effects within the whole social field; but in order for it to be even possible, the tools or material machines have to be chosen first of all by a diagram and taken up by assemblages. Historian have often been confronted by this requirement: the so-called hoptile armies are part of the phalanx assemblage; the stirrup is selected by the diagram of feudalism; the burrowing stick, the hoe and the plough do not form a linear progression but refer respectively to collective machines which vary with the density of the population and the time of the fallow. In this respect, Foucault shows how the rifle exists as a tool only in the sense that is 'a machinery whose principle would no longer be the mobile or the immobile mass, but a geometry of divisible (and composable] segments.

Technology is therefore social before it is technical" Deleuze Foucault p.34

...

“The history of forms, the archive, is doubled by an evolution of forces, the diagram. The forces appear in 'every relation from one point to another': a diagram is a map, or rather several imposed maps. And from one diagram to the next, new maps are drawn. Thus there is no diagram that does not also include, besides the points which it connects up, certain relatively free or unbound points, points of creativity, change and resistance, and it is perhaps with these that we ought to begin in order to understand the whole picture. It is on the basis of the 'struggles' of each age, and the style of these struggles, that we can understand the succession of diagrams or the way in which they become linked up again above and beyond the discontinuities. For each diagram testifies to the twisting line of the outside spoken of by Melville, without beginning or end, an oceanic line of passes through all points of resistance, pitches diagrams against one another, and operates always as the most recent. And what a strange twist of the line was 1968, the line with a thousand aberrations! From this we can get the triple definition of writing: to write is to struggle and resist; to write is to become; to write is to draw a map: 'I am a cartographer'.” Deleuze Foucault p.37-38

From this we can get the triple definition of programming: to program is to struggle and resist; to program is to become; to program is to draw a map: 'I am a programmer!'.

GoL Turing Machine

Paul Rendell 2000
engineered patterns of John Conway's Game of Life assembled to operate as a Turing Machine able to carry out computations. More on the Machine can be found here

a Trojan horse without any Soldier

"I think the technology serves as a Trojan horse all right, but in the real story of the Trojan horse, it wasn't the horse that was effective, it was the soldiers inside the horse. And the technology is only going to be effective in changing education if you put an army inside it which is determined to make that change once it gets through the barrier.

Unfortunately, the easier way to get the technology to the school, if you're a vendor, for example, is to open it up and say, "Look, there's no army inside here. It's fine. It suits your purpose. It's not going to be subversive, and so it's a Trojan horse without any soldiers, and that's not a very effective way of doing it.""

Seymour Papert

CODE

"Perhaps to ask code and coders to think again about the way in which they see the world, to move from objects to things, and practice code as poetry (poiesis). Rather than code as ordering the world, fixing and overcoding. Code as a craft, 'bringing-forth' through a showing or revealing that is not about turning the world into resources to be assembled and reassembled forever"

Jo Pawlik

poetry code

a very interesting article regarding trends and future developments on programming languages http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/08/towards-an-expressiveness-of-c.html

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algorithmic text as beyond text

"today to write theory means to write code"

Galloway & Thacker, The Exploit

theorization and its mode of experimentation. I will come back on this shortly, it is a field that we would like to exploit by putting forward an interdisciplinary web platform. The goal is not to destroy IT but to push IT into a hypertrophic state, further than IT is meant to go... this is resistance through an active experimentation

the creation of alternative algorithms

I came across with this abstract from Alexander R. Galloway's paper entitled “Alternative Algorithms (On Method)”

"It happens from time to time that a certain amount of reflection becomes necessary, not simply concerning the objects of the mind, but as to the actual manner in which intellectual work is done. This typically comes under the heading of methodology, which today has a distinctly liberal profile. With method, it is often more a question of suitability than existential correctness, often more a question of personal style than universal context. Hence methodological discussions these days often devolve into a sort of popularity contest. Who advocates what method and for what purpose? Which general equivalent trumps all others—is it race, or is it class, or is it the logos, or the archive, or the gaze, or desire, play, excess, singularity, resistance, or perhaps life itself—elevating one methodological formation above all others in a triumphant critique (to end all future critique)? In this paper I examine what sorts of methodological approaches make sense today, making the case that the proper methodological position for those working critically within techno-culture is the creation of alternative algorithms."

looking forward for the full text.

the Programming of Architecture

Paul Coates' new book is finally scheduled to be published at the very early of 2010... you will be suprised that Paul strugles to make programming a method or/and property of architecture almost the last 30 years. The title of the book has been translated to the mainstream title "the Programming of Architecture" which direclty implies to the more computational one which was programming.architecture/architecture.programming... the book covers a history of experimentations from turing machines to alpha syntax and the most contemporary research on Neural Networks.

Before you dive into scripting and code hard geometric functions to produce the popular now voronoi diagram read how you can program simple rules and wait for the complex pattern/behaviour to emerge.

You can pre order the book here