Code & Power: Discussion Notes

Code and Power CCR 633 ::: 4/14/11Friday, April 15, 2011

code as writingFriday, April 15, 2011

critical code studiesFriday, April 15, 2011

What shifts when writing isn’t human-readable?Friday, April 15, 2011

“Code is the only language that is executable, meaning that it is the ﬁrst discourse that is materially affective.” - Alexander Galloway, ProtocolFriday, April 15, 2011

How do we split agency between humans and machines?Friday, April 15, 2011

Who is doing what to whom? For whom? How does technology reinforce or facilitate that?Friday, April 15, 2011

Does the context of war continue to inﬂuence these technologies?Friday, April 15, 2011

Friday, April 15, 2011

Heinrich HimmlerFriday, April 15, 2011

Dr. Josef MengeleFriday, April 15, 2011

Nazis were not just monstrous grown-upsFriday, April 15, 2011

Luftwaffe PilotFriday, April 15, 2011

SS-Sturmman, Wiking DivisionFriday, April 15, 2011

Not just men, either.Friday, April 15, 2011

Eva BraunFriday, April 15, 2011

Irma GreseFriday, April 15, 2011

Senior Auschwitz SupervisorFriday, April 15, 2011

30,000 prisonersFriday, April 15, 2011

19 years oldFriday, April 15, 2011

ordinary peopleFriday, April 15, 2011

not so different from usFriday, April 15, 2011

who did the daily work of the Holocaust.Friday, April 15, 2011

LaToya: we can see nothing happens in vacuum. There is no direct link between new technologies and their consequences whether they are good, bad, or somewhere in the middle; there is always a middle man, woman, group, or human force whose will and/ or intention is the determining factor. I maintain that there is no neutral technology where there is human inﬂuence. ... With this in mind, how can we re-member and learn from the ways that technology has been used in the past to oppress, or create conditions that oppress others? How might this process of re-membering inform and bring about more ethical practices in the future?Friday, April 15, 2011

Part 1: EniacFriday, April 15, 2011

“A computer was a human being until approximately 1945. After that date, the term referred to a machine and the former human computers became “operators.”Friday, April 15, 2011

“The ENIAC was then told to solve a difﬁcult problem that would have required several weeks’ work by a trained man. The ENIAC did it in exactly 15 seconds.” The “15 seconds” claim ignores the time women spent setting up each problem on the machine. (474)Friday, April 15, 2011

Tim: But this story is bigger than a story of inclusion. These stories are stories of war machines. Of “megamachines,” to quote Lewis Mumford via Cynthia Haynes. And this story is about the colonial price of inclusion in the halls of power–at any position. Because no matter how utopian Vannevar Bush made the memex sound, the ENIAC girls were partaking in–helping to perfect–machines of ultimate control. Death machines. The megamachine. What price, inclusion? What price, a more technical education and job? What price, to develop technologies that stop the Nazi’s (insert any other colonial monster here) and to enable them at the same time (remembering here the Onondaga land I’m actually on as I type this)? What price, to seek to include more and more in a system that cries out for radical transformation?Friday, April 15, 2011

Part II: HollerithFriday, April 15, 2011

Tim: all these inscription technologies, from clay tokens right up to punch cards and the ENIAC computer, have all been technologies originally developed as systems for those in power to control those without it. Whether it’s death (Hole 8), or taxes (clay tokens), technologies of inscription so often begin as systems of more efﬁcient control.Friday, April 15, 2011

Tim: How might we, as teachers of art and writing inscription, continually politicize these technologies for ourselves and students? How might we inoculate ourselves against the silencing, the forgetting, the “oh gee, isn’t that cool?” that so often accompanies our professionalization, our technology use, our everyday practices, that we might work to be more like Minnie Bruce and excavate real use-able histories that might point us to better methods of imagination for transformation?Friday, April 15, 2011

Code & Power: Discussion Notes

by Krista Kennedy on Apr 15, 2011

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