SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing - Softcover

Drucker, Johanna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226165086 ISBN 13: 9780226165080

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2009

Synopsis

Nearly a decade ago, Johanna Drucker cofounded the University of Virginia’s SpecLab, a digital humanities laboratory dedicated to risky projects with serious aims. In SpecLab she explores the implications of these radical efforts to use critical practices and aesthetic principles against the authority of technology based on analytic models of knowledge.

Inspired by the imaginative frontiers of graphic arts and experimental literature and the technical possibilities of computation and information management, the projects Drucker engages range from Subjective Meteorology to Artists’ Books Online to the as yet unrealized ’Patacritical Demon, an interactive tool for exposing the structures that underlie our interpretations of text. Illuminating the kind of future such experiments could enable, SpecLab functions as more than a set of case studies at the intersection of computers and humanistic inquiry. It also exemplifies Drucker’s contention that humanists must play a role in designing models of knowledge for the digital age—models that will determine how our culture will function in years to come.

About this title

About the Author

Johanna Drucker is the Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of several books, including Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Review

"Clearly and incisively written, this book provides digital humanities with a much-needed critique. It gives the field guidance for its ever-faster-approaching futures and documents SpecLab's important critical and interpretive interventions in humanities research and teaching." - John Cayley, Brown University"

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0226165086
• ISBN 13: 9780226165080
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 261