<nettime-ann> Wendy Chun lecture at RISD

[kanarinka <kanarinka@ikatun.com>]

.
"Programmable Visions:  On the Emergence of Computer and Biological  
Code-Scripts"
Lecture by Wendy Chun
Tuesday May 2nd
RISD Auditorium, 7PM

"Programmable Visions:  On the Emergence of Computer and Biological  
Code-Scripts"
Why are images proliferating at a time when their power to index  
reality is waning?  How and why have non-transparent technologies,  
such as computers, become conflated with transparency?  This talk  
argues that the answer to these questions lies in the unforeseen  
emergence of programming languages.  Drawing connections between  
early genetics and computer engineering, this talk argues that  
digital computing's "programmability"-its return to a "clock-work"  
universe-encapsulated mid-twentieth century dreams of biological  
heredity.  Rather than foreshadowing DNA, as many have argued, early  
ruminations on the existence of a genetic code-script that conflated  
execution and legislation, such as Schrodinger's What is Life?,  
foreshadowed the emergence of a code-based causality, which software- 
not DNA-would, and could only, instantiate.

About Wendy Chun
Wendy Chun is an associate professor of Modern Culture and Media at  
Brown University. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and  
English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current  
work on digital media. She is author of _Control and Freedom: Power  
and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics_ (MIT, 2006), and co-editor  
(with Thomas Keenan) of _New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory  
Reader (Routledge, 2005). She has been a fellow at the Radcliffe  
Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and a Wriston Fellow at  
Brown. She is currently working on a monograph entitled _Programmed  
Visions: Software, DNA, Race_ (forthcoming MIT, 2008).

More information:
www.brown.edu/Departments/MCM/people/chun/


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