SpecLab

Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing

Johanna Drucker author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:The University of Chicago Press

Published:2nd Jun '09

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

SpecLab cover

Nearly a decade ago, Johanna Drucker cofounded the University of Virginia's SpecLab, a digital humanities laboratory dedicated to risky projects with serious aims. Here 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.

"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"

ISBN: 9780226165080

Dimensions: 23mm x 15mm x 2mm

Weight: 397g

264 pages