Writing, Medium, Machine

Writing, Medium, Machine
Author: Sean Pryor
Publisher:
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2020-10-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781013286643

Writing, Medium, Machine: Modern Technographies is a collection of thirteen essays by leading scholars which explores the mutual determination of forms of writing and forms of technology in modern literature. The essays unfold from a variety of historical and theoretical perspectives the proposition that literature is not less but more mechanical than other forms of writing: a transfigurative ideal machine. The collection breaks new ground archaeologically, unearthing representations in literature and film of a whole range of decisive technologies from the stereopticon through census-and slot-machines to the stock ticker, and from the Telex to the manipulation of genetic code and the screens which increasingly mediate our access to the world and to each other. It also contributes significantly to critical and cultural theory by investigating key concepts which articulate the relation between writing and technology: number, measure, encoding, encryption, the archive, the interface. Technography is not just a modern matter, a feature of texts that happen to arise in a world full of machinery and pay attention to that machinery in various ways. But the mediation of other machines has beyond doubt assisted literature to imagine and start to become the ideal machine it is always aspiring to be. Contributors: Ruth Abbott, John Attridge, Kasia Boddy, Mark Byron, Beci Carver, Steven Connor, Esther Leslie, Robbie Moore, Julian Murphet, James Purdon, Sean Pryor, Paul Sheehan, Kristen Treen. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Writing Machines

Writing Machines
Author: N. Katherine Hayles
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2002
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780262582155

A pseudo-autobiographical exploration of the artistic and cultural impact of the transformation of the print book to its electronic incarnations.

The Influencing Machine

The Influencing Machine
Author: Brooke Gladstone
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012-05-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0393342468

"Mind-opening, thought-provoking and incredibly timely… An absolutely spectacular read."—Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing A million listeners trust NPR's Brooke Gladstone to guide them through the complexities of the modern media. Bursting onto the page in vivid comics by acclaimed artist Josh Neufeld, this brilliant radio personality guides us through two millennia of media history, debunking the notion that "The Media" is an external force beyond our control and equipping us to be savvy consumers and shapers of the news.

Designing Data-Intensive Applications

Designing Data-Intensive Applications
Author: Martin Kleppmann
Publisher: "O'Reilly Media, Inc."
Total Pages: 658
Release: 2017-03-16
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1491903104

Data is at the center of many challenges in system design today. Difficult issues need to be figured out, such as scalability, consistency, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability. In addition, we have an overwhelming variety of tools, including relational databases, NoSQL datastores, stream or batch processors, and message brokers. What are the right choices for your application? How do you make sense of all these buzzwords? In this practical and comprehensive guide, author Martin Kleppmann helps you navigate this diverse landscape by examining the pros and cons of various technologies for processing and storing data. Software keeps changing, but the fundamental principles remain the same. With this book, software engineers and architects will learn how to apply those ideas in practice, and how to make full use of data in modern applications. Peer under the hood of the systems you already use, and learn how to use and operate them more effectively Make informed decisions by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of different tools Navigate the trade-offs around consistency, scalability, fault tolerance, and complexity Understand the distributed systems research upon which modern databases are built Peek behind the scenes of major online services, and learn from their architectures

Generative Deep Learning

Generative Deep Learning
Author: David Foster
Publisher: "O'Reilly Media, Inc."
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2019-06-28
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1492041890

Generative modeling is one of the hottest topics in AI. It’s now possible to teach a machine to excel at human endeavors such as painting, writing, and composing music. With this practical book, machine-learning engineers and data scientists will discover how to re-create some of the most impressive examples of generative deep learning models, such as variational autoencoders,generative adversarial networks (GANs), encoder-decoder models and world models. Author David Foster demonstrates the inner workings of each technique, starting with the basics of deep learning before advancing to some of the most cutting-edge algorithms in the field. Through tips and tricks, you’ll understand how to make your models learn more efficiently and become more creative. Discover how variational autoencoders can change facial expressions in photos Build practical GAN examples from scratch, including CycleGAN for style transfer and MuseGAN for music generation Create recurrent generative models for text generation and learn how to improve the models using attention Understand how generative models can help agents to accomplish tasks within a reinforcement learning setting Explore the architecture of the Transformer (BERT, GPT-2) and image generation models such as ProGAN and StyleGAN

The Adding Machine

The Adding Machine
Author: William S. Burroughs
Publisher: Grove Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2013-10-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0802121950

"Sheer pleasure. . . . Wonderfully entertaining."--Chicago Sun-Times Acclaimed by Norman Mailer more than twenty years ago as "possibly the only American writer of genius," William S. Burroughs has produced a body of work unique in our time. In these scintillating essays, he writes wittily and wisely about himself, his interests, his influences, his friends and foes. He offers candid and not always flattering assessments of such diverse writers as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Samuel Beckett, and Marcel Proust. He ruminates on science and the often dubious paths into which it seems intent on leading us, whether into outer or inner space. He reviews his reviewers, explains his famous "cut-up" method, and discusses the role coincidence has played in his life and work. As satirist and parodist, William Burroughs has no peer, as these varied works, written over three decades, amply reveal.

Aum Golly: Poems on Humanity by an Artificial Intelligence

Aum Golly: Poems on Humanity by an Artificial Intelligence
Author: Gpt- Ai
Publisher: Kertojan Aani
Total Pages: 74
Release: 2021-10-09
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9789527397237

What does AI know about love, happiness and making a difference? Aum Golly is a book of poems written in 24 hours. It was made possible by GPT-3 - an advanced autoregressive language model published in 2020 by OpenAI. "... a collection that surprises with humor and delicateness..." - Goodreads review "... I have to say reading it was a pleasure..." - Finnish radio host Ruben Stiller on Yle "... a beautiful dialogue between man and machine..." - a review of the Finnish audiobook The deep learning model can generate text that is virtually indistinguishable from text written by humans: poems, recipes, summaries, legal text and even pieces of code. GPT-3 is autofill on steroids. Good poetry makes us feel something and see the world differently. Despite the gut reaction some of us may have towards AI-enhanced creativity, Aum Golly is a book like any other. You will love some of the poems. You will hate others. Some will make you wonder, but all of them will make you think. Award-winning writer and TEDx speaker Jukka Aalho has guided the AI and chosen the poems for the collection.

Modernism and Time Machines

Modernism and Time Machines
Author: Tung Charles M. Tung
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2019-03-14
Genre: American fiction
ISBN: 1474431364

Bridging modernist studies and science fiction scholarshipModernism and Time Machines places the fascination with time in canonical works of twentieth-century literature and art side-by-side with the rise of time-travel narratives and alternate histories in popular culture. Both modernism and this cardinal trope of science fiction produce a range of effects and insights that go beyond the exhilarations of simply sliding back and forth in history. Together the modernist time-obsession and the fantasy of moving in time help us to rethink the shapes of time, the consistency of timespace and the nature of history.Key FeaturesDraws on insights from a range of sources, including critical geography, postcolonial theory, science and technology studies, and time studiesExamines different kinds of objects together: SF, Impressionism, and Henri Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis; evolutionary biology, Eliot's The Waste Land, and Leinster's "e;Sidewise in Time"e;; Woolf, Philip K. Dick's alternate history, and the film Interstellar; bullet time, Faulkner's racialized lag, and Jessica Hagedorn's postcolonial anachronism; "e;big history,"e; Olaf Stapledon's two-billion-year novel of the human species, and Terrence Malick's film Tree of Life

The Twittering Machine

The Twittering Machine
Author: Richard Seymour
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2020-09-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1788739310

A brilliant probe into the political and psychological effects of our changing relationship with social media Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience. The Twittering Machine is an unflinching view into the calamities of digital life: the circus of online trolling, flourishing alt-right subcultures, pervasive corporate surveillance, and the virtual data mines of Facebook and Google where we spend considerable portions of our free time. In this polemical tour de force, Richard Seymour shows how the digital world is changing the ways we speak, write, and think. Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of the machine, asking what we’re getting out of it, and what we’re getting into. Social media held out the promise that we could make our own history–to what extent did we choose the nightmare that it has become?