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Forthcoming from the MIT Press

"A detailed history of Code for America examining how we can democratically design government systems"--

"An argument if favor of hybrid AI systems over purely ML ones to increase machine transparency and human trust"--

"This book bridges conceptual frameworks found in architectural design and contemporary representation to examine design technology's social, material, and political effects"--

"A history of British postwar architecture, analyzed through the concept of performance and the ubiquitous (but elusive) image of the arrow"--

Forthcoming from the MIT Press

"This text in embedded computing is designed for late-undergraduate and graduate mechanical engineering students, recognizing how their backgrounds differ from those of computer scientists or electrical engineers, the usual target audience for such texts"--

Forthcoming from the MIT Press

Forthcoming from the MIT Press

How today's digital devices got their voices, and how we learned to listen to them. From early robots to toys like the iconic Speak & Spell to Apple's Siri, Vox Ex Machina tells the fascinating story of how scientists and engineers developed voices for machines during the twentieth century. Sarah Bell chronicles the development of voice synthesis from buzzy electrical current and circuitry in analog components to the robotic sounds of early digital signal processing to today's human sounding applications. Along the way, Bell also shows how the public responded to these technologies and asks whether talking machines are even good for us. Using a wide range of intriguing examples, Vox Ex Machina is embedded in a wider story about people--describing responses to voice synthesis technologies that often challenged prevailing ideas about computation and automation promoted by boosters of the Information Age. Bell helps explain why voice technologies came to sound and to operate in the way they do--influenced as they were by a combination of technical assumptions and limitations, the choices of the corporations that deploy them, and the habits that consumers developed over time. A beautifully written book that will appeal to anyone with a healthy skepticism toward Silicon Valley, Vox Ex Machina is an important and timely contribution to our cultural histories of information, computing, and media.

"A first-ever English-language comprehensive anthology of the writings of pioneering Italian modern architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers"--

Forthcoming from the MIT Press

"This book details how a diverse set of architects began adopting graph theory to transform architectural theory and design, prompting a shift from geometry, which long held pride of place in architecture, to topology, which instead emphasized relations"--

How religious thinking was--and remains--a central influence shaping economics. The conventional view of economics is that the field was a product of the Enlightenment and, therefore, bore no relation to religious ideas. But is this true? In Religious Influences on Economic Thinking, Benjamin Friedman shows that religious thinking was, in fact, a powerful force in shaping the initial development of modern Western economics and that it has remained an influence on economic thinking ever since. Friedman argues that an important influence enabling the insights of Adam Smith and his contemporaries was the new and highly controversial line of religious thinking at that time in the English-speaking Protestant world. Friedman explains that the influence of religious thinking on modern economic thought at the field's inception established resonances that have persisted through the subsequent centuries, even as the economic context has evolved and the questions economists ask have shifted along with it. Because we are largely not conscious of these influences, neither in the past nor as they are at work today, we are sometimes puzzled when we stumble across evidence of them--for example, in the otherwise hard-to-explain attitudes that many of our fellow citizens express on issues like estate taxes, business regulation, and environmental restrictions. But they are still at work. Understanding them can only enhance the economics profession's capacity to contribute to our ongoing public discussion of the important questions on which the discipline so usefully bears.

A theory of biopolitical power that updates Foucault, illustrating the moral implications of modern evolutionary theory. In our day, the individual has become "a life," the singular of the plural noun "population." From this new understanding of what it means to be human comes a new form of biopolitical power with a new set of moral rules. In The Morals of Life, moral philosopher Davide Tarizzo presents a theoretical framework for understanding this transformation of the old-fashioned "government of living beings," as Michel Foucault characterized biopolitics, into a new government of modular living beings, as well as a template for making sense of biopolitical power that operates on the scale of populations rather than individuals. Tarizzo traces population thinking, the notion of modular optimization, and other conceptual keystones of the current biopolitical regime (an "ethopolitical regime," in the author's terms) to their origins in twentieth-century biological thought--more precisely, and critically, evolutionary theory. Neo-Darwinism, Tarizzo argues, should be seen not only as a scientific paradigm but also as a philosophy per se, because it is evolutionary theory that today provides an answer to the old philosophical question: What is man? This new kind of philosophy, his book suggests, largely determines the way in which people look at themselves and society. Not only does it contribute to designing new technologies of power, but it also fosters subjection to the new ethopolitical regime.

How archives obscure recorded media—and the case in favor of discovering them.Silence is not absence. It may be perceived as meaningless, or it may not be perceived at all, but it takes up space. In Dissonant Records, Tanya Clement makes the case for spoken word audio recordings within the archives. She explains why we tend to not use these audio recordings in research, what silences exist in the cultural record, and what difference it makes when we start to listen. From recordings of the survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre to Anne Sexton’s recorded therapy sessions, Clement illustrates the myriad ways in which our current use of archives precludes the use of invaluable recorded texts.Whom, what, and how are we not studying in our cultural histories? Why, Clement asks, do audio recordings typically garner little interest? This book dissects the institutional and disciplinary blockades that discourage the use of spoken word audio recordings in research and teaching while interrogating how institutions and researchers can be selectively biased in favor of print and against the seemingly more ephemeral, time-based objects of our archives. History-making is a messy, sociotechnical process, the author explains, and our understanding of culture can only be made better when we listen more closely to the noise.

A new theory of perception that posits that conscious perception consists not of a single kind of awareness, but of two radically different kinds deployed in concert. Most contemporary theories of perception, including leading forms of representationalism and naive realism, are monistic they assume that to consciously perceive is to deploy only one kind of sensory awareness. In A Pluralist Theory of Perception, Neil Mehta instead argues for pluralism, which says that to consciously perceive is to deploy two very different kinds of sensory awareness in concert. Mehta argues that pluralism can simultaneously explain what is common to all forms of consciousness and what is distinctive about conscious perception. Mehta's preferred version of pluralism, which he calls rich pluralism, says that conscious perception is constituted by successful sensory representation and deep awareness. Successful sensory representation is a representational form of awareness whose targets include particulars. It is found in perceptions, whether conscious or unconscious, but not in hallucinations. By contrast, deep awareness is a nonrepresentational form of sensory awareness whose targets are certain universals--the sensory qualities. Deep awareness constitutes one kind of consciousness, it is common to conscious perceptions and hallucinations, and it reveals part of the essences of its targets. Mehta argues that although rich pluralism appears to be less parsimonious than monism, it is not. All monistic theories that are explanatorily adequate end up being even more complex than rich pluralism. Thus, rich pluralism is the most spartan theory that can shoulder the explanatory load.

Why the world needs less AI and better programming languages. Decades ago, we believed that robots and computers would take over all the boring jobs and drudgery, leaving humans to a life of leisure. This hasn't happened. Instead, humans are still doing boring jobs, and even worse, AI researchers have built technology that is creative, self-aware, and emotional--doing the tasks humans were supposed to enjoy. How did we get here? In Moral Codes, Alan Blackwell argues that there is a fundamental flaw in the research agenda of AI. What humanity needs, Blackwell argues, is better ways to tell computers what we want them to do, with new and better programming languages: More Open Representations, Access to Learning, and Control Over Digital Expression, in other words, MORAL CODE. Blackwell draws on his deep experiences as a programming language designer--which he has been doing since 1983--to unpack fundamental principles of interaction design and explain their technical relationship to ideas of creativity and fairness. Taking aim at software that constrains our conversations with strict word counts or infantilizes human interaction with likes and emojis, Blackwell shows how to design software that is better--not more efficient or more profitable, but better for society and better for all people. Covering recent research and the latest smart tools, Blackwell offers rich design principles for a better kind of software--and a better kind of world.

The definitive toolkit for doctoral students in engineering on thesis--and journal--article preparation, project (and stress) management, IP protection, collaborations, and other aspects of the PhD journey. It shouldn't take a PhD to get a PhD, but sometimes the process can seem that confusing--even though, to the mentors and advisors, so obvious that it goes without saying. For doctoral students in engineering confronting this dilemma, Caroline Boudoux, an accomplished researcher and entrepreneur, provides a demystifying guide to the challenges--daunting, seemingly routine, and at times unexpected--of pursuing a PhD in this demanding field. In It Goes without Saying, Boudoux marshals her own considerable experience mentoring graduate students, teaching doctoral workshops, and--not so long ago--earning her own PhD at MIT to give PhD candidates the know-how, and the confidence, to succeed. Among the topics this book takes up are: What a PhD is: the journey, the milestones, and the endgame.Technical questions about what a doctoral project in engineering is and how to lead one.Practical matters including tips on writing, from proposal to dissertation; ethics; and intellectual property.Personal concerns, such as dealing with expectations, imposter syndrome, and stress.From the mundane to the metaphysical, this user-friendly guide gives the doctoral student in engineering the tools to make it from Day 1 to the successful completion of the PhD in a timely, fully informed, and forward-looking manner.

The first comprehensive critical analysis of the practices and consequences of ancient DNA research. This edited collection, Critical Perspectives on Ancient DNA, presents a critical enquiry into the much-hyped "ancient DNA revolution" in archaeology. Offering the first comprehensive and in-depth scholarly analysis of the practices and effects of archaeogenetics, editors Daniel Strand, Anna Källén, and Charlotte Mulcare, along with other renowned scholars from Europe and the United States, address a host of questions, such as: What happens with our understanding of the past when archaeology is married to genetic science? What cultural forms and historical narratives are generated by ancient DNA (aDNA) research, and what energies could they unleash? Taking a multidisciplinary and multisite approach to the topic, these essays offer important insights into the epistemological, ethical, and political consequences around and beyond the scientific analysis of aDNA. As such, Critical Perspectives on Ancient DNA provides a timely and much-needed critical engagement with the rapidly growing field of aDNA research--a field that, while already having a notable impact on how we view the past in research, museums, and popular media--had not yet been subject to thorough critical scrutiny. ContributorsRuth Amstutz, Chip Colwell, Magnus Fiskesjö, K. Ann Horsburgh, Anna Källén, Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa, Amade M'charek, Charlotte Mulcare, Andreas Nyblom, Venla Oikkonen, Mélanie Pruvost, Marianne Sommer, Daniel Strand

An updated edition of the seminal book that explores why the interest in psychoanalysis in France exploded after 1968 and what it says about culture and therapy. Among Western countries, France may well be the one that resisted Freud the longest. But, in the late 1960s, France was seized by an infatuation with Freudianism. By the end of that decade, France had more than a psychoanalytic movement: it had a widespread and deeply rooted psychoanalytic culture. At the heart of this development was Jacques Lacan's reconstruction of Freudian theory, a reinvention of psychoanalysis that resonated with French culture in the aftermath of the uprisings of 1968. In Psychoanalytic Politics, the second edition of her groundbreaking work, Sherry Turkle tells the fascinating story of Lacan and why his work so profoundly influenced the French psyche. While in the United States psychoanalysis is identified with an essentially conservative medical establishment, the French rediscovery of Freud, in a dramatic enactment of Freud's prophesy, became associated with the most radical elements of French philosophical and political life. In this book, Turkle provides a firsthand account of the psychoanalytic culture that developed in France--as a politicized, Gallicized, and poeticized Freudianism, deeply marked by the work of Jacques Lacan. The clearest introduction in English to Lacan's teaching, Psychoanalytic Politics explores how cultures appropriate theories of mind and how ideas come to connect with individuals. The book's final chapter provides a fascinating portrayal of the last years of Lacan's life--the intrigue and power struggles that resulted in the break-up of the Freudian School he founded and the events that unfolded in the years following his death in 1981. This edition includes a new preface by the author, reflecting on the origins of the book and its relevance for today: a time when the integration of thought and feeling, politics and self-examination is as urgent an endeavor as ever.

The "mapness of maps"--how maps live in interaction with their users, and what this tells us about what they are and how they work. In a sense, maps are temporarily alive for those who design, draw, and use them. They have, for the moment, a cognitive life. To grapple with what this means--to ask how maps can be alive, and what kind of life they have--is to explore the core question of what maps are. And this is what Roberto Casati does in The Cognitive Life of Maps, in the process assembling the conceptual tools for understanding why maps have the power they have, why they are so widely used, and how we use (and misuse) them. Drawing on insights from cognitive science and philosophy of mind, Casati considers the main claims around what maps are and how they work--their specific syntax, peculiar semantics, and pragmatics. He proposes a series of steps that can lead to a precise theory of maps, one that reveals what maps have in common with diagrams, pictures, and texts, and what makes them different. This minimal theory of maps helps us to see maps nested in many cognitive artifacts--clock faces, musical notation, writing, calendars, and numerical series, for instance. It also allows us to tackle the issue of the territorialization of maps--to show how maps can be used to draw specific spatial inferences about territories. From the mechanics of maps used for navigation to the differences and similarities between maps and pictures and models, Casati's ambitious work is a cognitive map in its own right, charting the way to a new understanding of what maps mean.

A provocative edited collection that takes an original approach toward the black box of military technology, surveillance, and AI--and reveals the aesthetic dimension of warfare. War and Aesthetics gathers leading artists, political scientists, and scholars to outline the aesthetic dimension of warfare and offer a novel perspective on its contemporary character and the construction of its potential futures. Edited by a team of four scholars, Jens Bjering, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Solveig Gade, and Christine Strandmose Toft, this timely volume examines warfare through the lens of aesthetics, arguing that the aesthetic configurations of perception, technology, and time are central to the artistic engagement with warfare, just as they are key to military AI, weaponry, and satellite surveillance. People mostly think of war as the violent manifestation of a political rationality. But when war is viewed through the lens of aesthesis--meaning perception and sensibility--military technology becomes an applied science of sensory cognition. An outgrowth of three war seminars that took place in Copenhagen between 2018 and 2021, War and Aesthetics engages in three main areas of inquiry--the rethinking of aesthetics in the field of art and in the military sphere; the exploration of techno-aesthetics and the wider political and theoretical implications of war technology; and finally, the analysis of future temporalities that these technologies produce. The editors gather various traditions and perspectives ranging from literature to media studies to international relations, creating a unique historical and scientific approach that broadly traces the entanglement of war and aesthetics across the arts, social sciences, and humanities from ancient times to the present. As international conflict looms between superpowers, War and Aesthetics presents new and illuminating ways to think about future conflict in a world where violence is only ever a few steps away. ContributorsLouise Amoore, Ryan Bishop, Jens Bjering, James Der Derian, Anthony Downey, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Solveig Gade, Mark B. Hansen, Caroline Holmqvist, Vivienne Jabri, Caren Kaplan, Phil Klay, Kate McLoughlin, Elaine Scarry, Christine Strandmose Toft, Joseph Vogl, Arkadi Zaides

An analysis of the game engine Unreal through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, as well as a critique of the platform studies framework itself. In this first scholarly book on the Unreal game engine, James Malazita explores one of the major contemporary game development platforms through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, revealing how Unreal produces, and is produced by, broader intersections of power. Enacting Platforms takes a novel critical platform studies approach, raising deeper questions: what are the material and cultural limits of platforms themselves? What is the relationship between the analyst and the platform of study, and how does that relationship in part determine what "counts" as the platform itself? Malazita also offers a forward-looking critique of the platform studies framework itself. The Unreal platform serves as a kind of technical and political archive of the games industry, highlighting how the techniques and concerns of games have shifted and accreted over the past 30 years. Today, Unreal is also used in contexts far beyond games, including in public communication, biomedical research, civil engineering, and military simulation and training. The author's depth of technical analysis, combined with new archival findings, contributes to discussions of topics rarely covered in games studies (such as the politics of graphical rendering algorithms), as well as new readings of previously "closed" case studies (such as the engine's entanglement with the US military and American masculinity in America's Army). Culture, Malazita writes, is not "built into" software but emerges through human practices with code.

A history of architecture, not as the art of what stays but of what changes and moves. We tend to think of architecture as a practice in permanence, but what if we looked instead for an architecture of transience? In Things That Move, Tim Anstey does just that: rather than assuming that architecture is, at a certain level, stationary, he considers how architecture moves subjects (referring to its emotive potential in the experience it creates); how it moves objects (referring to how it choreographs bodies in motion); and how it is itself moved (referring to the mixture of materials, laws, affordances, and images that introduce movement into any architectural condition). The first of the book's three sections, "Cargoes," highlights the mobile peripheries of architectural history through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It asks what kinds of knowledge can be included under a discussion of something called architecture, noting the connections between discourses of the lithe and the technical, on the one hand, and those associated with the production of monumental, static compositions on the other. The second section, "Dispatches," reinterprets early architectural theory by examining the Renaissance ideal of decorum, the nature of the architectural work, and the ways in which architects are constituted as authors. Lastly, "Vehicles" considers building in terms of literal and metaphorical movement, using two cases from the twentieth century that investigate the relationship between architecture and cultural memory. Using a broadly forensic approach to connect details in otherwise disparate cases, Things That Move is a breathtakingly capacious architectural account that will change the way readers understand buildings, their becoming, and their significance.

An impassioned philosophical celebration of the multiple dimensions of contemporary cuteness.Involuntarily sucked into the forcefield of Cute, Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic decided to let go, give in, let the demon ride them, and make an accelerationism out of it—only to realize that Cute opens a microcosmic gate onto the transcendental process of acceleration itself.Joining the swarming e-girls, t-girls, NEETS, anons, and otaku who rescued accelerationism from the double pincers of media panic and academic buzzkill by introducing it to big eyes, fluffy ears, programming socks, and silly memes, they discover that the objects of cute culture are just spinoffs of an accelerative process booping us from the future, rendering us all submissive, breedable, helpless, and cute in our turn. Cute comes tomorrow, and only anastrophe can make sense of what it will have been doing to us.Evading all discipline, sliding across all possible surfaces, Cute Accelerationism embraces every detail of the symptomatology, aetiology, epidemiology, history, biology, etymology, topology, and even embryology of Cute, joyfully burrowing down into its natural, cultural, sensory, sexual, subjective, erotic, and semiotic dimensions in order to sound out the latent spaces of this Thing that has soft-soaped its way into human culture.Traversing tangents on natural and unnatural selection, runaway supernormalisation, the collective self-transformation of genderswarming cuties, the hyperstitional cultures of shojo and otaku, denpa and 2D love, and the cute subworlds of aegyo and meng, moé and flatmaxxing, catboys and dogon eggs, bobbles and gummies, vore machines and partial objects, BwOs and UwUs…glomping, snuggling, smooshing and squeeeeing their way toward the event horizon of Cute, donning cat ears and popping bubbles as they go, in this untimely philosophical intensification of an omnipresent phenomenon, having surrendered to the squishiest demonic possession, like, ever, two bffs set out in search of the transcendental shape of cuteness only to realize that, even though it is all around us, we do not yet know what Cute can do.Seriously superficial and bafflingly coherent, half erudite philosophical treatise, half dariacore mashup, 100 percent cutagion, this compact lil’ textual machine is a meltdown and a glow up, as well as a twizzled homage to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Welcome to the kawaiizome: nothing uncute makes it out of the near future, and the cute will very soon no longer be even remotely human.

An in-depth exploration of the work of Frederick Kiesler, the visionary architect, with a special focus on his Mobile Home Library.Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines explores the work of Austrian architect, theater designer, and theorist Frederick Kiesler (1890–1965). The book’s centerpiece is a close examination of Kiesler’s iconic but unrealized Mobile Home Library, which will be fabricated for the first time and photographed for the publication. Built around a speculative essay by Mark Wasiuta, tracing Kiesler’s visionary, even obsessive interest in sight, dreams, looking, and reading, the book covers Kiesler’s research and teaching at Columbia University’s School of Architecture in the late 1930s and 1940s, focusing on the main projects he developed at his Design Correlation Laboratory, the Mobile Home Library and the Vision Machine.The Vision Machine was imagined as an ambitious device intended to visualize human sight, from optics and nerve stimuli to dream content and hallucinations. The Mobile Home Library was conceived as a dynamic, modular object—part device, part furniture—whose repertoire of rotating, spinning movements allowed variable forms of interaction with readers and users. At first glance these two projects barely resemble each other. Yet together they illustrate the strange and astonishing scope of Kiesler’s correalism, which spanned and confused his biotechnique (a biologically-oriented design process aimed at fostering human health) and his techno-oneiric surrealism.The book is published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Graham Foundation in Chicago in Fall 2024, but is a stand-alone volume. It presents Wasiuta’s substantial research and thinking on Kiesler, a wealth of photographs, drawings, documents, film stills, and pedagogical experiments from Kiesler’s laboratory, as well as photographs of the exhibition’s centerpiece, the (re)construction of the never-built Mobile Home Library.Frederick Kiesler was born in Czernowitz, Austria-Hungary (now Ukraine) in 1890 and died in New York in 1965. For a short time, he was a member of De Stijl, he briefly partnered with Adolf Loos in the 1920s, and he was an associate of many avant-garde artists, including Man Ray and Fernand Léger.

"Interrogative Design aims to animate the city as a space of public discourse and dynamic democratic process through critical interventions that raise awareness regarding social concerns, e.g., violence"--

"An overview of how and why human males evolved the capacity to be highly involved caregivers, and why some are more involved than others"--

"A thoroughly updated and revised edition of a university president's recommendations for providing the next generation of college students with the critical skills needed to work with, and alongside, AI"--