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MACHINE LANGUAGE
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please note! many parts of this spreadsheet are interactive. it's also not locked down in any way, so please be respectful and mindful to not accidentally delete or add to participants' work.
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This spreadsheet was created by participants in the School For Poetic Computation's MACHINE LANGUAGE course, winter 2023. All software programs contain “machine language” — the low-level digital code to which machines can respond directly. This course sought to expand our critical and creative understandings of how communications with machines occur, and to create agency to influence or redirect how these interactions shape our comprehension of ourselves, each other, and our worlds.
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Over 10 weeks, we framed our examinations through four lenses: quantization, computation, assembly, and hardware dependency. In what ways does constant interfacing with a multiplicity of machines contour our sensory perceptions, informational structures, and bodily abilities? How do we identify and interrogate our sociotechnical imaginaries in ways which recognize our entangled relationships? How might we better understand the machine languages that surround us, and how might we start to build alternatives? Weekly readings, in-class discussion, example projects, and creative prompts were all used as we explored our personal and collective relationship to machine language.
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Weeks 2 + 3: Quantization – This is the process by which the unbounded analog world gets sensed, categorized, and digitized into binary values that machine language can interact with. Yet a bit marks a boundary: the digital, by definition, cannot tolerate ambiguity. We will seek a robust understanding of what data –the result of quantization - is, then consider how data is not neutral, but informed by the design of the machine / software / collector / perceiver.
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Weeks 4 + 5: Computation – The machine-readable world can only be computed, and machines can only comprehend what they are built to read. Machine language can sort or synthesize, but it can neither describe or interpret without human intervention–and even the precepts of machine readability are programmed in ways that embed biases. How do quantitative limitations influence our interactions with qualitative realities? What are solutions without descriptions? And, how do computational approaches of different levels of complexity impact ways in which we understand data, ourselves, and the world?
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Weeks 6 + 7: Assembly – In 1947 Kathleen Booth created the first Assembly Language: the lowest-level language to communicate with machines that humans can read. In the decades since, technologists have transformed human-machine interfaces to include increasingly narrative, graphic, and haptic interactions. Though posed as universal developments, for whom are these interfaces intended? Who is left out, and how do alternatives emerge?
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Weeks 8 + 9: Hardware Dependency – From Andean quipu to corporate supercomputers, even the most abstract computation requires material support with specific algorithms to run on it. We will interrogate our relationships with hardware. Amongst other questions, we’ll ask: What are hardware’s opportunities and impacts? How may agendas may be forced on machine configurations, and what are the implications? Why might we transform and/or subvert hardware limitations, how, and towards what ends?
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Teachers: Sherri Wasserman, Jace Clayton
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Contributing Participants:
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Arushi Bandi
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Shakti Mb
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Souha M.Y.
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Cameron Morris
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Lizz Thabet
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Pelenakeke Brown
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Lluvia Nisayé
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Amalia Mayorga
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Herdimas Anggara
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Blair Johnson
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Michelle Santiago Cortes
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Xizi Hua
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We will be posting a link to a related zine online, here, in the near future.
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