[Commlist] new book: The Software Arts

New book in the Software Studies Series at MIT Press: Warren Sack, The 
Software Arts (MIT Press, 2019).

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-arts


Summary

An alternative history of software that places the liberal arts at the 
very center of software's evolution.

In The Software Arts, Warren Sack offers an alternative history of 
computing that places the arts at the very center of software's 
evolution. Tracing the origins of software to eighteenth-century French 
encyclopedists' step-by-step descriptions of how things were made in the 
workshops of artists and artisans, Sack shows that programming languages 
are the offspring of an effort to describe the mechanical arts in the 
language of the liberal arts.

Sack offers a reading of the texts of computing—code, algorithms, and 
technical papers—that emphasizes continuity between prose and programs. 
He translates concepts and categories from the liberal and mechanical 
arts—including logic, rhetoric, grammar, learning, algorithm, language, 
and simulation—into terms of computer science and then considers their 
further translation into popular culture, where they circulate as forms 
of digital life. He considers, among other topics, the “arithmetization” 
of knowledge that presaged digitization; today's multitude of logics; 
the history of demonstration, from deduction to newer forms of 
persuasion; and the post-Chomsky absence of meaning in grammar. With The 
Software Arts, Sack invites artists and humanists to see how their ideas 
are at the root of software and invites computer scientists to envision 
themselves as artists and humanists.


Warren Sack is a media theorist, software designer, and artist whose 
work has been exhibited at SFMoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, 
the Walker Art Center, and the ZKM Center for Art and Media. He is Chair 
and Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, 
Santa Cruz.


Endorsements

    “Warren Sack's creative thinking across the arts and sciences has 
kept my cyborg on her toes, provoked again and again to test out how to 
reinvent practices for thinking, designing, working, and playing 
together for less deadly worlds. Sack's historically attuned book 
investigates the folded zones linking the mechanical and liberal arts as 
new languages called programs have been built for emerging worlds. 
Rhetorics, epistemologies, and procedures are at stake in the digital 
media that shape and are shaped by the arts of computation. This is an 
important book about how things come to be in the workshops of the 
software arts that can never pretend to the separation of interpreting, 
making, and thinking.”

    Donna Haraway

    Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of  California, Santa Cruz

    “'Detecting what is a bot and what is not may be a crucial question 
for the future of democracy.' This political sense of urgency is the 
surprising conclusion to Warren Sack's close reading of historical texts 
of computer science.”

    Rudolf Frieling

    Curator of Media Arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

    "The Software Arts is an intellectually inspiring read that sees 
the arts and the humanities at the heart of computing and showcases the 
deep entanglement of culture and computing. Based on profound historical 
and philosophical research, Warren Sack's book demands that we look 
beyond the old story of computation as logic or purely mathematical 
interpretation to understand how software is shaping our digital life. 
He looks at us as makers of software instead of just users and thus 
stresses the importance for new methods and thinking to control the 
development of our 'computational conditions' instead of them 
controlling us.”

    Sabine Himmelsbach

    Director of HeK, House of Electronic Arts Basel

    “At last, a book that argues that the very nature of programming is 
not a mere mechanical process that can be automated with Machine 
Learning techniques, but before all is an intense creative activity! I 
recommend it to any educated person of the digital age, since it clearly 
shows that software design requires a set of skills analogous to the 
liberal arts that, in their classical meaning, include logic, 
arithmetic, grammar, rhetoric, and, last but not least, music.”

    Jean-Gabriel Ganascia

    Professor of Computer Science at Sorbonne University; AI 
researcher; Chairman of the CNRS Ethical Committee


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