[Commlist] New Book: Invocational Media: Reconceptualising the Computer

New book:

/Invocational media: reconceptualising the computer/

Chris Chesher

Bloomsbury

Invocational Media: Reconceptualising the Computer: Chris Chesher: 
Bloomsbury Academic 
<https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/invocational-media-9781501363627/>

*/Invocational Media /**critiques the sociotechnical power of digital 
technologies by introducing the concept of invocational media.*

What is an invocation? Ask your voice assistant and it will define it 
for you. It is a media artefact that responds to many invocations such 
as seeking the weather forecast, requesting any song you can name, or 
turning on the lights, almost magically. This contemporary manifestation 
of the ancient practice of invocation gives an immediate response to 
your call in a way that Chris Chesher argues is the characteristic power 
of all computers, which he redefines as invocational media.

This book challenges the foundations of computer science by offering 
invocation as a powerful new way of conceptualising digital 
technologies. Drawing on media philosophy, Deleuze, Guattari, Heidegger, 
Latour, Austin, Innis and McLuhan, it critiques the representationalism 
of data processing, artificial intelligence and virtual reality. 
Invocational media seem to empower individuals, but necessarily subject 
users to corporate and government monopolies of invocation. They offer 
many 'solutions', but only by reducing everything to the same kind of 
act. They complicate agency in their indifference as to whether invokers 
are human or non-human. With robotics they invoke material form to act 
physically and autonomously. People willingly make themselves invocable 
to surveillance and control by creating their own profiles and marking 
themselves with biometrics. This ground-breaking book will change how 
you think about digital media by showing they are, in fact, invocational 
media.

Turning away from computational media as "digital" and instead 
theorizing computers through their capacity to /invoke/, to call things 
up and respond, Chris Chesher's /Invocational Media/ provides a 
staggeringly original perspective on technology that thrillingly 
reimagines almost all foundations of digital culture.

― /Grant Bollmer, Associate Professor of Media Studies, NC State 
University, USA/

In a time where we are all mesmerized by the magic of ChatGPT and 
similar AI technologies, Chris Chesher's book is highly welcomed and 
timely. Using the concept of invocation and engaging with a wide range 
of relevant media philosophy, /Invocational Media /offers an interesting 
and highly original way to theorize how we design, experience and 
interact with digital technologies and, more precisely, how they design 
/us/. This is an important contribution to the philosophy of media and 
compulsory reading for everyone puzzled by the mystery of contemporary AI.

― /Mark Coeckelbergh, Professor of Philosophy of Media and Technology at 
the University of Vienna, Austria/

Just at the moment when the interactive interface is newly ascendant and 
we thought that all had been said, along comes this gift of a book. 
Thinking with the generative trope of invocational media, Chesher 
refigures the power and limits of computation. /Invocational 
Media/ offers a history of the present of human-computer interaction, 
and a proposal for how we can rearticulate its future. It will be of 
interest to anyone engaged with the invocations, avocations and 
evocations that comprise relations at and through the interface.

― /Lucy Suchman, Professor Emerita of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK/


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