Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics

Fazi, M. Beatrice

ISBN 10: 1786606089 / ISBN 13: 9781786606082

Published by Rowman & Littlefield Intl, 2018

About this Item

304 pages. 9.00x6.00x0.50 inches. In Stock. Seller Inventory # x-1786606089

Bibliographic Details

Title: Contingent Computation: Abstraction, ...

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Intl

Publication Date: 2018

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Brand New

About this title

Synopsis:

In Contingent Computation, M. Beatrice Fazi offers a new theoretical perspective through which we can engage philosophically with computing. The book proves that aesthetics is a viable mode of investigating contemporary computational systems. It does so by advancing an original conception of computational aesthetics that does not just concern art made by or with computers, but rather the modes of being and becoming of computational processes. Contingent Computation mobilises the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead in order to address aesthetics as an ontological study of the generative potential of reality. Through a novel philosophical reading of Gödel's incompleteness theorems and of Turing's notion of incomputability, Fazi finds this potential at the formal heart of computational systems, and argues that computation is a process of determining indeterminacy. This indeterminacy, which is central to computational systems, does not contradict their functionality. Instead, it drives their very operation, albeit in a manner that might not always fit with the instrumental, representational and cognitivist purposes that we have assigned to computing.

About the Author:

M. Beatrice Fazi is Research Fellow at the Sussex Humanities Lab (University of Sussex, United Kingdom). Her primary areas of expertise are the philosophy of computation, the philosophy of technology and the emerging field of media philosophy.