Chun | On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge

Software has become a commonsense shorthand for culture and hardware a shorthand for nature. (In the current debate over stem cell research, stem cells have been called “hardware.”Historically software also facilitated the separation of pattern from matter, necessary for the separation of genes from DNA.
In our so-called postideological society, software sustains and depoliticizes notions of ideology and ideology critique. People may deny ideology, but they don’t deny software—and they attribute to software, metaphorically, greater powers than have been attributed to ideology. Our interactions with software have disciplined us, created certain expectations about cause and effect, offered us pleasure and power that we believe should be transferable elsewhere. The notion of software has crept into our critical vocabulary in mostly uninterrogated ways. By interrogating software and the visual knowledge it perpetuates, we can move beyond the so-called crisis in indexicality toward under-
standing the new ways in which visual knowledge is being transformed and perpetuated, not simply displaced or rendered obsolete

Steganography / hiding in plain sight

Steganography is the art and science of hiding that communication is happening. Classical steganography systems depend on keeping the encoding system secret, but modern steganography is detectable only if secret information is known, e.g. a secret key. Because of their invasive nature, steganography systems leave detectable traces within a medium's characteristics. This allows an eavesdropper to detect media that has been modified, revealing that secret communication is taking place. Although the secrecy of the information is not degraded, its hidden nature is revealed, defeating the main purpose of Steganography.

http://www.outguess.org/

A Martian Factory

To the outsider the threads connecting the delicate brains of the men with the indestructible organs of the machines were subtle and invisible.
Bogdanov/ 65

The earthly envelope of land, air and ocean – the realm of organic life, or biosphere – is doubled by a second skin of electronically mediated thought: the noosphere.
Brian Holmes

Digital Dark Spaces

 

A state apparatus is erected upon the primitive agricultural communities, which already have lineal-territorial codes; but it overcodes them, submitting them to the power of a despotic emperor, the sole and transcendent public-property owner, the master of the surplus or the stock, the organizer of large-scale works (surplus labor), the source of public functions and bureaucracy. This is the paradigm of the bond, the knot. Such is the regime of signs of the State: overcoding, or the Signifier. It is a system of machinic enslavement: the first “megamachine” in the strict sense, to use Mumford’s term.5