💾 Archived View for soviet.circumlunar.space › alison captured on 2023-03-20 at 17:40:47. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Andrew Lison

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About

I am a theorist and historian of digital media, currently Assistant Professor of Media Study at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. I have begun to explore Geminispace out of some strange combination of professional curiosity and personal nostalgia for a time before the web (or at least a time before the web came to dominate the Internet out of which it came into being).

My present work focuses on a contemporary sense of letdown with the promises of the Internet and digital media more broadly. I’ve explored this from a number of angles, including the effacement of action by symbolic encoding via information theory, the enervating effects of a proliferation of digitized multimedia information, melancholy for the rave culture of the early ’90s, and the looming end to Moore’s Law and with it the vertiginous ride on which the growth of silicon-based computing has taken us over the past sixty years.

I explore the history that has lead us to this present conuncture while (hopefully) avoiding the trap of straighforward nostalgia. Gemini seems like a particularly good platform for doing this, given both its minimal and what might even be called “retro” approach to information presentation and its simultaneous insistence on incorporating some of the latest developments in communication technology, e.g. encryption and character set encoding—😉. While the main avenue for me to explore these themes is the book I am currently writing, I also hope to occasionally make notes addressing these and other topics in a gemlog.

Selected Publications

“Minimal Computing” interview in Counter-N (December 2022).

Minimal Computing interview link

“New Media, 1989: Cubase and the New Temporal Order,” in Computational Culture 8 (July 2021).

Computational Culture article link

“Toward a Theory of 100% Utilization,” in Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology 28:4 (Fall 2020): 491–519.
Archives (In Search of Media series book), co-authored with Rick Prelinger, Marcell Mars, and Tomislav Medak (meson/University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
“From Shrink Wrap to Services: The Universal Machine and Universal Exchange,” in There is no Software, there are just Services, eds. Irina Kaldrack and Martina Leeker (meson press, 2015), 57–71.
“Fun is a Battlefield: Software between Enjoyment and Obsession,” with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, in Fun and Software: Exploring Pleasure, Paradox and Pain in Computing, ed. Olga Goriunova (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 175–196.
The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: Media, Counterculture, Revolt (edited volume), with Timothy Scott Brown (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Recent Talks

“Computational Infrastructure and State-Socialist Piracy: The Global Reach of the Zilog Z80,” Society for the History of Technology Annual Conference, New Orleans, LA, November 10–13, 2022.
“Parallelism and the Laws of Progress: Huang, Amdahl, Moore,” Society for Literature, Science and the Arts Annual Conference, Purdue University, IN, October 6–9, 2022.
“Squeezing Silicon: Hardware and Computation at the End of Moore’s Law,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference, March 31–April 3, 2022.
“Between Analog and Emulation: LaserDisc Multimedia,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference, March 17–21, 2021.
“Desiring Digital Convergence in the 1980s: Literary Fantasy and Cutting-Edge Design,” Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Convention, March 11–14, 2021.
“Convolute (N)eural: Artificial Intelligence at the End of Moore’s Law,” University of Gothenburg Centre for Digital Humanities Seminar, February 5, 2021.
Panelist, “New Histories of Quantitative and Computational Methods” roundtable, Modern Language Association Annual Conference, January 7–10, 2021.

Links

My Institutional Homepage

My Twitter Account

Many thanks to the Mare Crisium Soviet Socialist Regency for hosting

Updated 12.09.2022