Artist, scholar, and programmer Matthew Fuller, from Goldsmiths College in London, will be visiting campus to share from his exciting work as critic, artist and educator, delivering two talks: one about his work as an artist and one from his scholarship on software and computing studies.
Matthew Fuller and I/O/D: The Web Stalker
Talk No.1 / VISITING ARTIST LECTURE
https://www.facebook.com/events/110053502458484/
Wednesday March 28, 4pm
Art and Design Building 107
408 E Peabody Drive, Champaign
This talk will run through Fuller’s work as part of groups such as I/O/D and Mongrel in which software and the internet become contexts, to more recent projects such as Digger Barley and Requiem for Cod, in which ecological interests come to the fore, as too the question of the possibility of art for non-human animals. Alongside such projects the talk will discuss the relation of art practice to different forms of theory and to fiction, through a discussion of books such as Elephant and Castle and projects such as Moving Forest.
Talk No.2 / KNOTTY PROBLEMS IN THE FABLES OF COMPUTING
https://www.facebook.com/events/202275393209882/
Thursday March 29, 4pm
126 LIS Building
501 E. Daniel St, Champaign
Computer Science has a number of classic problems, such as the Travelling Salesman’s Problem and the Dining Philosophers Problem that have been developed over time as abstract versions of real engineering conditions in which resource allocation, of memory, of bandwidth, and so on, must be made. Such knotty problems are part of the iteration of one of the central problems in computing, that of speed and intractability as it unfolds in relation to computing applications. In themselves these problems are profound and fascinating micro-worlds that work in the “timeless” worlds of fables, but they also have significant conceptual and practical spill-over involving spatial, social and aesthetic dimensions. This talk will attempt to draw out some of their implications for politics and art.
Biography
Matthew Fuller is author of various books including ‘Media Ecologies, materialist energies in art and technoculture’, (MIT) ‘Behind the Blip, essays on the culture of software’ and ‘Elephant & Castle’. (both Autonomedia) With Usman Haque, he is co-author of ‘Urban Versioning System v1.0′ (ALNY) and with Andrew Goffey, co-author of the forthcoming ‘Evil Media’. (MIT) Editor of ‘Software Studies, a lexicon’, (MIT) and co-editor of the new Software Studies series from MIT Press and of the journal Computational Culture, he is involved in a number of projects in art, media and software and is a Reader at the Centre for Cultural Studies Goldsmiths, University of London.
Sponsors
SORF
GSLIS
HASTAC@Illinois
Center for People and Infrastructures
