On Remediation: Media, Repair, and the Discipline of Fantasy in the Theory and Practice of Algorithmic Modernity (2023)
Barany, Michael J. (Author)
Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 38
Pages: 40-57
Nothing ever works quite as imagined. When algorithms and mathematical systems work, to the extent they do, imagination makes all the difference. Work, imagination, and the space between them manifest in mediated practices of conceptual figuration sustained through regimes of remediation: repair, correction, backfilling, but also (as a pun) patterns of mediation and material transmutation. Such remediation links algorithmic practice and fantasy from early modernity to the present, from the elementary to the elite. It makes whole small errors and grand systems alike. I explore these remediations and their relationship to materials, labor, and fantasy through an episodic account of sixteenth-century arithmetic, nineteenth-century blackboards, twentieth-century projects to create global infrastructures and universal foundations, and twenty-first-century tests of the promises and limits of mediated imagination in mathematics.
...MoreArticle James Evans; Adrian Johns (2023) Introduction: How and Why to Historicize Algorithmic Cultures. Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 1-15).
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