Keynote

Narrating a series of lesser-known historical episodes, Alexander R. Galloway’s keynote lecture addresses the computable and uncomputable. These stories are drawn from the archives of computation and digital media, broadly conceived. The goal is to show how computation emerges or fails to emerge, how the digital thrives but also atrophies, how networks interconnect while also fraying and falling apart. Such alternations–something done something undone, something computed, something uncomputed–constitute the real history of digital machines, from cybernetics and networks to cellular automata and beyond. And while computers have colonized the globe in recent years they also excel at various practices of exclusion. Since the 1970s “protocol” technologies have played a key role in this transformation. Galloway concludes with an interrogation of the concept of protocol in 2020, revisiting his groundbreaking 2004 book Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization.

Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programmer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, he is author of several books on digital media and critical theory, including The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012). His collaboration with Eugene Thacker and McKenzie Wark, Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation, was published by the University of Chicago Press. With Jason E. Smith, Galloway co-translated the Tiqqun book Introduction to Civil War (Semiotext[e], 2010). For ten years he worked with RSG on Carnivore, Kriegspiel, and other software projects. Galloway’s last book was a monograph on the work of François Laruelle, published in 2014. He is currently finishing a new manuscript on the deep history of computation.

The Vera List Center Forum 2020 launches the center’s 2020-2022 focus theme, As for Protocols. Curated by Carin Kuoni and Eriola Pira, it is organized with the support of Adrienne Umeh, Heran Abate, Joshua van Biema, and Maryna Arabei.

The Vera List Center Forum 2020 is made possible by major support from Jane Lombard and the Kettering Fund, as well as the Boris Lurie Art Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Sigrid Rausing Trust, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and The New School as well as members of the Vera List Center’s board and other individuals.