Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space (Technologies of Lived Abstraction)

"The thrill of this volume lies in its sustained pursuit of the problem of chance, randomness, and noncomputability as core dynamics in digital media. Its brilliantly heterodox take on computation allows Contagious Architecture to develop a groundbreaking account of algorithms and software, an account that puts debates about prediction and control in computational cultures on a much more exciting footing." -- Adrian Mackenzie, Lancaster University; author of Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism in Network Cultures "In Contagious Architecture, Luciana Parisi gives us a sense of space beyond spatiality, showing us an architecture in which the fixed is fluid -- an evocative and rigorous study whose scope exceeds traditional disciplinary boundaries." -- Eugene Thacker, School of Media Studies, The New School; author of The Global Genome " Contagious Architecture is the antidote to the cyclical trend of Auguste Comte's neopositivistic 'order of discourse.' By restoring the whole spectrum of languages, the multiple whispering in computation's Tower of Babel, Luciana Parisi introduces contingencies, the 'one thousand plateaus,' as a factor of knowledge -- rid of its deterministic and intrinsic nature of control -- to release its consequences as well as its presuppositions." -- Francois Roche, architect