Lending Library

• Situated Software

  Clay Shirky

  Does software have to scale endlessly? An essay on how you can build software to be contingent and embedded in a specific community, and the benefits that can bring.

• There Is No Software

  Friedrich Kittler

  Fantastic academic exploration of the materiality of computing, and interrogation of abstractions that modern programming is built upon. 'What remains a problem is only recognizing these layers which, like modem media technologies in general, have been explicitly connived to evade perception. We simply do not know what our writing does.'

• Against Interpretation

  Susan Sontag

  Foundational text on valuing the immediacy of art. 'To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world, in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.” It is to turn the world into this world. (“This world”! As if there were any other.) The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.'