This is no less than a history of our informatic and algorithmic present, one that fully succeeds in its aim ‘to unify critical theory and digital media.’
Alexander Galloway, media theorist, computer programmer, and NYU Steinhardt Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, has published a new critical examination of digital media. In Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age (Verso Books, November 2021), Galloway narrates some lesser known episodes from the history of digital machines, showing how computation emerges or fails to emerge, how the digital thrives but also atrophies, how networks interconnect while also fray and fall apart.
Galloway is the author or co-author of several foundational books on critical theory and digital media, such as Excommunication (2013) The Interface Effect (2012), Gaming (2006), and Protocol (2004). His grants and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Berlin Prize, and the Prix Ars Electronica. The New York Times has described his practice as "conceptually sharp, visually compelling and completely attuned to the political moment."