Professor Warren Sack's The Software Arts (Cambridge MIT, 2019)

Warren Sack (Chair and Professor of Film and Digital Media, University of California Santa Cruz) argues in a new book 'The Software Arts' that computing is an art that belongs at least as much in the humanities as it does in the sciences. Fascinatingly, he shows how the art of computing hinges on skills in interpretation and translation which are features that are at once problematising and enriching: 'once we are working with metaphors, we are working as artists' (Sack: 2019, 19). However, he warns that a founding idea of computing, that they can do anything humans can, is a myth. He argues by tracing this back to incorrect popularising of the earliest theorists of computing (Turing). Instead of pursuing an arithmetisation that is damaging to thought, we should 'think beyond the current ideological limits of algorithms' (Sack, 2019, 28). I find this book extraordinarily stimulating because it encourages one to return to the possibilities of computing but to do so as an artist rather than as a subject in thrall to big data, using methods of assembly and appropriation to integrate computing tools into art that reflects back what it is to be human. What could that mean in practice? The transformation of sound in live musical settings through ensemble communication, sometimes complicated and mediated by computing, sometimes not.