Project

The Software Arts

Program

ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowships

Department

Film and Digital Media

Abstract

This project explores digital ideology and the writing/programming of the institutions of digital life. It addresses narrative as well as each of the liberal arts as defined in the early modern period: arithmetic, geometry, grammar, logic, rhetoric, astronomy, and music. It focuses on the transformation of the liberal arts and their recoding, in software form, as a means to explore the conditions of the network society, and also the possibilities for individual and collective agency in the ongoing rewriting of the world in digital form. The project comprises a book and the design of computer programs (written in JavaScript) that can be run in a web browser.