I have a new short piece about the value of language in the digital economy out in APRJA Research Values, ed. by Christian Ulrik Andersen & Geoff Cox. I use {poem}.py (my artistic intervention into Linguistic Capitalism & Google AdWords), to re-work Christian and Geoff’s introduction 3 ways:  http://www.aprja.net/language-redux/ This issue is the result of the Research Values workshop at the Brandenburg Center for Media … Continue reading Language Redux

Geographies of (con)text: language and structure in a digital age is an article I published last year (2017) in Computational Culture: a journal of software studies. It began life as an AAG paper called The Production of Context and Digital Reproduction of Language, presented in one of the Geographies of Software sessions organised by Nick Lally and Ryan Burns in 2016. The article talks about … Continue reading geographies of (con)text: language and structure in a digital age

I haven’t always written about algorithms and digital capitalism, but I have previously used poetry as a lens through which to expose the politics and asymmetries of technology and space. The Meaning of Light: Seeing and Being on the Battlefield (cultural geographies Vol: 22 issue: 4) is a paper I published in 2015 based on my experiences as a reservist soldier in Iraq in 2003. … Continue reading The Meaning of Light: Seeing and Being on the Battlefield

I am very excited to be a part of this event at Mile End Arts Pavilion in London next month. I will be displaying my {poem}.py project at the exhibition (3-8th Sept), and also giving an artist’s talk at the symposium on the 8th September. The exhibition also features computer artist Will Hurt and designer Yosuke Ushigome. From the website: Following the rise of unprecedented… Continue reading Politics and ethics in media & art technology | Exhibition & Symposium 3-8th Sept Mile End Arts Pavilion

By Pip Thornton I have been doing some work about the Tories and Labour buying Google adverts for ‘dementia tax’ in the run up to the General election. It is fascinating to me as it shows so clearly what I am trying to critique in my work about the politics and economics of the search engine, and the neoliberalistion of language and discourse through Google’s… Continue reading Buying Brexit: the politics of Google ads & the general election

Sergey Brin and Larry Page invented Google as students at Stanford in 1998. They knew from the beginning how advertising could interfere with the efficiency and integrity of their proposed search engine. In an appendix to their paper, on The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine, they noted that ‘the goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality … Continue reading How the Tories wrote my thesis: the political economy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine

My essay The Death of the Reader has been published in Under the Influence magazine. It’s a special issue on the subject of SPEED, so the essay reflects on the implications of machine reading, and includes a brief description of my own intervention against the quantification of language (specifically by Google’s AdWords platform) in my {poem}.py project. A PDF of the essay is available here: … Continue reading The Death of the Reader | UNDER THE INFLUENCE MAGAZINE

I’ve been playing around with some ideas for my upcoming presentation at the Research in Real-Time – Practice in Progress conference at NUI Galway next month. I’ll be using some material from the Engineering Fictions workshop I did with CONNECT writer in residence Jessica Foley in Dublin in February, where we experimented with writing the most expensive and cheapest love poems using Google AdWords suggested … Continue reading reclaiming poetry from the algorithmic marketplace