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Critical
Software Thing

artist-researchers

Critical Software Thing is a collective of artists, thinkers and researchers interested in thinking “thing” from the perspective of Software Studies. The group began as a series of discussions and a shared set of interests around the notion of execution, questioning what exactly execution is and where something like a computer program might be understood to execute. The group has published a book project provisionally titled Executing Practices (published by Autonomedia in the DATA browser book series). Contributors are Audrey Samson, Lea Muldtofte, Winnie Soon, Eric Snodgrass and Francisco Gallardo as part of the Critical Software Thing collective.

Prospections

30/01/2023

On Digital Discomfort

Execution

Critical Software Thing

Originating with the twelfth-century French term l’exécuteur du testament (the executor of the will), the term “execution” today finds itself entangled in myriad systems, such as linguistic systems, judiciary systems, computational systems, and systems of memory—all of which are touched upon in this text (originally published as an entry in The Posthuman Glossary [2028]) by Critical Software Thing (CST)). Be it by guillotine or CPU, as a realization of a decreed sentence, CST suggest that “execution” always relates to the now, “to an actualization, a presence which is always already over.” Highlighting the micro-instructions, micro-operations, and micro-temporality of systems executions, CST point toward the liveness inherent in them. Without succumbing to the seeming seamlessness of computation—harkening to the Cell for Digital Discomfort’s suggestion to embrace a seamful approach to technology—and with an awareness for the executive power of code, CST propose that code itself to be regarded as but “a partial instruction within a wider, dynamic ecology of many executing systems.”

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Prospections

Execution

Critical Software Thing

Critical
Software Thing