News/Research

Jacob Gaboury at Situations

28 Nov, 2018

Jacob Gaboury at Situations

On October 8, 2018, Jacob Gaboury presented a lecture at the Foto Museum Winterthur in Switzerland as part of Situations.

Situations 2018 explores the mechanisms of technical infrastructures and circulating images in the struggle for attention, focusing on the social implications of exposing / monitoring, as well as on the interface of the photographic and posthuman.

At Situations 139, Jacob presented "On Uncomputable Numbers: Queer Histories of Computation," exploring what a queer technics might look like — one that "refuses the logic of capture and extraction that define contemporary platform capitalism."

From Jacob's abstract: Drawing on the long history of queer engagements with the negative, the outside, nonsense, and illegibility, this presentation looks to those sites and processes in the history of computing that fall outside the successful and productive functionality of computational systems, where technology breaks down, fails, recurs, and runs forever, that is, to uncomputability. Through a reading of Alan Turing's early work on undecidability alongside Ludwig Wittgenstein's simultaneous research into the foundations of mathematics, this presentation explores the concept of computing outside the imperative of successful communication, arguing that these failed states are examples of what we might describe as a queer computation, in that they are the externalities of a binary system that seeks universal application.

See more here.