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CTRL SHIFT makes a case for design under contemporary computation. The abstractions of reading, writing, metaphors, mythology, cryptography, interfaces, and other such symbolic languages are leveraged as tools for understanding. In a field that maintains its power through the jealous guarding of knowledge, this understanding becomes an active threat. Through challenges to the singular expertise of programmers, CTRL SHIFT advocates for the examination of internalized beliefs, the breaking of software's control structures, and the collective sabotage of computational authority.
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Notes on Reading
(for an Online Exhibition Reader)
The text above is the abstract for the thesis book. In it, the text is titled "Notes on Reading (for a Database)" and is qualified with a footnote about its role as a collection of tags for the RISD library database. In the introduction of the book, I address 'abstraction as a means of control' as it relates to computation. The irony of writing an abstract for this book, for the purposes of entry into a database, is not lost upon me. To a library database, keywords serve as both the beginning and end of its reading; partial information is taken as complete, and this misleading totalization mediates the search. This abstract is written with the expectation that it will be so mediated. As such, it is more a shotgun spray of keywords than a weighted summation of an argument.
