Fun and Software offers the untold story of fun as constitutive of computing's culture and aesthetics. Fun is a form of production that touches on the foundations of formal logic and precise notation, exhibiting their connection to nonsense, paradox, play and art. Exploring topics as diverse as the pleasure and pain of the hacker, geek wit, and coding as a bodily pursuit of the unique in recursive structures helps construct a different point of entry to the understanding of software. From the formation of the discipline of programming as an outgrowth of pure mathematics to its manifestation in contemporary forms such as gaming, fun has always been a powerful (though by and large previously unaccounted for) force that continues to shape our life with software as it becomes the key mechanism of contemporary society. The fun this book speaks of is of a profound and multiform kind, the exploration and examination of which is pressing if we are to understand the endlessly compelling worlds of computational cultures. Including contributions from Matthew Fuller, Wendy Chun, Andrew Lison and Lev Manovich, Fun and Software promises not only represent the field of software studies, but build interdisciplinary debates and open the topic of software to a variety of approaches.
