Matthew Fuller

Lives in	London, United Kingdom
Web	Aaaaarg, Wikipedia

Matthew Fuller is a writer, artist and Professor of Cultural Studies at the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is known for his writings in media theory, software studies, cultural studies, and contemporary fiction. Until September 2006, he was responsible for the Media Design Research programme at Piet Zwart Institute along with Femke Snelting, and worked as Course Director for the Media Design programme. He has collaborated with a number of art collectives, including I/O/D (as a member), Mongrel, MediaShed, and The Container Project. He lives in London. (2019)

Works

Nonfiction

• editor, Flyposter Frenzy: Posters from the Anticopyright Network, London: Working Press, 1992, 104 pp. A collection of 90 full-page posters. Introduction. [1] [2]
• editor, Unnatural: Techno-Theory for a Contaminated Culture, London: Underground, 1994, [86] pp.
• co-editor, ReadMe! ASCII Culture & The Revenge of Knowledge. Filtered by Nettime, New York: Autonomedia, 1999, 556 pp.
• Behind The Blip. Essays On The Culture Of Software, New York: Autonomedia, 2003, 165 pp.
• Media Ecologies. Materialist Energies In Art And Technoculture, Cambridge/London: MIT Press, 2005, 265 pp.
• Softness: Interrogability; General Intellect, Art Methodologies in Software, Huddersfield: Huddersfield University/Digital Research Unit, 2006; repr., Aarhus: Center for Digital Æstetik-forskning, 2006, 49 pp. Originally given as a talk at the ISEA in Helsinki in 2004
• with Usman Haque, Urban Versioning System v1.0, Architectural League of New York, 2008, PDF.
• editor, Software Studies: A Lexicon, MIT Press, 2008, 334 pp.
• with Andrew Goffey, Evil Media, MIT Press, 2012, 235 pp.
• How To Be a Geek: Essays on the Culture of Software, Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017, x+233 pp. Collected essays 2011-2016.
• How to Sleep: The Art, Biology and Culture of Unconsciousness, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, 192 pp.
• with Olga Goriunova, Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019, xxviii+192 pp.
• editor, with Rosi Braidotti, Theory, Culture & Society 36(6): "Transversal Posthumanities", Sage, Jul 2019. [3]
• with Eyal Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth, London: Verso, 2021, 259 pp.
• editor, with Tihomir Topuzovski, The Large Glass: journal of contemporary art, culture and theory 37/38, Skopje: MoCA, 2025. Publisher. [4]

Fiction

• ATM, London and Milan: Shake, 2000, 108 pp. [5] [6]
• Elephant & Castle, Autonomedia, 2011, 160 pp. [7]
• More, cont.

Papers, book chapters, articles

• with Simon Pope, "WARNING! This Computer Has Multiple Personality Disorder", 1995.
• "(Freedom of) Speech Pattern Recognition", Wired UK 1.03, Jun 1995.
• "SPEW, Excess and Moderation on the Networks" [1995], in ZK Proceedings 95: Net Criticism, eds. Geert Lovink and Pit Schultz, Amsterdam, 1996.
  • "OKÁDÉK - mértéktelenség és mértékletesség a hálózatokon", in Buldózer: Médiaelméleti antológia, eds. Ágnes Ivacs and János Sugár, Budapest: Media Research Foundation, 1997. (Hungarian)
• "Eating Disorder: The Story of a Shape", cont., Nettime, Jan 1997. [8]
• "The Long Dark Phone-in of the Soul", in The Beauty and the East, eds. Pit Schultz, Diana McCarty, Geert Lovink, and Vuk Cosic, Ljubljana, May 1997; repr. in Mute 1(8): "Cyberfeminism", London, Sep 1997. [9]
• "Visceral Facades: taking Matta-Clark's crowbar to software", May 1997.
• "A Means of Mutation: Notes on I/O/D 4: The Web Stalker", cont., Nettime, May 1998. [10]
• "Linker", Nettime, Sep 1999.
• with Geert Lovink, "The Chickens Have Come Home to Roast: Organising Attention", Nettime, Aug 1999.
• "Books to Beat Bottlenecks", Mute 1:17, Jul 2000.
• "It looks like you're writing a letter: Microsoft Word", Nettime, Sep 2000.
• "Commonality, pixel property, seduction: As If", Sep 2001.
• "Utilitopianism", Mute 1:22, Dec 2001.
• "Behind the Blip: Software as Culture", Nettime, Jan 2002.
• "Freaks of Number", in Engineering Culture: On 'The Author as (Digital) Producer', eds. Geoff Cox and Joasia Krysa, New York: Autonomedia, 2005, pp 161-175.
  • "Monstres mathématiques (Freaks of Number)", in Art ++, ed. David-Olivier Lartigaud, Orléans: HYX, 2011, pp 302-315. (French)
• with Andrew Goffey, "Towards an Evil Media Studies", in The Spam Book, eds. Jussi Parikka and Tony Sampson, Hampton Press, 2009, pp 141-159. Written Mar 2007.
• with Andrew Goffey, "On the Usefulness of Anxiety: Two Evil Media Stratagems", in Sarai Reader 08: Fear, eds. Monica Narula, et al., Delhi: Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2010, pp 156-163.
• "The Cat Seemed to Think There was Enough of It Now in Sight", in Opaque Presence: Manual of Latent Visibility, eds. Andreas Broeckmann and Knowbotic Research, Zurich: diaphanes, 2010, pp 37-52. [11] [12]
• with Sónia Matos, "Feral Computing: From Ubiquitous Calculation to Wild Interactions", Fibreculture Journal, Sydney, 2011; repr. in Fuller, How To Be a Geek, Polity, 2017.
• with Andrew Goffey, "Digital Infrastructures and the Machinery of Topological Abstraction", Theory, Culture and Society 29:4-5, 2012, pp 311-333.
• with Olga Goriunova, "Phrase", in Inventive Methods, eds. Celia Lury and Nina Wakeford, London: Routledge, 2013; repr. in Fuller, How To Be a Geek, Polity, 2017.
• "Several Repetitions on the Nature of the Copy", Concreta 02, Valencia: Concreta, 6 Dec 2013.
• with Andrew Goffey, "The Unknown Objects of Object Orientation", in Objects and Materials: A Routledge Companion, eds. Penny Harvey, et al., Routledge, 2014, pp 218-227; repr. as "The Obscure Objects of Object Orientation", in Fuller, How To Be a Geek, Polity, 2017. [13]
  • "Die obskuren Objekte der Objektorientierung", trans. Heinz-Günter Kuper, Agata Królikowska and Jens-Martin Loebel, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 6, 2012, pp 206-221. [14] (German)
• "How to Sleep: The Art, Biology and Culture of Unconsciousness", Springerin 4: "Kognitives Kapital", Vienna, 2014.
• "Always One Bit More, Computing and the Experience of Ambiguity", in Fun and Software: Exploring Pleasure, Paradox and Pain in Computing, ed. Olga Goriunova, Bloomsbury, 2014, pp 91-108; repr. in Fuller, How To Be a Geek, Polity, 2017.
• with Ellef Prestsæter, Michael Murtaugh, Nicolas Malevé, "Vandalist Iconophilia", Concreta 05, Valencia: Concreta, 1 Jun 2015.
• "The Forbidden Pleasures of Media Determining", in Media After Kittler, eds. Eleni Ikoniadou and Scott Wilson, London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2015, pp 95-111.
• with M. Beatrice Fazi, "Computational Aesthetics", in A Companion to Digital Art, ed. Christiane Paul, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016, pp 281-296; repr. in Fuller, How To Be a Geek, Polity, 2017.
• with Graham Harwood, "Abstract Urbanism", in Code and the City, eds. Rob Kitchin and Sung Yueh Perng, London: Routledge, 2016; repr. in Fuller, How To Be a Geek, Polity, 2017. Presented at the Programmable City workshop at Nirsa in Maynooth in 2015.
• with Andrew Goffey, Adrian Mackenzie, Richard Mills, and Stuart Sharples, "Big Diff, Granularity, Incoherence, and Production in the Github Software Repository", in Memory in Motion: Archives, Technology, and the Social eds. Ina Blom, Trond Lundemo and Eivind Røssaak, Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 2016, pp 87-101; repr. in Fuller, How To Be a Geek, Polity, 2017. It follows research with the co-authors in the ESRC-funded Metacommunities of Code project, led by Adrian Mackenzie.
• "Crawl, Map, Link, Read, Copy, Repeat. Notes on I/O/D 4: The Web Stalker", Rhizome, Feb 2017.
• "Nobody Knows What a Book Is Any More", in Report from the Gutenberg Galaxy (Blaker), 3: Archive Has Left the Building, eds. Karin Nygård and Ellef Prestsæter, Blaker: Rett Kopi, 2017, pp 6-10.
• "Bookworms", in Report from the Gutenberg Galaxy (Blaker), 3: Archive Has Left the Building, eds. Karin Nygård and Ellef Prestsæter, Blaker: Rett Kopi, 2017, pp 16-21.
• "Software Studies Methods", in Fuller, How To Be a Geek, Polity, 2017; repr. in The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers, London: Routledge, 2018, pp 250-257.
• with Nikita Mazurov and Dan McQuillan, "The Author Field", in Fuller, How To Be a Geek, Polity, 2017. Follows from work on the London Cryptofestival in November 2013.
• "Just Fun Enough To Go Completely Mad About: On Games, Procedures and Amusement", in Fuller, How To Be a Geek, Polity, 2017. Presented as a paper at the St Petersburg Centre for Media Philosophy; a workshop organized by the ARITHMUS research project at Goldsmiths; and C-Dare at Coventry University.
• "Black Sites and Transparency Layers", in Fuller, How To Be a Geek, Polity, 2017. First given as a talk organized by Robin McKay of Urbanomic at Thomas Dane Gallery, London, March 2015; a later version was presented at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremburg; at the Interface Politics conference, Barcelona, April 2016; and as an inaugural lecture at Goldsmiths.
• with Olga Goriunova, "Devastation", in General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm, eds. Erich Hörl and James Burton, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
• "Inhabiting High Density Realities: On Shu Lea Cheang's Artistic Language" / "棲息於高密度現實 鄭淑麗的藝術語言", in 3x3x6: Shu Lea Cheang, ed. Paul B. Preciado, Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2019, pp 15-47. (English)/(Chinese)
• with Rosi Braidotti, "The Posthumanities in an Era of Unexpected Consequences", Theory, Culture & Society 36:6, 2019, pp 3-29. [15]
• with Nikita Mazurov, "A Counter-Forensic Audit Trail: Disassembling the Case of The Hateful Eight", Theory, Culture & Society 36(6): "Transversal Posthumanities", eds. Rosi Braidotti and Matthew Fuller, Nov 2019, pp 171-196. [16]
• with Dominik Schindler, "Community as a Vague Operator: Epistemological Questions for a Critical Heuristics of Community Detection Algorithms", Computational Culture 9, Jul 2023.

• more, cont., cont., texts in Datacide

Interviews

• Interviews with Kate Rich, Ben Grosser, Sean Dockray, Annet Dekker, Olga Goriunova, Graham Harwood, Steve Goodman, Mark Fisher, Femke Snelting, Jussi Parikka, Luciana Parisi, a Photocopier, Rachel Baker, Bifo, Tom Betts, and 0100101110101101.ORG.
• "Mervin Jarman - The Container", Nettime, Jun 1999.
• Matthew Fuller, "SERVICE 2000: 29 Uncommissioned Web Sites", Telepolis, 3 Jul 2000.
• snafu, "Matthew Fuller on ATM", Nettime, Sep 2000.
• Ryan Griffis, "Tandem Surfing the Third Wave with Matthew Fuller", Fall 2004.
• Simon Mills, "Interview with Matthew Fuller", framed, c2006.
• Matthew Fuller, "Questioning Capitalist Realism: An Interview with Mark Fisher", Monthly Review, 27 Dec 2009.
• "Matthew Fuller in Conversation with Mark Marino", Journal of e-Media Studies 3:1, 2013.
• "Matthew Fuller", Radio Web MACBA, 11 Aug 2017, 46 min. Audio.
• more

Literature

• Belinda Barnett, "Storming the Interface: Mindvirus, I/O/D and Deceptive Interaction", Artlink 17:4, 1997.

Links

• Home page (archived 2016)
• Home page (archived 2003)
• Profile on Goldsmith, London
• Profile on Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam (archived 2008)