Compression Mode - by Stephen Kennedy (Paperback)

About the Book

Proposes an acoustic response to the bewildering excess of information that accompanies exponential growth in the digital age.

Book Synopsis

This book examines how compression can be understood not only as a digital process enacted through computing, but as a wider economic and political phenomenon that impacts on the ecology of waste, diversity and social inclusivity.

Setting out from the linguistic underpinning of visual space it proceeds to the development of the MP3 algorithm and an examination of the 'waste' itcreates. As it does so it challenges the received wisdom, prevalent in western thought, that human reason and logic enacted through language is uniquely capable of bringing order to chaos. Returning to the idea of a sonic economy it seeks to reintroduce waste, error, and other discarded material back into our systems of thought, or perhaps more accurately into systems beyond our thought.

Review Quotes

Compression Mode explores the unruly nature of sound and noise, unearthing the treasures lost in our compressed digital worlds where the signal takes precedence. Kennedy takes us on an exhilarating ride, conjuring the spectral, the hidden and the unthought - a journey that questions our relationships with the sensual and digital worlds as they collide and coalesce.
Jane Grant, Associate Professor in Digital Arts, University of Plymouth, UK

For years literature on sound has lacked the specificity and precision afforded to visual culture. Compression Mode by Stephen Kennedy takes on this challenge and answers this call.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Founder and Director of Earshot.ngo

What can music, noise, and sound teach us about the fundamental ways we make sense of the world? This question is at the heart of Stephen Kennedy's intriguing book Compression Mode. For Kennedy, 'compression' is not simply a technical operation characteristic of digital media but a process evident in all the ways we represent or comprehend the world: language, mathematics, cartography, musical notation and more. Compression, then, becomes a metaphysical and epistemological concept with which Kennedy engages key debates in contemporary philosophy and aesthetics.
Christoph Cox, Executive Dean, Eugene Lang College, The New School, USA

About the Author

Stephen Kennedy is an independent researcher and member of the Captivate Heritage Lab, UK. He is the author of Chaos Media: A Sonic Economy of Digital Space (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Future Sounds: The Temporality of Noise (Bloomsbury, 2018). His work engages with digital aesthetics and involves reformulating the idea of noise as a means of supporting philosophical frameworks capable of accounting for the complex nature of contemporary environments.