Indeed, we are now seeing a dramatic change in the way in which sociality is performed and mediated through new distributed digital media technologies. Crucially, this change is also to be seen in the way in which sociality itself is understood, for example through social media and related technologies. That is, we see simultaneously an epistemological and pragmatic shift in everyday life towards the use of computational systems to support and mediate life itself. As the computational increasingly penetrates life in profound ways, it does so with a new intensity in terms of a complex repertoire of user-oriented logics drawing from an interdisciplinary archive of aesthetic, human–computer, psychological, sociological, phenomenological and design research. This research has been mobilized to provide a texture and a form to computation, which has built an infrastructure that performs a logic of impalpability, that is, an imperceptibility to the machinery of computation through a veneer on which the commodity form of computation is inscribed (Berry 2014, 69). Indeed, this also points to the importance of new critical disciplinary engagements with the computational reflected in, for example, digital humanities, software studies, digital sociology, computational social science, digital history, computational media and so on (see Berry 2011; Golumbia 2014; Wardrip-Fruin and Mateas 2014).

We might say that a new constellātiō informs an epistemology of the historical present, with an episteme informed by a new historical constellation derived from the truth-values implicit in the interdisciplinary formation of knowledges linked to computation, or at least a scientism that distils these knowledges into a performative form (see, for example, Lyotard 1984). Here we might reflect on the way in which new patterns are formed in and through the computational, with the logic of influence and logistics driving the instrumentality that is delegated to machines that materialize the spectrality of algorithms.

We are not suggesting that this is a totalization of all spheres of life. Indeed, there remain residual practices which will be outside, or on the margins of, computation, in some senses antagonistic to computation but also parasitic on the computational form. However, these will be peripheral practices in relation to the centre of experimentation and creativity within new forms under the terms of the asterism of computation, for example through increasingly computationally infused art and design practices. In a world of computational rationality and the new performative epistemologies it makes possible (Berry 2012), it thus becomes crucial to map and understand this new form of rationality in the light of instrumentalism and capitalism.

In this new constellation, the historical distinction between the digital and the non-digital becomes increasingly blurred, to the extent that to talk about the digital presupposes a disjuncture in our experience that makes less and less sense in the experience of the everyday (Berry 2014; but also see Galloway 2014 for a discussion of non-digitality). Computation becomes experiential, spatial and materialized in its implementation, embedded within the environment and embodied, part of the texture of life itself but also upon and even within the body. Computation becomes something which operates while one walks around, is touched and touchable, manipulated and manipulable and interactive and operable through a number of entry-points, surfaces and veneers. Indeed, in a similar way to how the distinction between ‘being online’ and ‘being offline’ has become problematic, with widespread wireless networked devices, so too, perhaps, the term ‘digital’ describes a historical world of discrete moments of the computational. Through the increasing reality of a deeply embedded computational horizon, computational technology institutes new and ever more effective, more delightful and pleasant forms of experience instituting new diagrams of social control and intensified social cohesion. We will return to this issue.

In 2008, Anderson proclaimed the ‘End of Theory’, arguing that the data deluge made the scientific method obsolete. Indeed, he argues that ‘we can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.’ He argued that this is

Today we might say that the condition of possibility for this new milieu of contemporary life is ‘compute’: compute as the abstract unit of computation, as both dunamis (potentiality) and energeia (actuality), that is, as the condition of possibility for the question of the in-itself and the for-itself. Compute, as a concept, exists in two senses: as the potential contained in a computational system, or infrastructure, and in the actuation of that potential in material work, such that the theoretical question posed by compute is directly relevant to the study of software, algorithms and code, and therefore the contemporary condition in what we might call a computal society. Here we are thinking about the computal as a concept for thinking about the differing constellation of computational(s) (see Moores, Couldry and Berry 2015): that is, to ‘stop thinking about the digital as something static and object-like and instead consider its “trajectories” ’ (Berry 2014, 14). Compute, then, is a notion of abstract computation, but it is also the condition of possibility for and the potential actuation of that reserve power of computation applied to a particular task. Compute becomes a key part of a computational noetic and a means of thinking through the distribution of computation. It also highlights the importance of thinking through the technological imaginary of computal society, how concepts like the postdigital offer a means of contesting and critiquing the derangement and reassembly of knowledges through computation, and how other ‘stacks’ are still possible (see Berry 2014; Bratton 2014; Terranova 2014).

This can be seen in the emergence of the New Aesthetic as a project initiated by James Bridle, a British designer and programmer, as an attempt to document and catalogue patterns of the computational throughout everyday life. The New Aesthetic, therefore, signals a kind of threshold or saturation point whereby the obscure ubiquity of digital, networked and mobile devices inspires a struggle to map, document and record; in other words, to make sensible and intelligible the seemingly opaque operations of digital infrastructure, even while invoking an ambiguous gesture of aesthetization using the Tumblr.com platform. Working from within an explicitly art-world context, the notion of post-internet art has, meanwhile, been elaborated as works that engage with digital networking through hybrid, often offline, manifestations. In this sense, artist and curator Marisa Olson uses the term to describe art literally created after internet use: the creative ‘yield’ from hours of consumptive downloading and browsing (Debatty 2008). This can, moreover, be taken as a situation of art making after the internet has massified through platformization, resulting in a mainstreaming marked by the shift from exceptional to ordinary perceptions of digital creativity. The role of the practitioner here, then, is also imagined in terms of techniques of recognizing patterns, cataloguing, curating, interpreting and transcribing (Vierkant 2010), and then actualizing these engagements as artefacts for potential contemplation. The ‘postdigital’, meanwhile, also covers a wide range of issues attached to the entanglements of media life after the digital, including a shift from an earlier moment driven by an almost obsessive fascination and enthusiasm with new media to a broader set of affectations that now includes unease, fatigue, boredom and disillusionment. Linked to ideas like the ‘off-internet’ and ‘neo-analogue’, the postdigital recognizes the revival of ‘old’ media formats like cassette tapes or analogue synthesizers, and more generally maps out ‘the messy state of media, arts and design after their digitization’ (Cramer 2015, this volume). Crucially, this also involves working through the implementations of the computal in a regular state of constant upheaval. In other words, this is a condition in which digital disruption is not transcended as such, but becomes routine or business as usual.

All of these proposed terms and concepts seize on a hybridized approach towards the digital and non-digital, finding characteristics of one within the other, deliberately mixing up processes of making things discrete, calculable, indexed and automated in unorthodox ways. In doing so, they form part of an epistemological asterism of practices, experiences and mediations that follows the primacy of the computal as normative. That is, the appearance of these terms can be interpreted collectively as endeavours to elucidate the trajectories of ubiquitous digitalization; they collectively form new patterns which can help us begin to map and historicize the varieties of computal societies.

This is not to imply that the aim was to outline a hermeneutic of the interface; rather, the intention was to explore contemporary manifestations and ‘eruptions’ of the digital into theory, art, design and everyday life more generally. From notions of the postdigital to the new aesthetic, there have been a number of attempts to situate and conceptualize the computational in relation to concerns about the affordances of digital technologies, media and infrastructures. Many of the contributions to this volume have attempted to reconstruct these computal constellations through a number of mediations, including objects, institutions, ideologies and theories, but there is also an explicit attempt to engage with the question of the computational as a fundamental problematic.

Florian Cramer opens this collection, asking: ‘What is the post-digital?’, examining a condition in which digital technology is no longer new media. He argues that ‘post-digital’ is arguably more than just a ‘sloppy descriptor for a contemporary, and possibly nostalgic, cultural trend’. Rather, ‘post’ should be understood in terms of post-punk, post-feminism, post-communism, as subtle cultural shifts and ongoing mutations. Thus, ‘post-digital’ refers to a state in which the disruption brought about by digital information technology has already occurred and, as such, represents a crisis of the cybernetic notion of ‘system’ which neither ‘digital’ nor ‘post-digital’ – two terms ultimately rooted in systems theory – is able to leave behind, nor even adequately describe.² In their contribution to the collection, Christiane Paul and Malcolm Levy trace a complex genealogy of the New Aesthetic that interweaves visual, theoretical and philosophical lineages. Discussing a wide range of phenomena movements from cybernetics to net art, they find a complex range of influences embedded in the ‘blurry’ collective impression of the New Aesthetic images, but nevertheless acknowledge that this strange low resolution of the assemblage is a central aspect of its appeal.

David M....