Invocational Media

"""Turning away from computational media as ""digital"" and instead theorizing computers through their capacity to invoke, to call things up and respond, Chris Chesher's Invocational Media provides a staggeringly original perspective on technology that thrillingly reimagines almost all foundations of digital culture."" --Grant Bollmer, Associate Professor of Media Studies, NC State University, USA ""In a time where we are all mesmerized by the magic of ChatGPT and similar AI technologies, Chris Chesher's book is highly welcomed and timely. Using the concept of invocation and engaging with a wide range of relevant media philosophy, Invocational Media offers an interesting and highly original way to theorize how we design, experience and interact with digital technologies and, more precisely, how they design us. This is an important contribution to the philosophy of media and compulsory reading for everyone puzzled by the mystery of contemporary AI."" --Mark Coeckelbergh, Professor of Philosophy of Media and Technology at the University of Vienna, Austria ""Just at the moment when the interactive interface is newly ascendant and we thought that all had been said, along comes this gift of a book. Thinking with the generative trope of invocational media, Chesher refigures the power and limits of computation. Invocational Media offers a history of the present of human-computer interaction, and a proposal for how we can rearticulate its future. It will be of interest to anyone engaged with the invocations, avocations and evocations that comprise relations at and through the interface."" --Lucy Suchman, Professor Emerita of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK"