The software arts (invited talk)

The subject of Warren Sack’s talk will be The Software Arts, a book recently published in the MIT Press “Software Studies” series. Sack offers an alternative history of software that traces its roots to the step-by-step descriptions of how things were made in the workshops of eighteenth-century artists and artisans. He illustrates how software was born of a coupling of the liberal arts and the mechanical arts and argues that the arts are at the heart of computing. The Software Arts is an invitation to artists and humanists to see how their ideas are already at the very center of software; and an invitation to computer scientists to envision how they are artists and humanists too.