[-empyre-] empyre DIGITAL OBJECTS october introductions
--empyre- soft-skinned space--*Welcome to October, 2014 on --empyre-- soft-skinned space: * *DIGITAL OBJECTS * Moderated by Quinn DuPont (CA), Anais Nony (FR), and Ashley Scarlett (CA) with invited discussants to include: Ange Albertini (US); Dragan Epstein (DE); Andres Ramirez Gaviria (CO/At); Yuk Hui (DE-based); Jan Robert Leegte (NL); Kristie MacDonald (CA); Mark C. Marino (US); Nicholas O’Brien (UK); Christian Pentzold (DE); Ben Roberts (UK); Dani Robison (US); Daniel Rourke (UK); Sean Rupka (CA/US); Phil Thompson (UK); Hannah Turner (CA); Alexander Wilson (CA); and others to be announced as the weekly subthemes are posted. October 6th to 12th Week 1: *PRACTICE* October 13th to 19th Week 2: *MATTER* October 19th to 25rd Week 3: *PROCESS* October 26th to 31st Week 4: *MEMORY* *Welcome! * During the month of October, --empyre—soft_skinned_space will be discussing DIGITAL OBJECTS as our over-arching theme, with Practice, Matter, Process, and Memory as weekly sub-themes intended to facilitate an intersectional approach to this emerging area of scholarship. We would be thrilled if you joined us!! Please find our introduction to the month’s conversation below, followed by a few provocations for your consideration! (Introductions to the weekly sub-themes will be posted on Sundays, along with the bios of the invited participants.) *ON DIGITAL OBJECTS* Deciphering the ontological underpinnings of digital objects has become an increasingly pressing line of inquiry within numerous disciplines, spanning the humanities, social and hard sciences. Informed by the terms and political impetus of (digital) Materialism, investigations into the status of digital objects offer grounded means through which to conceptualize the “submedial space” of 21st century media. To date, these projects have been driven in large part by such questions as: what kind of thing is: a digital file? (Kirschenbaum 2010; Vismann 2008); metadata? (Hui 2012); the selection tool? (Leegte 2010); or 3D scans and prints? (Sportun 2013). As this list suggests, developing a rich and reliable understanding of digital things has theoretical implications for how contemporary computing is being conceptualized, while also posing practical consequences within fields such as copyright legislation and digital repatriation. This current interest in digital objects mirrors a recent and overarching academic reorientation around objects and materiality more generally (Morton 2013; Harman 2011; Bennett 2009). While a considerable amount of this scholarship asserts the historical necessity of an object-oriented (re)turn to the material realm, these projects have been unable to contend with digitality, focusing instead on the physically robust supports of computer interaction (screens, hard-drives, network wires). According to Jussi Parikka (2012), the recent turn to object-oriented inquiry has emerged at precisely the moment when a series of mediatic phenomena, such as ubiquitous computing and algorithmic futures (Hansen 2015), are systematically undermining established perceptions of what an object is at all. Complicating the matter of objects further is the sense that digitality has given rise to new forms of techno-relational substance that philosophy is not yet equipped to account for (Bryant 2014). While 20th century philosophy incorporated an analysis of technical objects into the long history of meditations on natural substance, we are now contending with the digital by-products of technical objects. To this end, the emergence of digital objects does not only pose significant implications for digital culture at large, but it also marks a novel moment in the history of philosophy, as we navigate new (and increasingly hybrid) notions of objectivity (Hui 2012). While a number of scholars, artists and practitioners have begun to account for the status of digital objects, their performative suspension, between software and hardware, as well as the processual and cascading grounds from which they perpetually emerge, greatly complicates efforts at developing a solid account of their underlying parameters. During the month of October, we are hoping to engage a multi-scalar, intersectional approach to Digital Objects. In an effort to ground the conversation in practice and existing literature, we will begin the month with discussions of PRACTICE and MATTER. During the 3rd week, we will explore PROCESS as both an essential and seemingly insurmountable component of digital objects; the processuality of digital objects poses one of the most significant challenges to developing a stable analysis of their ontological underpinnings. In the 4th and final week, we will analyze how the intersection of MEMORY and digital objects problematizes matters of memorialization and rationalization. Our hope is to assess how digital objects might necessitate an altered conceptualization of memory. Through our
[-empyre-] week one - PRACTICE - introduction
--empyre- soft-skinned space--*October 6-12* *PRACTICE* Much of the current and most pressing work on digital objects is being taken up within professional and creative contexts through practice. In an effort to ground a largely theoretical discussion on digital objects, and furnish it with political and practical urgency, from October 6th-12th, we would like to open with a conversation regarding encounters with and impressions of digital objects “in the wild”. Of particular interest are conversations regarding how digital objects are being encountered and conceptualized within practices of: curation; exhibition; preservation; archiving; and design. In addition to our overarching provocations, we will explore such questions as: · Drawing upon your experience, how do you conceptualize digital objects? How does this conceptualization fit into the work that you do? · How have historical, political, experiential, and ideological forces factored into this definition of digital objects? · What consequences does this definition have within your line of work/research? And more broadly? · How would you characterize your relation to and experience of digital objects? · Why does a conversation concerning digital objects matter? What is at stake in this conversation? While we will hopefully make our way through each of these questions this week, as well as other emergent ones – we would like to extend a special invitation to the --empyre--soft_skinned_space community to share your own “definitions” of digital objects. From your perspective, what kind of thing is a digital objects? *INVITED DISCUSSANT BIOS* *Ange Albertini *is a reverse engineer, professional malware analyst, developer, and author of http://www.corkami.com. Ange has been experimenting with computer internals more than 20 years. More recently, Ange has become interested in the visualization of digital objects, attempting to document various binary file formats visually (current images can be found at pics.corkami.com). Additionally, Ange manually crafts files to present particular characteristics by combining file formats, compression and cryptography. Ange has been called a 'digital alchemist' and a 'binary artist’ for his work in creating a valid PDF that is also a valid TrueCrypt container, and a JPEG that encrypts with AES to a PNG file which decrypts with 3-DES to a PDF file. *Dragan Espenschied *(*1975 Germany) is a media artist, digital culture researcher and 8-bit musician living in New York City. Starting out as a net activist in the late 1990’s, he created several online interventions concerned with digital power structures and live network traffic analysis/manipulation together with Alvar Freude. In his artistic career, Espenschied focuses on the historization of Digital Culture from the perspective of computer users rather than hackers, developers or “inventors” and together with net art pioneer Olia Lialina has created a significant body of work concerned with how to represent and write a culture-centric history of the networked age. Since 2011, he has been restoring and culturally analyzing 1 TB of Geocities data, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Espenschied worked with the transmediale festival’s archive and the Vilem Flusser Archive to conceptually and technically integrate large-scale emulation while working as a researcher at the University of Freiburg and the University of Applied Arts in Karlsruhe. Publications include papers on large-scale curation of complex digital artifacts, emulation and digital culture, the influential reader Digital Folklore as well as musical releases on Aphex Twin’s label Rephlex and several underground/net labels, performing and lecturing in between raves and museums in Europe and the United States. Since April 2014, he is leading the Digital Art Conservation Program at Rhizome. *Andres Ramirez Gaviria *Informed by processes of translation and transference, and building on the forms, figures, and discourses of art, design, and technology, Andrés Ramírez Gaviria’s work addresses such disparate, even contradictory, notions as autonomy and communication. Through the interaction of forms and connections, Gaviria’s work emphasizes moments of discord and dialogue between the constantly changing perspective of historical references and an experiential notion of the contemporary. Andrés Ramírez Gaviria (born 1975 Bogotá) lives and works in Vienna, Austria. His work has been exhibited in BA – CA Kunstforum, Vienna; Kunsthaus Graz; Kunsthaus Dresden; Caribbean Biennial, Santo Domingo; Galeria Vermelho, Sao Paulo; Arte Camara – ArtBo, Bogotá; the ARCO International Contemporary Art Fair, Madrid; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Sonambiente, Berlin and Transmediale, Berlin. *Kristie MacDonald* is a visual artist and archivist who lives and works in Toronto, Ontario. She holds a BFA from York University specializing in Visual
