Re: [-empyre-] A question concerning the electrification of digital objects
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Dear all, Usually I don’t write in Empyre, but in this case I want to contribute with some thoughts on digital objects as it is central to my ongoing research. Regarding the work of Goodman, I agree that his approach on how the coding distinctions between the score (numbers), the script (texts), and sketch (images) should be perceived and interpreted in different ways is quite relevant to the contemporary discussion on digital objects. This brings me back to the question on practice, since numbers, texts and images are the three elementary cultural forms that human beings use in order to manage information through (work) practices. The semiotic characteristics of these tokens in the physical world persist even in the digital realm. Thus, their semiotic character helps to evince the elusive and transfigurable nature and characteristics of digital objects. For example, the sketch is highly ambiguous; images do not have an “alphabet” or a structure for combining them, which explains why the image’s level of ambiguity is high in comparison to that of a text or other mono-semiotic structures (i.e., numbers, alphabet). An image can never be procedurally reproduced in an identical fashion, unless copied in its entirety. Seen as a process and an outcome, the sketch lacks the cognitive organization of rule-based combinations of standardized marks such as the composition of scripts and the musical notation (score). This is the main reason why there are indeed particularities and different types of practices that forge between the different types of digital objects. On top of that we have to add additional-semiotic structures such as metadata that are necessary in order to understand the way in which people search or manipulate contemporary digital objects today. In terms of bibliography, during the last decades in the field of Information Systems there has been a growing research on digital objects. Two key authors Shoshana Zuboff (In the age of the smart machine : the future of work and power, 1988) and Jannnis Kallinikos (Governing through technology : information artefacts and social practice, 2011) analyze the impact that information-based tokens may have on work practices. Both authors emphasize how work is becoming more abstract and symbolic, increasingly focused on the intricacies of instrumentation, and distanced from its physical reference (refs: Ong and Goodman). There are other works which emerged in recent years, based on the study of technological (or digital) artefacts as structured objects. Contemporary work environments are considerably shaped by the interaction of these structured objects and the ways they are managed (in the form of text, images, video, or computer code). Studies from this angle analyze the impact of a technology through the structural attributes or properties of digital technologies, such as Youngjin Yoo (Computing In Everyday Life: A Call For Research On Experiential Computing. MIS Quarterly 34(2), 2010), Jannis Kallinikos, et al. (A Theory of Digital Objects, First Monday 15(6). http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/rt/printerFriendly/3033/2564 and more recently The Ambivalent Ontology of Digital Artifacts. MIS Quarterly 37(2), 2013). best, José-Carlos On 8 October 2014 at 10:40:47, sally jane norman (normansallyj...@googlemail.com) wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello Quinn, all Thanks for a superb subject for harvesting autumn musings (or spring shoots, for the half of the planet's population living down under...). Quinn, your digital example - discretised digits - is on a superficial reading both helpful (I also use this etymology a fair bit, particularly for dealing with arts practices that demand sophisticated gestural/ instrumental skills) and frustrating, since its very usefulness depends on overlooking vital continuity between the operational (separate) digits and the spaces in between, which include epidermis and nerves and tendons and a bunch of fibres that in fact link digits to the limbs and the brain thence to the environment and cosmos... Of course, it never ends. The infradigital? José Gil (Metamorphoses of the Body) would eloquently hammer this issue with his infralanguage, the resistance of gesture to micromovement analysis, etc. But I guess the trade-off between the discretised (to use a happily Stieglerian term) and the holistic is inherent to our problems somehow conceptualising the digital, in ways that might usefully rein it in for corporeal practices. I'm certainly having to - literally and physically - grapple with it all the time. Nice to catch Goodman in here; must go back and look at his Languages. Re Mario Carpo and the architectural strand, he presented at an event last month in Barcelona where the outline and abstracts seem to broach some of the things this discussion
[-empyre-] D-to-A conversion
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- additional musings: I think a discussion of 'digital' needs to include, somewhere, the term 'analog', as one of the key devices that *has* to be invoked *and* implemented in any interaction with the digital is the A-to-D or D-to-A converter. This is a device without which the digital would remain a total abstraction. Even the brain of the coder has to function in the capacity of such a converter. The digital is the abstracted (sampled) representation of the analog: a sampling of a flow that reduces the energized sample to a numeric (abstracted) coded value. This is the essence of a 'digital-to-analog converter' -- it is the primary interface between the world of (real!) energy flows and the abstracted world of code. (see http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/archives/1199 for an exapnsion of that) The present techno-social system we are enfolded within may be described as a hybrid code/energy (digital/analog) system. A digital signal is digital only in a static and dormant (potential) and provisional sense. Just as money is the abstracted social representation for (potential) real energy exchanges, the digital (as an abstracted protocol for the organization of information) is a representation of what is, at base, a movement of energy. Digital information is a representation of some originary flow of energy 'out there': when the digital it is in motion, it is analog. Changing a digital data set does not impact the nature of the digital data-set in its abstraction. The changing of a digital 'signal' is fundamentally the changing of an analog signal: it is coded abstraction coming-to-be. By the discrete and representative nature of the digital, change is only an issue at the analog input and output. A unit of data on a spinning hard drive disk (as one example of 'digital storage') is a temporary set of aligned magnetic dipoles (which take energy to align!). To transfer data is to duplicate the highly ordered (analog!) arrangement of dipoles in another location through electromagnetic amplification (and transmission) following a precise pathway within a highly defined and strict set of protocols: what is the sound of one bit flipping? Duplication, transmission, and interaction requires the (analog) movement of energy. For the body-system to interact with the digital, a movement of energy is necessary. The body cannot 'be' digital, it is embedded in and interfaces with the universe through the movement of energy. Our 'interactions' with the 'virtual' or 'the digital' require a complex deployment of interdependent energy flow pathways within the global techno-social system... Cheers, JH -- ++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD grounded on a granite batholith twitter: @neoscenes http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Digital Objects
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Dear --empyre-- members and invited discussants, Thank you for an engaging start to this month's conversation! I have a bit of a follow-up question that I feel engages several of the entries thus far and that, I hope, might get us talking about how to reconcile function and appearance. After posing my question, I will provide some context for it. *** Is framing digital phenomena as objects worthwhile? What work can the concept of digital object do for us, that an acknowledgement of perpetual processuality cannot? *** Because computer programs are largely founded upon the “presupposition of representation” (Hui 2012:345), much of the scholarship on digital objects has been limited to things that could be made visible to a user (Ange’s comment regarding his reason for back-end “crafting” seems relevant here). As several of the recent posts (Dragan, Andres, Hannah...) have articulated, this is a regrettably limited approach that is not able to account for the depth and processual complexity of digital objects/things/stuff/whatever. From hidden communication between smart devices to the algorithmic computation of actionable futures, many of the processes inherent to “the digital” are taking place outside of the phenomenal field of human perception. To this end, not only is the performative “stuff” of the digital functionally evasive, but the reiterative and regenerative executions that drive its operation also suggest that even when we do “see something,” it is nothing more than an ephemeral apparition. Now, with this being said - As Chun (2008) has discussed, and as Kristie and Dragan commented in their closing remarks (I think), despite the cascading complexity of the digital, and the dispersed apparatus that props it up, digital “stuff” *does* endure and frequently adopts a form that is remarkably easy to objectify, if only in appearance - the mouse pointer, an MP3 file, the selection tool (http://www.selectionasanobject.com/), a series of electronic gems (http://nicolassassoon.com/GEMS.html)… These things look like objects, act like objects, and (increasingly, as the distance between the digital and the physical closes,) feel like objects. Whether this is merely an ideological function of engineering or a matter of socio-cultural hallucination, the fact remains that digital objects are emerging as a contemporary phenomenon in need of critique... At any rate, I suppose the question now becomes whether the term “object” is merely a skeuomorphic metaphor used to make sense of the “stuff unlike any other,” or if an case can be made for the existence of digital objects. (I think several of us participating this month would like to make a case for the latter!) Furthermore, what work does and can the concept of digital object do for us? What insight might a conceptualization of digital objects provide us with that an understanding of the brute technicalities of computation cannot? *** Until next time, A. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
