Re: [-empyre-] technological and human dis/remembering
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I wanted to take up John's notion of the impermanence of The Cloud. This puts me in mind of an art project that I believe speaks to this intersection of issues. Last year, my writing partner Rob Wittig and I ran a netprov on this topic. (A netprov is an online improvised narrative.) ( http://robwit.net/?p=223) hehe, Mark -- just to drop a singular historical note in the mix -- I was regularly doing live/online networked text/sonic/visual improv storytelling with my students in Finland, Germany, Norway, Iceland, and @ CU-Boulder between '93-'04 via IRC, iVisit, CUSeeME, VDMX, REAL, and FTP (some scattered evidence @): http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/archives/tag/online/page/2 -- it's quite fun when they get tapped into it -- A bit hard to imagine how it proceeds in this day of saturated social media. cheers, John -- ++ 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
[-empyre-] Digitality, Authenticity, Decay, Memory
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi Attila and Mark, I think this may speak to aspects of both your posts so I will leave this here. Let me echo the thanks to Quinn for organize this and quickly apologize for being a bit late to the game. Just to riff a bit on some of your points Atilla. I think, as I understand it, I completely agree with your suggestion that memory itself, thought of as “human memory” has always been intertwined with techne, dependent on some form of prosthesis outside of ourselves to serve as referent. To this extent as well I agree that immanent to memory is it is consistently built on a lack that is compensated for through a reiteration of the relation to a past. What I mean to say, if memory is considered as a particular relation to the past, the selective nature of memory itself implies the converse as well, that every relation to a past via memory is a non-relation to an alternate past. How might this relate to digital objects or the digitization of information? I would raise multiple questions here that I believe my interlocutors may be better positioned to comment on. The relationship between memory and technological artifice has been problematic at least since the time of Plato. The externalization and perhaps expropriation of memory, the location of memory elsewhere in objects (memorials) could in fact be destructive. The openness of such objects as memorials has long been linked to discussions of their success or failure as memorials. The question I would raise then vis-à-vis digital objects and memory relates directly to the question of what is the digital object and from whence does its authority emanate? The idea of digital archives for example calls to (my) mind the contradictory stances of both something eternal and unchanging but as well their ultimate fragility. This fragility has been pointed out as deriving from the nature of the medium itself (the ease of its re-writeability, erasability, as well as very real possibility for the decay/degeneration or loss of information, vulnerability to changes in technology, obsolescence). Insofar as digital objects' immateriality compared to traditional objects are free from what we generally call decay, their relation to memory itself changes. We could for example say the materiality of decaying objects has traditionally been the ironic source for their identity, by their increasing 'lack' over time of what they once were we judge their authenticity, through their decay we have some referent to the fact that two times (past and present) are bridged. Digital decay I would suggest does not act in the same way. This being said digital mediums that by nature exist less as authoritative isolated objects and are more dependent on their relationality may allow for multiple, co-existent, even contradictory structures of memory. I am thinking of Ernst here when I suggest that the digital realm is dependent as much upon its relationality and its structure as it is upon concrete bits of information. To bring a quote in “Ultimate knowledge (the old encyclopedia model) gives way to the principle of permanent rewriting or addition (Wikipedia) (Ernst 2013). Here memory then could be seen as ultimately formed through its reaffirmation and changed through the shifting frequency of future iterations, searches and relationships. Now is this in and of itself radically new? Perhaps not. Memory has likely always been competitive. But there is something interesting in the shifting ontological nature of the digital object and that perhaps is due further investigation. Further though, if what is essential for a human appropriation or extrapolation of memory from digital data which in its sheer amount far exceeds the ability of any one individual to take in at any given time (thus necessitating a certain selective forgetting but as well pointing towards an interesting gap between information and knowledge that is no doubt exacerbated by such a form) how much are we externalizing memory in a technological artifice that we, somewhat unawares, become incapable of accessing largely through our inability to process such databases? Becoming crippled under the weight of data? Marks question here of source code as reminder seems pertinent and interesting but I need to ponder it a bit further, and I would echo his reference to Chun by quoting her from an essay I recently read (The Digital Ephemeral, 2008) “The major characteristic of digital media is memory. It’s ontology is memory…” I feel like this may have become a rant but these were a few thoughts I had to hopefully add to the conversation. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Digitality, Authenticity, Decay, Memory
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 6:42 AM, Sean Rupka sru...@gmail.com wrote: Marks question here of source code as reminder seems pertinent and interesting but I need to ponder it a bit further, and I would echo his reference to Chun by quoting her from an essay I recently read (The Digital Ephemeral, 2008) “The major characteristic of digital media is memory. It’s ontology is memory…” In an effort to draw together some of these excellent discussions so far, I’m wondering if there isn’t a salient connection between thinking and memory that sits beneath some of these examples of technology, (social/) psychology, and ontology? At some obvious level, our capacity to think—rationally or emotionally—would be seriously impacted by changes to our mnemonic world: presumably this lies behind the consternation about digital clouds (Attila) and Wikipedia (Christian), but maybe also the narrative of re-created snapshots (BTW: Mark’s project is terribly funny!). Additionally, what does it say about our epistemic position that we judge authenticity by decay, as Sean pointed out? How do we *think* about ourselves when this decay occurs differently in the digital (although, as physically instantiated, decay still very much occurs)? Beyond the somewhat obvious sense of memory I just mentioned—that one needs memory to be able to “think” in some (empirical) sense—I’m also intrigued by a sense of memory that, as a society, we’ve lost sight of (but may be on its way back). Specifically, I’ve been intrigued by the seemingly close association between “thinking” and “memory” as instantiated in a number of early devices. One such device is Athanasius Kircher’s intriguing “ark” or “organ” (see an image here: http://note.io/1DvX0w4). This curious device works like an alphabetic slide rule, or, to modernize the phrase considerably, a computer. By *combining* letters the user can find solutions to existing problems. On the surface, this may have little to do with memory, but these tools that combine discrete things are very much informed by, originally, Raymund Lull’s volvelles (http://note.io/10yEPdr), and eventually a long mnenomic tradition (here’s an image of Bruno’s memory wheel: http://note.io/10yEPdr). Yates makes this point many decades ago: “As intellectus, it was an art of knowing or finding out truth; as voluntas it was an art of training the will towards loving truth; as memoria, it was an art of memory for remembering truth” (1966, 174). And, what is equally exciting, Yates notes that Lull “introduces movement into memory. The figures of his Art, on which its concepts are set out in the letter notation, are not static but revolving”. This movement, Yates notes, was a big departure from the “memory palaces” of the Greeks: but, is chillingly similar to how digital objects function today, isn’t it? Computers hum. They swirl and and move. They “execute” (recalling Mark’s reference to Chun’s distinction between source and executable code). It is an important fact that what makes executable code so important to a computer is movement. Cheers, Quinn P.S. My research is actually on cryptography, and it isn’t lost on me that Lull and Bruno’s thinking/memory wheels eventually produced Alberti’s cipher wheel: http://note.io/1DvY2ID. An especially intriguing connection if we think about how encrypted text is the very definition of unassailable memory. -- - iqdupont.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Digitality, Authenticity, Decay, Memory
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- A few years back, Empyre hosted a discussion on the E-Ject… which, eventually, was turned into a paper for DAC: E-Ject: On the Ephemeral Nature, Mechanisms, and Implications of Electronic Objects: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2xv6b6n0 This has been a good thread to follow. I wanted to comment on your statement: This being said digital mediums that by nature exist less as authoritative isolated objects and are more dependent on their relationality may allow for multiple, co-existent, even contradictory structures of memory. This is what I am puzzling through with regards to my research on objects created in Flash. Soon, people might not even know how to read or access important works of art from the 1990s. This is different than losing something from culture because it is considered unimportant, or not considered at all. Rather, we are experiencing a split of literacy. On the one hand, media obsolescence is like Hopkins' comment on the forgetting that comes when a language and its community of users dies. To the vast range of human users, swaths of culture die off when a medium becomes obsolete. On the other hand, as Marino notes, the code is still there (even if it is not readily readable to the software/platform/interface you are using). In many cases, there are pre-networked digital objects that are locked into archives, gathering dust, decaying, etc. But there are many inaccessible and dead works that can still be saved, stored, analyzed as code… from a machine perspective. The only thing I can think about, is the situation in the middle ages, when monasteries processed unknown (and even dead) languages while the larger community outside used a spoken vernacular to conduct its affairs (occasionally dipping into the world of deep coding to intervene in the deeper structures of codes like law and theology and record). In a way, it is a reflection of the new power dynamic in which we place machines and their reading practices in a central role. Davin Heckman On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 4:42 AM, Sean Rupka sru...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi Attila and Mark, I think this may speak to aspects of both your posts so I will leave this here. Let me echo the thanks to Quinn for organize this and quickly apologize for being a bit late to the game. Just to riff a bit on some of your points Atilla. I think, as I understand it, I completely agree with your suggestion that memory itself, thought of as “human memory” has always been intertwined with techne, dependent on some form of prosthesis outside of ourselves to serve as referent. To this extent as well I agree that immanent to memory is it is consistently built on a lack that is compensated for through a reiteration of the relation to a past. What I mean to say, if memory is considered as a particular relation to the past, the selective nature of memory itself implies the converse as well, that every relation to a past via memory is a non-relation to an alternate past. How might this relate to digital objects or the digitization of information? I would raise multiple questions here that I believe my interlocutors may be better positioned to comment on. The relationship between memory and technological artifice has been problematic at least since the time of Plato. The externalization and perhaps expropriation of memory, the location of memory elsewhere in objects (memorials) could in fact be destructive. The openness of such objects as memorials has long been linked to discussions of their success or failure as memorials. The question I would raise then vis-à-vis digital objects and memory relates directly to the question of what is the digital object and from whence does its authority emanate? The idea of digital archives for example calls to (my) mind the contradictory stances of both something eternal and unchanging but as well their ultimate fragility. This fragility has been pointed out as deriving from the nature of the medium itself (the ease of its re-writeability, erasability, as well as very real possibility for the decay/degeneration or loss of information, vulnerability to changes in technology, obsolescence). Insofar as digital objects' immateriality compared to traditional objects are free from what we generally call decay, their relation to memory itself changes. We could for example say the materiality of decaying objects has traditionally been the ironic source for their identity, by their increasing 'lack' over time of what they once were we judge their authenticity, through their decay we have some referent to the fact that two times (past and present) are bridged. Digital decay I would suggest does not act in the same way. This being said digital mediums that by nature exist less as authoritative isolated objects and are more dependent
