----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Thank Ashley of bringing us together for this discussion. I just came to
the list so I may repeat some of the points that others have discussed. In
case, I excuse myself for this. I have written a PhD thesis titled "On the
Existence of Digital Objects" dedicated to a reading of Martin Heidegger
and Gilbert Simondon, so what I am going to say may resonate with Daniel's
previous comment.
I guess the thing and object distinction is one that every modern
philosophical treaty on thing or on object will encounter, indeed. I think
it is possible to study the thingness of a digital object, a thing has more
possibilities than an object, but probably less powerful than the object.
This reminds me of a recent conversation with Tristan Garcia (author of
Object and Form - A treaty on things), where he makes a paired distinction:
thing - ontology, object - metaphysics. My interest in digital objects
comes out of my interest in the question of formalisation. I think, this is
also largely the distinction that Heidegger has made, in which a object
always stands against (Dasein) (he takes it from the german word
Gegenstand), while a thing (especially in his 1951 essay Das Ding) - in his
own philosophical project - disrupts such tendency of formalisation, hence
we have the four-fold (das Geviert), namely heaven, divine, mortal and
earth. Digital object is always about formalisation, at least, from the
computational level. Sure when we speak of formalization, there are
different ways and also levels. I took digital object in a much narrower
sense (otherwise it wouldn't be possible to finish the thesis...), namely
objects with formalized metadata. This allows me to study the mark-up
languages and the evolution of digital objects from the 1960s until now.
The question of matter for me is one of the trickiest one. The blurb
written by Ashley reminded me immediately of J-F. Lyotard's 1985 exhibition
Les Immatériaux. Lyotard has chosen the name not because that he thought
there is something material, instead, he claimed to be a materialist,
wanted to show the the immaterial is the new materiality brought by
telecommunication technologies. Lyotard has an inedited text that he has
written as kind of report or letter addressing his colleagues, in which he
wanted to propose a new metaphysics after the technological development
(for interested parties, you can check out a colloque that I organized in
May with Andreas Broeckmann dedicated to Les Immateriaux, titled "30 years
after Les Immateriaux: art, science and theory". Lyotard has tried to
analyse this new material according 5 categories (matériau/medium,
matériel /receiver (destinataire), maternité /emitter (destinateur),
matière / referent, and matrice/code). This interlude of Lyotard
emphasized the relation between this new materiality and language.
I think Lyotard was right, in fact, not to focus on binary rather than
language: symbols and grammars. This violence of the binary, I won't take
it too serious, since it is clear if we study Leibniz carefully, that the
binary is like the minimum ontology, which allows to develop a metaphysics
which "with simplest hypothesis, produces the richest phenomenons". Deleuze
and Guatarri indeed, tend to emphasize the numérique than the binary. This
is also the order of magnitude that I have chosen to work on, data objects.
I prefer to talk about materiality than matter, since materiality gives us
different order of magnitudes, while matter, for me, implies an endless
reduction. Hence I come to the last point of this post (I know I shouldn't
write too long). In search of the matter of digital objects, we can perform
a reduction down to the hardware and finally to the quantum activities,
which may not give us an explanation of the other orders of realities above
it. This partly explains, to my own reading, that Aristotle in Metaphysics
Book Z has decided to grant the primary being to *eidos* instead of matter.
Materiality for me is not something we can get rid of form, indeed, I have
tried to show in a recent article Form and Relation
<https://www.academia.edu/7782458/Form_and_Relation_-Materialism_on_an_Uncanny_Stage>,
that the hylomorphism should be abandoned following Heidegger and Simondon,
while it is also not productive to revive the 18th century metaphysics that
reappear in the recent works of some speculative realists. The materiality
also implies a constant process of materialisation, which is always
technical and technological, Simondon in his Du Mode d'existence des objets
techiques has a very interesting take on this process of materialisation,
which I have also described in the above article.
Best,
Yuk
2014-10-13 19:29 GMT+02:00 Daniel Rourke <therou...@gmail.com>:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> More echoed thanks to Ashley for bringing us all here and each of the
> previous occupants of the conversation for kicking things off...
>
> Reading Nicolas's thoughts on interruption I was reminded of a text very
> much* not *about digital materiality, that is Bill Brown's playful
> treatise *'Thing Theory' *(2001).
> <http://faculty.virginia.edu/theorygroup/docs/brown.thing-theory.2001.pdf>
>
> Eschewing Heidegger's definition of a 'thing', in which objects are
> brought out of the background of existence through human* use*, Bill
> Brown marks 'things' through the jolt, the interruption, the encounter. An
> object becomes a thing when it stops working for us; when the smear on the
> window halts our treatment of the window as something we merely 'see
> through'. I can only consider the MATTER of the digital through similar
> encounters, no doubt one of the main reasons why I am drawn to (digital)
> art that engages with interruption, failure, glitch, and jam in its
> conception and/or making. To blend Brown's ideas into Nicolas's analogy of
> a journey, I don't experience interruption as the choice I make to drive
> off the road, to knowingly halt the journey. Rather, that decision is only
> the first step I make in my search for the 'elusive moment of terrified
> separation from humanity/civilization'. Glitch artists do not *create
> *glitches,
> rather they manifest behaviours in environments (physical or mediated) that
> are more likely to lead them towards the elusive glitch, the sublime
> interruption. If one smears the window on purpose then the window+smear
> continues to function precisely as you wished it to. Your making of the
> smear cancels out any chance it has to jolt you into thingly confrontation
> with the window. Glitch artists flirt with this problem in their work, and
> the further problem that comes from most glitches leading to absolute
> failure. One must therefore court the glitch, whilst not letting it take
> over completely. Artist Daniel Temkin <http://danieltemkin.com/> has
> talked extensively on this.
>
> If we consider 'the digital' to be more than zeroes and ones, to exist in
> the relationship between materials and software/hardware protocols,
> then the idea of a digital 'thing' is intimately bound up with an idea of
> human autonomy and mastery (or lack of). Entropy marks all physical
> processes in the universe, and so in order for digital processes to carry
> on carrying on we invented certain protocols and rules of parity. In short:
> error checking routines are fundamental to what constitutes the digital.
> Again, the thingliness of the digital comes to the fore when these error
> checking routines fail, when the parity bit is not parsed correctly and the
> jpeg won't load. In that moment, as the OS repeats its message of apology
> and the jpeg continues to remain unvisible, only then do I encounter the
> jpeg as thing, the computer as thing, the digital as thing. The glitch
> artist, of course, does not want the jpeg to fail absolutely, rather they
> want it to fail *just enough* to produce a file that still opens, but has
> been radically transformed.
>
> This opens up into a larger set of political questions concerned with the
> privilege of 'flow' over 'interruption'; of 'signal' over 'noise' in our
> digitally mediated world. As Mark Nunes has noted
> <https://www.scribd.com/doc/58881843/Mark-Nunes-Error-Glitch-Noise-And-Jam-in-New-Media-Cultures>,
> following the work of Deleuze and Guattari:
>
>
> “This forced binary imposes a kind of violence, one that demands a
> rationalisation of all singularities of expressions within a totalising
> system… The violence of information is, then, the violence of silencing or
> making to speak that which cannot communicate.”
>
>
> Is the will we have to encounter the digital object / to radically
> transform it / to impose an aura onto it - perhaps a violent one? How do we
> render this violence productive, without also rendering it inert?
>
> I am going to end there I think. Hopefully the distinction between the
> terms 'object' and 'thing' is a useful one for our discussion, and also
> perhaps the distinction between an intended interruption and a stumbled
> upon encounter. Really looking forward to seeing where this conversation
> takes us.
>
>
> Daniel
>
>
>
>
>
> On 13 Oct 2014 16:44, "Nicholas O'Brien" <nicholaso...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>
>> Hello empyre:
>>
>>
>> Thanks so much to Ashley and the other moderators for inviting me to be a
>> discussant this month. I’ve been following the conversation and am
>> definitely excited to contribute!
>>
>> As a way of getting started I wanted to pick up on two things that Ashley
>> wrote with regards to the materiality of digital objects:
>>
>> *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… *
>>
>>
>>> *As I mentioned in an earlier post, much of what we refer to when we
>>> speak of “the digital” takes place outside of the field of human
>>> perception.*
>>
>>
>> This statement makes me think about driving in nature. I live in NYC now
>> and don’t really get to act on the “Did you know New York has 10,000 miles
>> (or whatever amount) of snowshoe hiking trails?” as much as I’d like to.
>> That being said, The “ephemeral apparition,” - or as I like to call it,
>> experience - of the digital reminds me of taking the offramp on the
>> highway to observe a scenic overlook. I grew up in Northern Virginia and my
>> family didn’t have a lot of money when I was young to go travel or book
>> hotels for long weekends. Instead we would go down US interstate 81 until
>> we got to the historical scenic route Skyline Drive. We would cruise up
>> and down the windy road, listening to tapes on the car stereo or playing
>> guessing games until my brother and I would get tired and fall asleep in
>> the back seat. From time to time, however, we’d pull over and take a look
>> out into the Blue Ridge Mountains and rolling hills of the lower
>> Appalachian Trail.
>>
>> More recently, whenever I make long car trips (in that
>> ever-so-quintessential Americana way), I rarely remember the mile marker,
>> or the commemorative plaque, or where I was on my journey, or even the
>> actual view. What I do remember is that I turned off the road and
>> interrupted my trip - and that this interruption is often a way of
>> reminding myself of my journey through the “stuff” of the road (or
>> information superhighway if you will).
>>
>> So, then, what is the objectification of that experience? What is the
>> matter that consolidates or crystallizes that moment of rupture? It could
>> be a photograph, or a video, or a tweet, or a sound recording, or a text to
>> a loved one - some digital artifact of remembrance, a keepsake of data. But
>> I’d wager that the real substance of experiencing the ephemeral occurs
>> in the moment of interruption. With a slight nod to Kev Bewersdorf, I’d say
>> that the materiality of the digital only happens AFK - removed from the
>> torrent of being plugged in, reflecting on it only when one has fully
>> stepped away from its monotony. The moment in which one pulls off the road,
>> interrupting their electronic activities, is the moment when the digital
>> becomes material. It is when the onslaught of digital stuff becomes sublime.
>>
>> For me the experience of the sublime is the elusive moment of terrified
>> separation from humanity/civilization. In that moment of (self) recognition
>> away from the digital, I am deeply troubled by what I see in front of me. I
>> see the sublime as a terrible thing, or else a thing of terror (ala Burke).
>> It is terrifying and horrific to reflect on the digital - and it is in that
>> moment of terror that the digitial becomes “real,” or else it becomes
>> “matter.” The “terribleness” - as described by Burke - of that feeling
>> transforms the ephemeral into the actual, and in doing so it shapes the
>> digital into an object.
>>
>> ***
>>
>> Perhaps the terror that I see during (self)reflection away from the
>> digital speaks to the dangers that occur within a disappearing submedial
>> space. The invisibility of surveillance and the political work that goes on
>> within network culture is often only visible en masse - as is the case with
>> OWS, the Arab Spring, and the current Hong Kong protests. The problematic
>> posed by Groys’ analysis of 21st century submedial space suggests not only
>> that the presence of such a space is becoming hard to perceive but also its
>> affect is becoming harder to feel. This lack of emotional (or
>> psychological) tactility that occurs from observing these mass-produced (or
>> mass-represented) forms of political action from the outside creates a
>> dangerous type of association - one that is inherently built on distance,
>> absence, and othering.
>>
>> When affect has been evacuated from social exchange a different type of
>> objectification happens, one that I don’t actually know how to define, but
>> certainly feels different. The matter of a digital object is one that is
>> quickly losing its affect, one that gets subsumed into an infinite scroll.
>> It doesn’t feel like pulling off the road, at least. Instead it feels more
>> like a self-driving car.
>>
>> --
>> Nicholas O'Brien
>>
>> Visiting Faculty | Gallery Director
>> Department of Digital Art, Pratt Institute
>> doubleunderscore.net
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
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>
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