[-empyre-] Process as paradigm: Time/Tools/Agency

[Julian Oliver]

..on Fri, May 28, 2010 at 07:58:49PM +0200, Yann Le Guennec wrote:
>
> At another level, this logic is now everywhere in the social,  
> economical, political space. All these spaces are computed, processed by  
> processors, and that's why we really live now in the computer, and  
> that's why i can't see it just like a tool anymore.

To say "everything is digital" (as I heard someone say yesterday) or that we
"live now in the computer" is a little lazy I think. 

Certainly, computation mediates many aspects of modern life and as such will
deeply inform the transformation of human culture, just as the invention of
printing did so before it. What we (largely in the West) do live 'in' is the
/idea/ of a computer as a preeminant power, which is a more interesting starting
point for inquiry, I think..

What you seem to be pointing out is a prevailing cultural change in how
computers are perceived - something further amplified by the recession of
perceptible fundaments of a computer at work, yielding to the glut of troubled
visual metaphors present in modern operating systems.

It's here that the very idea of a computer becomes 'blurred' in the popular
imagination and people start thinking that everything's somehow digital or that
computers have an all-pervading reach. All the while the world's no less
'physical' than it was before Babbage. 

The second factor of this enchanting/blurring seems to be due to modern
computers' increasing dependence on their given network context, in order to
function at the Application Layer, forever rendering them partially 'somewhere
else'. The aptly named Cloud Computing is the very manifestation of this. The
result is that computers are increasingly imaginary objects.

This accumulating 'magic', indirectly bestowed on the modern computing device
(and the powerlessness it often brings), is a race-condition between hardware
and software engineers and the dwindling technical understanding of users. 

All said, computers can very much be tools; complex enough for fluid simulation
or emulating the prosthetic simplicities of a paintbrush.  While a tool,
computers are also commonly the presentation substrate itself, the support on
which that artwork will depend. No work of so-called 'digital art' can wholly
fulfill its title in this regard. Digits manifest and are manifested by certain
physical events and conditions, commonly fed by fossil fuels, all hosted in the
same complex physical universe as the eye and the canvas.

I find that in order to return the computer to the felt status of a very real
tool I simply need to go offline for a week or two, something easily done in my
home country. There is a world of creative possibility with Linux and the
command line alone, daunting in itself!

Thanks for reading,

-- 
Julian Oliver
home: New Zealand
based: Berlin, Germany 
currently: Berlin, Germany
about: http://julianoliver.com