[-empyre-] A question concerning the electrification of digital objects

[Quinn DuPont]

For my contribution to the week of PRACTICE, I offer the following question concerning the electrification of digital objects:

Whenever discussing "digital objects" to undergraduates I find that it is helpful to relate the well-worn etymology of "digital": that it is about the finger, or more specifically, the width of the finger which came to mean the gaps between. Immediately, this helps students to recognize that the electrification of digital objects is a purely contingent matter, which arose only after many non-electrical digital apparatuses. In fact, the computer, our zenith of digital apparatuses, can be fashioned out of many different material substrates---I then tell the undergrads about how I was once tasked with making a computer out of Meccano, an old children's toy that uses connecting pins to connect flat rods that have been punched with holes. I failed at the task, but learned first-hand about the importance of these holes. That the holes are *discrete* (separated, like the fingers) is vitally important for digitality.

This account of digitality inherits the ideality of its most precise narrator, the nominalist philosopher Nelson Goodman (in his work Languages of Art, 1976). Goodman sets up a tortuously analytical account of digital objects, bifurcated into what he calls "notational schemes" and "notational systems". The prior, *schemes*, are what we talk about when we discuss "the digital" (the latter include semantical criteria, and go beyond the "merely" digital). Goodman's criteria are convoluted ("disjoint" and "finitely differentiated"), but his examples are familiar: "alphabetical, numerical, binary, telegraphic, and basic musical notations" (p.140).

To kick-off my thoughts on how Goodman's "notational scheme" (aka: digital) relates to PRACTICE, I'll introduce two recent accounts directly inspired by Goodman (surprisingly, there are not many). 

The first is Mario Carpo's two works on theories of architecture: The Alphabet and the Algorithm (2011), and Architecture in the Age of Printing (2001). In both of these works, Capro discusses the 15th century thinker Leon Battista Alberti who used *digital* methods for his architectural creations. By imagining architectural forms digitally, Alberti was able to transform the practice of architecture from a craft to a science, capable of producing identical reproductions that fit together in an interchangeable, modular fashion. One of the more vivid examples is Alberti's development of a map constructed from a set of (what we would now call) digital "data points" (in his Descriptio urbis Romae). At the time, this was the most reliable, compact, data format for geographical imaging.

The second is Sybille Kramer's argument that writing can be contrasted to orality as a form of "notational iconicity". This strange term ("Schriftbildlichkeit" in the original German), highlights the fact that the invention of the phonetic alphabet by the Greeks was no mere derivation. Rather, because the alphabet breaks the naturally-continuous voice into artificial, discrete ("digital") parts, it permits the isolation and dissection of language. Kramer states that "notational visualization makes the *form* of language visible." Through writing, then, we ignore the musicality of language in favour of the visual. This leads, in the end, towards the "calculation" of language which reduces and eradicates meaning, (foreshadowing our discussion in the last week regarding the MEMORY of digital objects) one of the forms of "the techniques of forgetting.”

~ Quinn DuPont (iqdupont.com)
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