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

[sally jane norman]

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 seeks to touch on (sadly I couldn't attend...);
proceedings are due out one day - info at www.enhsa.net/WhatsTheMatter/.
Luciana Parisi's reasoning across computation and architecture ("Contagious
Architecture") might also be relevant to this tack, and/ or Bernard
Tschumi's work on the "programmatic" and event-oriented thrust of urban
architectural design, but I'll (almost) stop name dropping here.

I like the fact/ way you're seeking to develop connections across the
discretisation of architectural/ algorithmic systems and of language/
linguistic systems, as per Kramer's argument. Am wondering how this /
Kramer's work (which I don't know, other than that she's an architect) fits
in with that of language specialists (more names, can't help it) like
Sylvain Auroux (La Révolution technologique de la grammatisation), for whom
grammar emerges as a cognitive tool that modifies modes of communication,
more or rather than as a describer of natural spoken language. His focus is
thus not on the "notational" breakdown of orality to the visual (cf. also
Walter Ong?), but instead on the advent of mechanisation and automatised
language processing through tools that extend from historical construals of
"grammar" to computational "expert" systems. I get a little nervous when
orality and musicality are too categorically opposed to visuality and
calculability, even though I realise we must sometimes resort to
cut-and-dried conjectures to get thoughts moving. Auroux's thinking is no
doubt anchored in a (French?) tendency  - I'd say gift, in his case - for
trying to freely span and bridge pre- and post-digital cultures, whilst
mobilising an extremely robust set of disciplinary perspectives.

OK enough from me; respectful of empyre netiquette. Wanting to hear more
from you folks.

all best
sj


On Wed, Oct 8, 2014 at 1:21 AM, Quinn DuPont <isaac.q.dupont at gmail.com>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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)
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
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