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

[Hannah Turner]

Dear all, 

Although with less of a philosophical lens, and at the risk of separating into another corner of the party - I thought I would post some initial thoughts on the last few posts, and raise a few questions that have occupied my mind through my work, and pose more questions.

I wanted to offer, alongside the discussion of the definition of the digital as both discretized and the holistic, as the previous post put it, a way to ground or reground this in practice, "in the wild, on the ground” so to speak. Specifically, I want to ask: what does a definition of the "digital" allow us to talk about, or help us to conduct practice in different, new or more productive ways? And what “difference” does this make to users of these computational systems – if any at all? 

Part of this begs the question - what is an object, and why are these important? One way to describe them, is that digital objects, as many people I work with would say, "just" representations of existing objects, for example, material heritage, and whether it is through a film camera or a computer, serve the same function and therefore are both described in the same way?

The first question, I think, is an interesting one. For example, some of my research has been to look at how computers and the Internet have enabled Indigenous communities who are interested in doing research on their cultural heritage located in museums, and who are geographically dispersed from these sites, a practice that has been happening for the better part of 20 years. For many individuals who seek this kind of access, viewing to the "Real" objects is of utmost importance, but images and representations on computer screens seem to be good enough placeholders for communities to identify objects that may or may not belong to them, and begin the process of repatriation or loans, or begin a dialogue with the museum about viewing the collections in situ. In any case, the ultimate goal is to be in presence with the "original" object - and any distinction made between an image taken with film versus one on the computer may not be relevant at all in this context, because as I said, they are talked about as if they are the same. 

It is my suspicion that defining a digital object is of little consequence in these places - however these same communities are seeking greater control and power over these digital representations and therefore, at least recognize the power (and danger) of the digital object to be endlessly repeated, duplicated (one of Goodman's criteria, I recall). This has potential ramifications, specifically when some individuals who carve/make these objects have relied on the income that comes with making and copying their own works with their hands and tools.

Another interest of mine, and which falls in line with the original question concerning the historical or political forces that lie behind this definition of the "digital", is how the there has been some interesting push back to work to realign the histories of Western philosophical discourse of the "digital" and the notational, and situate them in alternative "digital" practices that are not necessarily considered part of the canon as of yet, that very much use the "finger" metaphor to describe digitality. This is just a thought, and a paper called "Wampum as Hypertext" by Angela Haas comes to mind, although I'd be interested to hear if there is anything else from other subscribers to help me think through this point. 


On Oct 8, 2014, at 2:25 PM, sally jane norman <normansallyjane at googlemail.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> excellent - who's serving the cocktails anyway?  I'm intrigued by your notion of "ubiquitous cryptography: digital objects so tightly wrapped we’ve excluded, perhaps, even the trace of the voice" - am wondering where theories of the voice (including Derrida's Phonocentrism?) might come into this, but also Stephen Connor's work on ventriloquism - playing with provenance, which is also a "cryptic behaviour"...
> 
> a quick caveat re Auroux/ Derrida: Auroux in the cited work devotes a rather harsh section (to say the least) to Derrida's Of Grammatology, so it might be risky to say that this lies "behind" Auroux - rather, it's directly in his line of fire... though fortunately for those of us outside of the target range, we can pick up on the best of all worlds...
> 
> I'll pick up on the Kittler with pleasure; lots here to mull over - including the Van Helmont glottis (yikes!).  Maybe you'd enjoy Simon Penny's astonishing "Phatus" work in robotics?  http://simonpenny.net/works/phatus.html
>  
> 
> all best 
> 
> sj
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, Oct 8, 2014 at 6:52 PM, Quinn DuPont <isaac.q.dupont at gmail.com> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Dear Sally Jane, et al
> 
> At the risk of responding so quickly, turning a cocktail party into a hushed dialog over in the corner of the room, I simply can’t contain myself! 
> 
> It is like you have read my mind! Although I have only read Auroux’s English work (a few articles, here and there), I think the reference is absolutely spot on. And, as you reference, Auroux and his concept of grammatization is critical to Stiegler, who I think is very much part of this discussion (and, for the week on MEMORY, I hope becomes part of our dialog). Especially in Stiegler’s *Decadence of Industrial Democracies* this process of grammatization comes through epochal shifts, from orality to writing (yes, Ong!), from writing to printing, and… to the contemporary computer? (for my own research, this is the coming epoch of ubiquitous cryptography: digital objects so tightly wrapped we’ve excluded, perhaps, even the trace of the voice?)
> 
> There is a short passage in Derrida’s Of Grammatology (which lies behind Stiegler and Auroux) where he claims to be enraptured by “cybernetics” and DNA (the “writing” of life). I’m far from a Derridian, but I can’t help but think that Derrida was foreshadowing the grammatization process, which I see as a technicized version of the ideality of Goodman’s notation.
> 
> I’ll return the favour of citations with another: Friedrich Kittler’s splendid analysis of “The Mother’s Mouth” as an important technology for forming the “discourse network” 1800 (Discourse Networks 1800/1900, 1990). Van Helmont’s 1667 “Short Sketch of the Truly Natural Alphabet” offers, I think, an interesting attempt at discretizing the voice by literally fitting the Hebrew letterforms into the mouth apparatus
> (here’s an image: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s1/sh/62c84c30-49e0-4f95-9cc2-f7e79b548c36/d3de9ea5dfbf58e4d31e333d2abbef28)
> 
> ~ Quinn DuPont
> 
> On October 8, 2014 at 12:41:08 PM, sally jane norman (normansallyjane at googlemail.com(mailto:normansallyjane at googlemail.com)) wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
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