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

[Jose-Carlos Mariategui]

Dear all,

Usually I don’t write in Empyre, but in this case I want to contribute with some thoughts on digital objects as it is central to my ongoing research. 

Regarding the work of Goodman, I agree that his approach on how the coding distinctions between the score (numbers), the script (texts), and sketch (images) should be perceived and interpreted in different ways is quite relevant to the contemporary discussion on digital objects. This brings me back to the question on practice, since numbers, texts and images are the three elementary cultural forms that human beings use in order to manage information through (work) practices. The semiotic characteristics of these tokens in the physical world persist even in the digital realm. Thus, their semiotic character helps to evince the elusive and transfigurable nature and characteristics of digital objects. For example, the sketch is highly ambiguous; images do not have an “alphabet” or a structure for combining them, which explains why the image’s level of ambiguity is high in comparison to that of a text or other mono-semiotic structures (i.e., numbers, alphabet). An image can never be procedurally reproduced in an identical fashion, unless copied in its entirety. Seen as a process and an outcome, the sketch lacks the cognitive organization of rule-based combinations of standardized marks such as the composition of scripts and the musical notation (score). This is the main reason why there are indeed particularities and different types of practices that forge between the different types of digital objects. On top of that we have to add additional-semiotic structures such as metadata that are necessary in order to understand the way in which people search or manipulate contemporary digital objects today.

In terms of bibliography, during the last decades in the field of Information Systems there has been a growing research on digital objects. Two key authors Shoshana Zuboff (In the age of the smart machine : the future of work and power, 1988) and Jannnis Kallinikos (Governing through technology : information artefacts and social practice, 2011) analyze the impact that information-based tokens may have on work practices. Both authors emphasize how work is becoming more abstract and symbolic, increasingly focused on the intricacies of instrumentation, and distanced from its physical reference (refs: Ong and Goodman). There are other works which emerged in recent years, based on the study of technological (or digital) artefacts as structured objects. Contemporary work environments are considerably shaped by the interaction of these structured objects and the ways they are managed (in the form of text, images, video, or computer code). Studies from this angle analyze the impact of a technology through the structural attributes or properties of digital technologies, such as Youngjin Yoo (Computing In Everyday Life: A Call For Research On Experiential Computing." MIS Quarterly 34(2), 2010), Jannis Kallinikos, et al. (A Theory of Digital Objects, First Monday 15(6). http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/rt/printerFriendly/3033/2564 and more recently The Ambivalent Ontology of Digital Artifacts." MIS Quarterly 37(2), 2013). 

best,

José-Carlos


On 8 October 2014 at 10:40:47, sally jane norman (normansallyjane at googlemail.com) wrote:

----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
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:
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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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