[-empyre-] week two - MATTER

[Daniel Rourke]

The problem Phil outlines with Groys's conception of digital things is
crucial.

In Groys's sense, the digital is neither a flowing circuitry, nor a poor
image of an originary world. Auras abound, everywhere we turn, indeed,
Groys's digital allows new objects to arise whenever a screen is fired up,
or even within each of the 60 refreshing frames crammed into every visual
second. There are no 'things', with their own being, only encounterers
encountering.

The quasi-subject is another great idea to bring into play, but it must be
evacuated of all appeals to human autonomy to be useful. Like Sally says,
digital things are relational. They are not the rugby ball nor the rugby
players, but more like a network that is enacted amongst them.

I am currently reading up on Craig Venter, the scientist best known for his
work on the human genome project. His current pet idea is that we are about
the enter an age of 'digital biology' in which chromosomes will travel
around the world at the speed of light. It is a stunning collapse between
various levels of materiality. The analogy is worth unpacking some more I
think. This brief summary is from 'Nature' on a problem Venter (and his
predecessor Erwin Schrödinger) propagates:

"Turing invented the stored-program computer, and von Neumann showed that
the description is separate from the universal constructor. This is not
trivial. Physicist Erwin Schrödinger confused the program and the
constructor in his 1944 book What is Life?, in which he saw chromosomes as
"architect's plan and builder's craft in one". This is wrong. The code
script contains only a description of the executive function, not the
function itself." (source:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v482/n7386/full/482461a.html)

I like this because it seems to both undermine and complicate our questions
at the same time :-) What are cells, flesh, human beings without material
substrates encoding information? Information that can be copied, parsed and
now - according to Venter - encoded in a digital form and copied, parsed
and propagated in another set of entirely different material substrates and
networks. At this point my head is hurting. Where does our elusive 'digital
MATTER' reside within this extended analogy?
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