[-empyre-] Digital Objects // PROCESS : What is a digital process?

[Ben Roberts]

Thanks to Anaïs, Ashley and Quinn for inviting me to take part in this 
discussion.

Just to pick up a point in Alexander's very productive post.

I am interested in the connection Alexander is forging between 
discretization (in Stiegler's sense) and the digital. It is certainly 
useful to compare the process of digital 'sampling' with the process, 
for example, by which the continuous movements of hand weaving are 
turned into the discrete automated steps of the mechanical loom. But 
discretization can also open new contingencies rather than fix them 
statically. In Stiegler's terms there is a loss of individuation, a 
homogenisation, a reduction of singularity but there is also the 
possibility, as with grammatization, of new individuations.

So I am not entirely convinced by the move that simply opposes the 
digital to 'process' or to a 'monstrous radical contingency that hides 
in each sampled interval, in between the quantized cracks of our pixels 
and voxels.' (although I like that formulation).

best,

Ben

--
Dr Ben Roberts
University of Bradford
http://www.brad.ac.uk/ei/s/?u=blrobert

On 21/10/14 04:34, Alexander Wilson wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
>
>
> Hello to everyone on the list. Thanks to our hosts for organizing this
> discussion (and for inviting me). I've just caught up on the discussion
> sthus far.
>
> I thought I'd give a go at the first question proposed:
>
> "What is a digital process?"
>
> The term "process" usually connotes continuity. The canonical
> heraclitean river, different each time one enters it, presents the
> essential character of process: it flows. Digital processes, however,
> are characterized by cuts, breaks, and jumps. The digital is given as a
> series of discontinuities. We look at the river flowing: it seems
> continuous, a unified flux. It is highly entropic, meaning it exceeds
> our capacity to resolve the minuscule details we assume compose it
> (water molecules). Every time you walk into it though, it feels
> decisively different. It may be warmer today than yesterday, the current
> might be stronger or it may have waned.
>
> Process implies change. But change in the digital realm can only happen
> discretely: one moment we have one state, the next we have another. One
> moment the water is warm, the next it is cold. There is nothing in
> between, no process to speak of. In this sense the digital neatly elides
> change. It is as though nothing has changed at all. The state space in
> the digital domain is finite; it is as though the various moments in the
> digital process are given all at once, and for all eternity. Indeed, one
> might say they are "outside of time", for these states, in themselves,
> are not affected by the process; each time they are taken up, they are
> exactly the same. The process hence seems to move the digital from the
> outside.
>
> The digital is inseparable from processes of "discretization", as
> Bernard Stiegler observes. It is simply the process which cuts
> continuities into discontinuities, making unified, homogeneous mixtures
> discrete, nameable, mobile, functional. It is true Stiegler usually
> looks at this as a (pre)historical or anthropological process (ie:
> grammatization). I, like Simondon, am more interested in seeing this
> process as an ontogenetic one. Simondon, remember, envisions the
> evolution of technology somewhat like thermodynamic process: a crystal
> propagating through a supersaturated solution, where the unified mixture
> of molecules is progressively organized, and structured, put to the
> service of the reproduction of the given symmetries ad infinitum,
> mechanically and algorithmically, until the favourable circumstances, or
> preindividual potentials, are exhausted.
>
> The digital is intimately related to such an ontogenetic process of
> selection. It is as though the algorithm prefigures the digital. The
> if-then decisional procedure of the algorithm gives rise to the series
> of cuts typical of the digital process, as the ebbs and flows of the
> unidentified, unresolved chaos "outside" is sampled, once a threshold of
> potential is met. Snapshot. The digital emerges in the moment of
> sampling; it is in the only moment a determinate system touches an
> indeterminate, un-incorporated preindividual "outside", that a "bit"
> comes into existence. Without this moment, the digital is not connected
> to any process: it is, like the crystal in the mind of the
> crystallographer, an eternal and infinite expanse of symmetries. Hence,
> the digital is moved by processes outside of itself. The digital
> process, therefore, always implies the "analogue". But the crude term
> "analogue" is hopelessly inadequate for signifying the monstrous radical
> contingency that hides in each sampled interval, in between the
> quantized cracks of our pixels and voxels.
>
> But what is this outside I have been referring to? The outside, in a
> cybernetic sense, is simply that which interacts with a given system
> through its inputs and outputs. A system is said to be operationally
> closed implying boundaries and definite topological connectivity. It
> will typically be composed of various (continuous) flows, feeding back
> upon themselves, according to a certain topological arrangement,
> implying certain thresholds, minima and maxima, varying ebbs of
> potential. The feedback loops themselves imply recursive processes. For
> digital cuts to emerge, loops in the process are necessary. The digital
> bit is born out of a specific decision implied by the structural
> coupling of some chaotic outside with some defined inside: physicists
> will call this measurement or observation.
>
> In order for a proper "digital process" to be conceived as a series of
> cuts, these cuts and breaks have to be recorded or inscribed in some
> context. The system must somehow change to receive the event. If it does
> not change, then nothing has happened. As people say on the web, when
> someone posts an unbelievable claim: "picture, or it didn't happen".
> Indeed, nothing happens that is not somewhere inscribed in some context.
> For something to happen, it must happen to something. This is the very
> structure of information: "difference that makes a difference" to use
> Bateson's famous adage. If it does not get inscribed anywhere, it
> doesn't "make a difference" to anything or for anything, and hence
> didn't happen. Process implies the system must change, and this change
> implies a break in its topology. This is the nature of actualization :
> we could discuss Whitehead in these terms (I would say the superject is
> always what "will have been" the context for the event). A difference
> can remain in potentia forever (as an eternal object), but it only is
> actualized and "makes a difference" once inscribed in some context.
>
> It is true that mathematics is plagued by a fundamental randomness:
> Chaitin's famous "Omega" exemplifies this; it distributes all possible
> decidable and undecidable computations in an algorithmically random
> manner. And it would seem that in cosmological physics, too, with the
> advent of the holographic principle, the "observable universe" much like
> the projection of a hologram, emerges from a discrete two-dimensional
> set of randomly distributed bits at the Planck scale, corresponding to
> the surface of the initial inflationary break from symmetry which gave
> rise to "everything". Here "everything should remain in scare quotes,
> because scientists will disagee as to whether this non-pattern truly
> does implies totality. Like the "thumbprint of god" (a term once used to
> describe Mandelbrot's fractal), the digital in its extremes seems to
> encounter an absolute contingency "outside of itself". The "observable
> universe" is bounded by pure ungrounded randomness; and all process is a
> coupling of this randomness and some procedure for resolving it. The
> absolute outside implies the symmetry of pure randomness. And randomness
> is dialectically opposed to the asymmetry of the observer and the event
> observed. Similarly, the digital always already implies the procedural
> abstraction, the algorithm, that leads to its sampling and resolving.
>
> Whether it be the decisive moment of a discerning subjective judgement,
> or the quantized capture of an electronic converter, the digital's
> process is extrinsic to the digital itself. Contingency is not digital.
> Change is not digital. Change is absolute difference: difference which
> does not (yet) "make" a difference. It "makes" a difference in the
> moment of the topological break, the rerouting of the observing systems
> circuit, that inscribes the event in some context: an intensity is
> measured, an aesthetic is judged, a value is attributed, a signal is
> sampled.
>
> I'll leave it at that for now.
>
> best,
> Alexander
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> alexanderwilson.net <http://alexanderwilson.net>
>
>
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