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

[Anaïs Nony]

Hi all,


I would like to respond to Alexander’s fruitful post as well as to share
some considerations raised by Quinn’s invitation to dig more into the
so-called algorithmic information theory.



My first thought concerns the feedback loop. As a retroactive process that
generates itself through phases of finite states, can we conceive the
feedback loop in terms of ontogenesis? At the level of the phase, yes. At
the level of what circulates within technical cycles, yes. However, what do
we need to achieve critically to bring Simondon’s mechanology into the
digital realm, within the realm of the in-betweenness of discontinuities
and cuts? I am not skeptical that we can. However, I am concerned that the
technical object in Simondon is an operational category that doesn’t fully
translate into digital objects. In other words, if Simondon’s transduction
is the movement of a particular problematic from a medium to another, what
does this transduction do to thinking about the contemporary situation of
digital platforms? In Simondon, technicities are schemes of
pure-operational continuity. What are the critical tools we have to
transduct these schemes into thinking the pure-operational discontinuities
of algorithmic structures?



One suggestion I would like to discuss is that the feedback loop seems to
deal with processes of selection not only based on complexity and
randomness (a shared characteristics with any field of study whose concerns
are creation, invention, and the limits of knowledge). It seems to deal
also with the question of openness raised by Simondon, especially as this
dimension of a technical object questions the functionality of a machine
not in terms of its uses, but precisely in terms of its potential. The
openness of an object (its greatest possible freedom of functioning) is
thus a dimension that allows for a rigorous and yet speculative approach to
thinking about what is now acknowledge as both computationally and
logically irreducible.



With digital processes and computational coding, are we facing the
development of what we could call a “timeware view of science” that is a
digitalogist approach to science? An approach that comes after the
sociologist, psychologist, technologist, and even mechanologist approach?
Could this “timeware view of science” be the transduction of Simondon’s
temporal coordination of the three levels of the technical object (element,
individual, ensemble) within the digital realm? In other words, I would
like to think of digital processes as having an operative potential that
has very much to do with a shared claim that there is a human reality in
digital reality.



Am I being too axiomatic while not using my reason enough?



Side note to engage with John Hopkins' post:

Concerning the language of mathematics, what is crucial concerning
algorithmic info theory is that the concern is not so much about semiotics
but about operations of thought. The programming language of computational
coding does have a direct impact of the algorithmic information content.
Here, I turn to the publication of Excommunication, co-written by Galloway,
Thacker, and Wark. The new master signifier is the system.



Best,

Anaïs
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