[-empyre-] Start of Week 4: Digital Objects and MEMORY

[Quinn DuPont]

For the fourth and final week of the exciting month on digital objects, I offer the following provocation on our theme, MEMORY:

“I hesitated // before untying the bow…” so begins William Gibson’s unravelling of his youth, his relationship to his father, his draft-dodging (Agrippa). A fitting material metaphor for a digital memory that would require cracking cryptographic code to untie; memory encased in code. Gibson’s poem is thus like our myriad digital detritus: snapshots from holidays, videos of cherished family events, but also “sexting” and pornographic home video sent to loved ones while away (and if you are famous and female, subject to hacking by those cruel males at /fappening). But, digital objects don’t just produce mementos (an archive—as cultural feedback? Ernst, 2002), they also aid thought and memory, a part of the long history of rationalization identified by Bernard Stiegler (most recently, 2011;2012;2014). According to Stiegler, we’ve encountered waves of Weberian rationalization at the hands of digital code: the first was the invention of alphabetic writing, the second was the invention of printing. Similarly, in Of Grammatology Derrida was enamored by the discovery of other digital codes—the discovery of evolutionary memory in the form of DNA and the so-called cybernetic revolution with its looping feedback. Later, and just as famously, Derrida would point directly to the archive; but, with the prevalence of “born-digital” objects, have we moved beyond the decidedly material, fixed sense of “archive” as a noun (Kirschenbaum, 2014)? Working through this provocation, from October 26th – 31st we might explore questions such as:
* If not mementos or rationalization, how else do digital objects shape our mnemonic lives?
* If “the Internet never forgets,” how might be create an amnesiac? And should we?
* The method of loci (or “memory palace”) was an ancient mnemonic device that associated a discrete figure with a mental idea. To the protest of the ancient Greeks, this method was largely made obsolete with writing. Digital objects—the iPhone as outboard brain—seem to cast another stone against this old method, but in a post-human future, how might we resuscitate this form of memory? 


Our excellent discussants this week are:

-Mark C. Marino-

Mark C. Marino is a writer and scholar of digital literature living in Los Angeles. He is an Associate Professor (Teaching) at the University of Southern California where he directs the Humanities and Critical Code Studies  (HaCCS) Lab (http://haccslab.com). His creative works include 
“Living Will,” 
(http://markcmarino.com/tales/livingwill.html) 
“a show of hands,” 
(http://hands.literatronica.net/src/initium.aspx) 
“Marginalia in the Library of Babel,” 
(http://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/07Fall/marino/) 
“The Ballad of WorkstudySeth,” 
(http://www.springgunpress.com/markmarino/markmarino/seth/) 
“@occupymla,” 
(http://markcmarino.com/wordpress/?page_id=117) and 
“Reality: Being @spencerpratt” 
(http://betabeat.com/2013/01/how-the-hills-spencer-pratt-became-an-unlikely-participant-in-a-complex-piece-of-twitter-performance-art/).

He is an editor of Buzzademia, a Like-Reviewed scholarly journal for Buzzfeed-style scholarship. He was one of ten co-authors of 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (http://10print.org). He is the Director of Communication of the Electronic Literature Organization (http://eliterature.org). His complete portfolio is here: http://markcmarino.com


-Attila Marton-

Attila Marton is an Assistant Professor in Information Management at the Copenhagen Business School. His overarching research interest addresses questions about the future of our past and the changing structure of social memory brought about by the particular characteristics of digital objects. 


-Christian Pentzold-

Christian is a Post-Doc researcher and lecturer at the Institute for  
Media Research at the Technische Universität Chemnitz and an Associate  
Researcher at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet &  
Society, Berlin. His work is based in communication research and  
sociology and it links to insights coming from economics, linguistics,  
socio-legal studies as well as science and technology studies. He has  
done research in the fields of computer-mediated communication, media  
policy and regulation, creative industries, media cultures as well as  
qualitative media analysis. Currently, his projects thus look at  
convergent multimodal discourse, internet-assisted cooperation,  
governance of digitally networked environments, mediated memories and  
the exploitation of entertainment programs like television formats and  
social games. In spring and summer 2015, Christian is going to be a  
Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Culture, Media &  
Creative Industries, King’s College London. 


-Sean Rupka-

Sean Rupka is currently a doctoral student in the department of Political Science at the Graduate Center - City University New York. Focusing on the imbrication of trauma, memory and history, Sean’s interdisciplinary work draws on film, literature and historical theory to discuss the politics of trauma as it relates to the (in)coherence of modern subjectivity, and the political implications of trauma’s transmissibility. Sean has presented multiple times in this area, drawing from a range of films covering genocide and warfare, the works of Kafka, Blanchot, and Walter Benjamin discussing both reconciliation and legacies of resistance. He has a forthcoming publication on the conceptual history of philosophy.