[-empyre-] Digitality, Authenticity, Decay, Memory

[Quinn DuPont]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 6:42 AM, Sean Rupka <srupka at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Marks question here of source code as reminder seems pertinent and interesting but I need to ponder it a bit further, and I would echo his reference to Chun by quoting her from an essay I recently read (The Digital Ephemeral, 2008) “The major characteristic of digital media is memory. It’s ontology is memory…”

In an effort to draw together some of these excellent discussions so
far, I’m wondering if there isn’t a salient connection between
thinking and memory that sits beneath some of these examples of
technology, (social/) psychology, and ontology? At some obvious level,
our capacity to think—rationally or emotionally—would be seriously
impacted by changes to our mnemonic world: presumably this lies behind
the consternation about digital clouds (Attila) and Wikipedia
(Christian), but maybe also the narrative of re-created snapshots
(BTW: Mark’s project is terribly funny!). Additionally, what does it
say about our epistemic position that we judge authenticity by decay,
as Sean pointed out? How do we *think* about ourselves when this decay
occurs differently in the digital (although, as physically
instantiated, decay still very much occurs)?

Beyond the somewhat obvious sense of memory I just mentioned—that one
needs memory to be able to “think” in some (empirical) sense—I’m also
intrigued by a sense of memory that, as a society, we’ve lost sight of
(but may be on its way back). Specifically, I’ve been intrigued by the
seemingly close association between “thinking” and “memory” as
instantiated in a number of early devices.

One such device is Athanasius Kircher’s intriguing “ark” or “organ”
(see an image here: http://note.io/1DvX0w4). This curious device works
like an alphabetic slide rule, or, to modernize the phrase
considerably, a computer. By *combining* letters the user can find
solutions to existing problems. On the surface, this may have little
to do with memory, but these tools that combine discrete things are
very much informed by, originally, Raymund Lull’s volvelles
(http://note.io/10yEPdr), and eventually a long mnenomic tradition
(here’s an image of Bruno’s memory wheel: http://note.io/10yEPdr).
Yates makes this point many decades ago:

“As intellectus, it was an art of knowing or finding out truth; as
voluntas it was an art of training the will towards loving truth; as
memoria, it was an art of memory for remembering truth” (1966, 174).

And, what is equally exciting, Yates notes that Lull “introduces
movement into memory. The figures of his Art, on which its concepts
are set out in the letter notation, are not static but revolving”.
This movement, Yates notes, was a big departure from the “memory
palaces” of the Greeks: but, is chillingly similar to how digital
objects function today, isn’t it? Computers hum. They swirl and and
move. They “execute” (recalling Mark’s reference to Chun’s distinction
between source and executable code). It is an important fact that what
makes executable code so important to a computer is movement.

Cheers,
Quinn

P.S. My research is actually on cryptography, and it isn’t lost on me
that Lull and Bruno’s thinking/memory wheels eventually produced
Alberti’s cipher wheel: http://note.io/1DvY2ID. An especially
intriguing connection if we think about how encrypted text is the very
definition of unassailable memory.
-- 
- iqdupont.com