mcst 234

[mcstie]

24/7

While Crary’s summary of the effects of modern technology on humans raises a number of subtle, relevant, and valid points, it unnecessarily simplifies certain aspects of such technology in order to create a fatalistic view of modern society. Though this tone effectively causes the reader to consider Crary’s many valid arguments, his book offers little respite from the problems he so exactingly outlines.

Crary’s strongest arguments enter into direct conversations with more optimistic theories on the digitizing potential of modern technology. In opposition to Haraway, he reminds the reader that an increasing dependence and reliance on technology also means an increasing dependence on the multinational corporations that create this technology. Furthermore, he recapitulates the problems mentioned in The Californian Ideology - we use technology as an attempt to virtualize ourselves and our interactions with one another and with the enivronment, removing the consequences of our actions from our direct line of sight. This makes it easier for us to ignore the environment and one another, enabling the narcissism that so successfully distracts us from our problematic impacts with new routines and products that are essential parts of fitting in to contemporary society. Instead, we worry about keeping up with the endlessly updating innovations of “right now”, which, again, furthers our dependency on the creators of these innovations. 

Beyond this, Crary argues that modern technology narrows our collective experiences of perception, which again makes us increasingly compliant. Instead of the natural rhythms of human life, centered around an understanding of collectivity and connectivity, we rely on the rhythms of these machines, which work to optimize and monetize the human experience. In Crary’s view, this means reducing human aspects of these systems to routine processes. Though Crary’s argument makes clear the dangers of a society reliant upon these technologies, he glosses over the fact that such technologies- and the corporations that control them - are run and controlled by humans. Though the logic of such systems is fast replacing the logic of humans and their weaknesses, there is necessarily always a human component to “the corporation” or “the government” which controls them, which means that the logic of these systems can be manipulated and understood by everyday people as well. So long as we work to educate a wide group of people about the way these technologies operate, we can continue to find members of our society that break with and manipulate the accepted uses and responses to these technologies.

Despite his many valid points, Crary’s arguments ignore the relative aspects of these innovations. Crary argues that it is no longer the type of innovation, but rather the speed of innovation that disrupts our ability to adjust to new technology, sending us into a frenzy of working to find the best new thing. This ignores the reality of many people’s situations - not everyone can afford to buy a new iPhone every time one comes out, and though empathizing through these virtual objects removes the responsibility of direct interaction with another person, it does not erase empathy completely. We may never be completely adjusted to the speed of innovation again, but we will continue to adjust to these new technologies in time. In this, we maintain the same balance between comfortable technology and new innovations that past generations have. 

See, for example, the “digital natives” who use their smartphones for Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and other social networks that have no inherent connection with the people of their real lives. The way young people use these networks is inherently a collective experience - Twitter and Tumblr are rampant breeding grounds for fandoms, groups of collective excitement about a given piece of media or personality. Of course, these websites are also used for self promotion and for narcissistic ends as well, but they are not, as Crary might have you believe, only used to do so. Young users empathize with one another and with other media via these technologies. Crary argues that these technologies inhibit empathy and emotional response, instead driving the user to repetitive motions in search for a fulfillment such technology cannot offer. Though these technology do promote repetitive use, this does not inherently inhibit empathy, especially for people who have grown up with smartphones as a natural part of human communication.

Again, Crary’s argument is on the whole an overwhelmingly accurate polemic on the problems with our increasingly connected and tech-dependent society. In its current state, a 24/7 world promotes dependency on technology and the companies that create it, creating narcissistic subjects who increasingly routinize their lives in order to be on top of the always fickle “next best thing”. However, with an increase in STEM education and an awareness of the potential for these technologies as direct forms of empathetic communication, maybe we can continue to develop technologies that bring us closer to Haraway’s cyborg utopia without losing our human rhythms and autonomy along the way. 

[mcstie]

My friends(don't have tumblr): have u seen this meme lol, it was on the 'best of tumblr' facebook page, tumblr is so funny

Me, a tumblr gremlin: haha yeah lol, think i've seen that one before lol

Me (what I really mean): you fools. I am plugged into the mainframe, wired to the primary source. Of course have seen that meme, and all 5000 of it's variants, 3 and a half months ago. I have seen the rise and fall of that meme, the boom and bust, the drama, the pain, the shitposting, oh god, the shitposting. I have seen this meme in it's rawest, freshest, unpasturised, most primal state. Do not insult me with these rank, stale puddles, that sit at the very base of the meme trickle down economy.

[mcstie]

Omnifocus - Human Minimization and  Optimization

OmniFocus is a productivity app available for desktop Mac computers and other iOS devices, including the iPhone and the Apple Watch. OmniFocus is a task manager that allows its users to “Get Things Done” more efficiently. For $40, OmniFocus users get an app that helps them categorize and prioritize all of the things that they need to do, from their work to their health to their leisure activities. In this, OmniFocus is a clear example of 24/7′s “externalization of the individual” as discussed by Crary. Call it transcoding, call it modernization - The System works to create efficiency by taking humans out of as many tasks as it can and, failing to do this, works to make the human as modular and mechanized in its tasks as possible. Users are encouraged to do a “brain dump” when they first download OmniFocus, taking information out of their unreliable human minds and putting it in the infallible mind of the program. OmniFocus allows its human users to work as perpetual betas of their perfect selves, choosing to accomplish tasks or to “defer” them until the next available instant. In this sense, OmniFocus helps reduce our leisure time (unless we choose to consider leisure time using the same framework as we do the tasks that need to be completed). We work as feedback loops, completing one task and returning to the top of the list so that we’re always being productive.

OmniFocus itself also represents the “perpetual beta” that compels the user to spend unnecessarily. Crary discusses how the rapid pace of “cutting edge innovations” drives people to consume because they are anxious about being outdated and, therefore, irrelevant. One of the most compelling points Crary makes is that the increasing regimentation of our lives that these products allow make us increasingly dependent on the companies that manufacture these contrived processes. We aren’t necessarily dependent on the products themselves, which are perpetually being replaced anyway, but on the companies that are constantly updating them. However, it isn’t just the hapless consumer whose moves are dictated by these companies. Content or application producers are just as pressured by the rapid pace of innovation as consumers are.  As Apple works to innovate, all of the software built to use Apple’s platforms must also work to innovate to survive. Since the release of OmniFocus 2, a number of updates have expanded the program from a desktop app to an app that functions across an increasingly diverse range of other Apple products, including the Apple Watch and the iPhone. Though there is little difference between checking your to-do list on your watch or your phone, if the consumer works to integrate these products into their lives, producers must also integrate these products into their business model.

OmniFocus adheres to a number of Crary's expectations of a 24/7 app. As OmniFocus externalizes our tasks and prioritization abilities, it serves to homogenize work and play even further, as Crary says capitalism is wont to do. OmniFocus proclaims itself as a productivity app "not just for the capital-I-Important things" but also for the small to-dos that come along with every day life. OmniFocus works to optimize all aspects of the consumer's life, allowing them to work and play (consume) more effectively than they would without the software. This percieved efficiency also helps to create a dependency upon the technology, despite the fact that it is essentially a $40 list-making service. Also related to Crary's critique of this technology is OmniFocus's self-regulating surveillance tendencies. In the guise of helping the user optimize their time while running errands, OmniFocus also uses the user’s location data to send them information about local grocery stores or other relevant errands. People consent to this datamining because it helps their productivity - we give up the relative privacy of our time running errands and at home in order to optimize our time while running errands. Beyond this, these reminders help us to be better members of a capitalist society. Never again does the OmniFocus user need to google substitutions for cream when she forgets to buy it at the supermarket. Instead, she is organized and optimized, and always takes advantage of an opportunity to spend as she needs.

-Catie Ball

[mcstie]

by catie ball

[mcstie]

Destabilizing Protocol by Widening the Database

As Manovich describes it, narratives - which we privilege as the main “form of cultural expression of the modern age” exist as a possible interpretation of a given database. A true database relays no inherent privilege to any data within the database - the database is structured so that a user can access all the data easily. The onus is on the user to create syntagmatic meaning within the paradigmatic choices allowed by the database. The Additivist Manifesto, then, suggests the creation of a database that contains blueprints for all manner of objects. By expanding the pragmatic variety within the database, the number of syntagmatic variations that can be created also expands dramatically. In this, the Additivist Manifesto echoes Cheng’s sentiment - we should embrace the creation of “noise”, “detritus” and other traditionally undesirable objects because embracing these objects dramatically expands the range of possible experiences.

However, beyond the practical and political hurdles that hinder the possibility of the world described by the Additivists, even a database containing blueprints for everything wouldn’t create a utopically homogeneous society. The problems with the Additivist Manifesto relate to the scheme of control that Galloway describes in his writing. Even if, as the Manifesto suggests, we were to create a database containing blueprints for the 3D printing of all manner of objects, the only people who would be able to use such blueprints would be those who understand the procedure behind 3D printing. Such a database would be like the anarchic structure of the internet- useless to those without an apparatus with which they could access it. 

In that sense, the Manifesto is less practical pragmatically than it is conceptually. In its philosophical embrace of the database, the Manifesto is an explicit representation of the potential of Donna Haraway’s cyborg embrace of technology. The Additivist Manifesto imagines a world where humans don’t consider themselves distinct creations, but rather an interface for accessing a universal database of knowledge. As we upload all of our knowledge to a system that can increasingly replicate and distort, we embrace the pluralism of narratives that databases allow us to create. As Manovich explains using the metaphor of photomanipulation, in the digital age, all photoshopped images are selections of effects synthesized from a database - it is up to the user to decide whether the final image should or should not convey a coherent narrative. The Additivists also embrace this “forking” potential, embracing the “crap and detritus” inherent in computing and mechanical technologies as part of the unlimited potential of these technologies.

In some respects, glitch art represents an early-adoptive take on such a philosophy. These works present “broken” or “noisy” images or sound files as works of art, and are typically created by embracing visible or audible markers of malfunctioning technology. These works embrace the breakdown of such technology’s regulatory protocols, reveling in the newness of an image where the voluntarily accepted rules for what a digital image should look like are explicitly ignored. In their disregard of these protocols, the popularization of such an aesthetic allows us to embrace new functions of these technology that we had once dismissed as useless. 

Catie Ball

[mcstie]

Versions and Simulation

Postproduction blurs the distinction between consumption and production. Today, art works that remain relevant are art works that are consumed and then reappropriated, flip-flopping the consumer with the creator and vice versa. Of course, this logic applies outside of the early-adopting art world as well. A prime example of this re-appropriation and distribution is, as Bourriard points out, pirating. As shown in Lovic’s Versions, when a cam of a movie is taken in a theater, the consumer becomes the creator. The low-quality cam becomes its own work that the consumer distributes and is inevitably reshaped by the consumer’s experience of that film - the quality of their camera, the sound and reaction of the audience around them.

These pirated films are an example of Bourriard’s utopic conception of a “culture of activity”, in which consumers react to the images and works that surround them, destabilizing the meanings and contexts that they promote. Bourriard sees contemporary art as necessarily engaged with the culture that simultaneously creates and interprets it, especially as the creator and consumer become increasingly linked.

Artists today “program” works rather than “compose” them - artists create meaning in a pre-existing language rather than mold a blank medium to their liking. Lovic is a prime example of this. Though his Versions are all variations on a single theme, he appropriates not only cultural images but also his own works in order to explain his ideas. In the 2010 version of the work, he concisely restates his exploration of the quantum physics “Many Worlds” theory he discussed in slightly more detail in the 2009 version. His new work is informed by and improves upon the commentary of his earlier work, and in this sense embodies Bourriard’s idea that artists today do not work to create an “end result,” but instead work to add onto an ever complicating chain of meaning, created as we realize that all works are derivatives of one another.

In Versions, Lovic argues that the bootleg’s infinite potential allows it to craft a concept to best fit the needs of its users. Ian Cheng discusses the relationship between humanity and the simulation in his work “Simulation: Forking at Perfection.” To Cheng, the truth is something that exists independent of our understanding of it. Cheng’s “factual” aligns with Lacan’s real, in that it is that which resists categorization or human rationalization. We rarely see the world in terms of actual truths, but instead convince ourselves to believe that the “ideals” our society creates in order to rationalize our world are truths. In this, the “truth” becomes something we are willing to cast away- We ignore all forks of a simulation that do not align with our ideal conception of the world. 

In Versions 2009, Laric touches on this point by discussing our self-imposed limitations on digital photo manipulations. When we combine the body of one figure with the head of the other, we typically only consider one possible combinations of this two-possibility simulation. In this, we reaffirm Ian Cheng’s idea that humans strive to create the ideal rather than to express all possibilities. However, meme culture offers a complication to our hesitation to embrace forking simulations. With the proliferation of memes online, digital artists are given incentive to tangentially reinvent a work, and with the multitude of meme creators that exist somewhere out there, memes are constantly being forked in myriad directions. An example of this is the “pepe the frog meme”, where creators work to create variations on the theme of a single image: 

Because the internet collects many groups with varying ideals, the variations on this theme represent a plurality of interests and perspectives.

However, even the most abstract iterations of these memes

 maintain some recognizable framework that maintains them as an “ideal” pepe. The ideal is no longer an image, but has instead become the form of art that Bourriard argues contemporary artists create - a framework, a fixed pathway through a varying field of signs. In this sense, we haven’t embraced the simulation yet so much as we’ve abstracted it one step further.

As “semionauts”, artists and cultural producers help to simultaneously create and navigate a new system of meaning. Will there be a point, though, after which every pathway has been traced and every combination of works has been played out? Is it possible we’ve already reached that point? I think Bourriard’s conception of the “post-” is one of the strongest aspects of his argument. In this, he states that it doesn’t matter whether or not everything has or has not been created (or, extrapolating from this, whether or not all ideas and structures of meaning have been considered). Instead, post-production artists work to create meaning once our old conception of meaning no longer represents the way we produce it. Once we’ve considered all the remixes we can, then, maybe we’ll move on to a new “ideal”, hidden somewhere in the infinite forking of our simulation that’s not yet played itself out.

[mcstie]

[mcstie]

Cyborgs Among Us

With characters who access virtual worlds through their minds, who have neural implants that allow them to receive messages through their optic nerves, and who engage in cosmetic cybernetic enhancements, William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer provides us with a believable extrapolation of how humans will continue to integrate technology into their personal beings. Though the enhancements he describes may have seemed like implausible science fiction when the book was published in 1984, modern technology incessantly moves us closer to these sci-fi fantasies. Technology like touchscreens and virtual reality give us the opportunity to visually and tangibly interact with data like Case, and cybernetic enhancements are giving us increasingly sophisticated ways to surgically enhance our bodies using technology as Molly does.

As McLuhan wrote last week, all media is an extension of man’s capabilities. In this respect, as we increasingly engage with media in order to communicate with one another, our “selves” are shaped not only by our “natural” physical human bodies, but also by the technology we use to interact with one another. When you read this, I am communicating with you through a digital medium - the “me” you receive is an extension of my physical capabilities enabled by our modern digital technology. Furthermore, we increasingly value our virtual selves as part of our beings thanks to social media. My instagram, facebook, snapchat, twitter, etc. pages are all the product of my human self working in tandem with technology. I consider the things I post on social media valid expressions of my identity just as much, if not more, than the ways I identify physically, and in this respect, I am the conglomeration of virtual and physical capabilities.

Haraway calls the cyborg a “cybernetic organism” - a being that breaches boundaries held rigidly in place thanks to the Western conception of the individual self, distinguished at birth from the masses. Where the western man seeks to stand out, to define himself in opposition to the masses, the cyborg operates as part of a system, simultaneously organism and machine, resisting definitions that essentialize its existence. The cyborg defines itself through “affinity, not identity”- the cyborg aligns itself with multiple phenomena but isn’t absorbed as part of either grouping. In this respect, we are more cyborg than ever - through things like social networking sites, we connect with others like us based on networks of interaction and affinity. 

Though technologically, we are more cyborg than ever, we haven’t reached a utopia based on Haraway’s cyborg ideology yet. Haraway’s cyborg embraces the modular effects of modern technology, reveling in the breakdown between human and machine, virtual and physical, etc. Last week, the McLuhan reading discussed the idea that we tend to use new technology to fulfill the purposes of the old. Though technology like the internet allows us the opportunity to deconstruct the way that gender, race, and other visual constructs create our identity, as a society, we have yet to transition to complete freedom from these constructs. Our online avatars and behaviors reinforce gender, race, and class communities because we haven’t yet learned  how to live without these identifiers. We continue to use new technologies to propagate old practices and ideas, rather than embracing the way these technologies allow us to separate from the power structures of Western culture.

One interesting example of this tension between old tendencies and new technology is the Alternate Limb project, an art project that creates prosthetic limbs in two very distinct styles. Some of the limbs created through the project are incredibly realistic. Despite the obvious technical skill necessary to create these pieces and the technical capabilities they allow their users, these prosthetics do not fully embrace Haraway’s cyborg mentality. Again, this is new technology doing the job of old technology - through the idea that prosthetics should imitate “natural” human bodies, we maintain the idea that humans control technology. We essentialize the role of technology in our lives such that it becomes a tool for getting something done, rather than celebrating its instrumental role in our identities, daily lives, and physical and mental capabilities.

On the other hand, the more artistic limbs created as part of the Alternative Limb Project embrace Haraway’s cyborg ideology more fully.Not only do these limbs allow their wearers the same technological capabilities that the realistic limbs do, but they also allow their wearers to create beauty in the space between our expectations for “human” and “machine”. In their detail and beauty, these limbs question our cultural assumption that the machine can never add to our personhood or be a part of our identity in a very physical and visible way. (Link to ALP website).

-Catie Ball

[mcstie]

The twitter bot Pentametron seeks out tweets that use iambic pentameter inadvertently, creating couplets by retweeting a pair of rhyming lines in sequence. Based on a program, Pentametron analyzes the form rather than the content of the tweets it selects for these couplets, oftentimes juxtaposing tweets with radically different tones and content in order to create a piece of poetry. In this, Pentametron uses ideas discussed in both McLuhan’s and Hayles’s writing. Its creative reappropriation of one of today’s most popular forms of communication considers how both Twitter and computers have affected our current state of communication.

McLuhan famously states that “the medium is the message” - any apparent “content” is actually just an embedded medium for conveying information. In this sense, analyzing the content disseminated by a medium in the hope of understanding it distracts from the medium being studied. Pentametron is a prime example of this - the individual tweets Pentametron retweets are chosen algorithmically and have no coherent narrative. Instead, Pentametron’s efficacy comes from the way it makes Twitter’s normalization of small, short bursts of context-dependent communication apparent. 

McLuhan states that, in our experience of information, media tend to be invisible, foregrounding the information they convey rather than the means of conveyance. In this, the way these media shape our understanding of their content is lost. Pentametron, though, requires the consumer to understand its context and the systems that allowed for its creation, highlighting the ways in which Twitter as a medium changes how we communicate. Pentametron only makes sense when we consider that it was created within constrains that seem natural to us when we use Twitter. When composing a Tweet, I don’t need to think about the character limit - beyond the small number in the corner of the composition box, I have been conditioned to know that Twitter necessarily conveys brief sentiments so I change the way I communicate to fit this constraint. Pentametron foregrounds the computers and environment of our communication on Twitter, making form its central focus. 

As McLuhan discusses, electronic media has conditioned us to act increasingly like the circuitry our society is built on. The individual’s viewpoint is no longer relevant or prized as a part of our cultural currency because we, like electronic technology, are conditioned to work in interconnected networks. As Pentametron shows, media today is about democratization - about how easily your message can be shared and valued by people in a different situation. The situations and viewpoints of the individuals creating the original tweets are unimportant in Pentametron’s overall effect, their efficacy instead coming from how well they work as part of a conglomerate whole. Even humor on today’s internet relies on play with context and shareability - from memes to vines that take short clips of movies out of their original context to highlight the specificity of their original situation (WHY was that woman singing about making guacamole)? 

Our communication relies on an implied context and on a shareability that Pentametron brings to light. Pentametron creates its content by retweeting, or appropriating short lines of text written by a number of Twitter’s millions of users. This fits with Hayles’s discussion of the two-pronged nature of human-computer communication - humans write the code that computers interpret, which is interpreted by humans as information. We see the two-pronged nature of this interaction with code as code combines disparate human sentiments with one another to create a completely different effect. The computer recognizes patterns in speech that the human might otherwise be unable to separate from meaning. Here, the relative strengths of humans and computers work together to create a new kind of complex message impossible for either group to create on their own. 

[worldhammerer-old]

I, a cold and callous millennial, have no interest in face to face conversations, because i am constantl jacked into the information supersoupway, i ride the pale lightning, my body is a conduit for an unending stream of html

[mcstie]

Technological Utopias: Google Life Sciences

The Californian Ideology paradoxically blends capitalist entrepreneurship and anti-establishment counterculture beliefs, creating a belief system that allows its followers to reconcile their fatigue with their position as a member of a workforce with their need to be recognized as autonomous individuals. Followers of this ideology have a blindly optimistic belief in the powers of technology and its ability to improve not only human life but the economy and free market. Especially today, when tech companies have a larger stake in our economy than ever before, these companies emulate the California Ideology in order to encourage the consumer to envision these enormous tech monopolies as friendly companies run by the DIY home computer builders who founded them on counter-cultural tenets in the 80s. 

Google is one of the best examples of the Californian Ideology at work today. Based in Palo Alto, Google’s reputation as a “laid-back” tech company promotes its image as a tech company working toward an egalitarian utopia. As depicted throughout popular culture (in movies like The Internship and books like Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore), Google employees work on a “campus” full of amenities and childlike whimsy. These employees work obsessively and exhaustively, in part because of their fervent devotion to The Cause - the utopia that technology will inevitably bring our society - and in part because they are otherwise socially inept. Regardless of whether or not these stereotypes are true, the fact that they continue to exist within our society shows the attractiveness of the Californian Ideology that they represent. 

Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore 

One division of Google, Google Life Sciences, is working to realize this technological utopia through research on how technology can be used to advance healthcare. Life Sciences hopes to create technology that will detect diseases faster, expedite the distribution of disease treatments, and that can be used for preventative care. One of this program’s first projects - contact lenses that monitor blood glucose levels in hopes of early diabetes detection - is being developed by a team that included “software engineers, oncologists, and optic experts” (x) This interdisciplinary approach to technology is one of the hallmarks of the Californian Ideology and the culture that has created the Tech Bro. As Richard Barbook and Andy Cameron explain in “The Californian Ideology”, tech companies practice self-management and democratic structures of power, allowing employees a greater sense of autonomy because their work cannot be automated or made into smaller jobs. According to the Wall Street Journal, the head of Life Sciences “doesn’t look like a typical doctor”- he “wears flip-flops to work,” preaches the value of technology and interdisciplinarity, and appreciates Google’s relaxed and casual atmosphere (x). In all of this, the Californian Ideology is well and alive at Life Sciences - the utopian ideals, the relaxed and autonomous atmosphere that promotes creativity, and, ultimately, the paradox of the multi-billion dollar corporation backing these endeavors. As a tech company, Google Life Sciences has monetary incentive to create technology that will improve humanity and our living conditions. It is, therefore, in the company’s best interest to believe that humanity can achieve utopia through this technology.

Google Life Sciences encapsulates both the good and the bad of the Californian Ideology. Though Life Sciences is not currently making any money in its research stages, Google is still a for profit company. The cyborg-like enhancements the program hopes to create - nanotechnology that will sniff out cancer, a clearer and more all-encompassing human genome, the aforementioned contact lenses - will only improve the quality of the lives of the humans that can afford them. This is a pitfall of any manifestation of the Californian Ideology. Though it sells these technologies as beneficial for the masses, it still sells these technologies, and in this is inherently the privilege of those who can afford it.

further information on Google Life Sciences:

Science Mag, The Atlantic

-Catie Ball

[mcstie]

Week 3 Response

Materiality describes the way we conceive of the physical (or non-physical) attributes of an object. It extends beyond the simple difference between the tangible and the intangible, however. Brown states that “materiality can refer to different dimensions of experience,” asserting that any binary created between things we do and don’t observe as matter essentializes the truly complex chain of our experience with the virtual. In reality, humans can never access the “physical beings” of objects because human perception is necessarily mediated, whether by their own senses or through media. Because this chain of transformations effects the way we perceive everything, we must conceive of materiality as a chain of abstractions that occur through various media. In the modern age, though, this phenomenon is further complicated by the dematerialization of these various media through computers. Brown predicts that this rise of multitasking machines may eventually lead to all media being “homogenized within the hegemony of the digital” (53). 

The artwork “56 Broken Kindle Screens” by Sebastian Schmeig plays with this notion of materiality by translating a still-controversial digitization back into a material form. A print on demand paperback, “56 Broken Kindle Screens” compiles 56 images from Kindles with malfunctioning screens, which prints - and therefore makes material - the pages of the Kindle, which, in their varying stages of decay, are explicitly digital images. In this, Schmeig encapsulates a number of important concepts about materiality. His emphasis on the Kindle’s physical flaws makes it clear that the Kindle, often criticized as the “dematerialization” of the printed word, is still a physical object. Though e-readers make the information within a book intangible, this newly dematerialized information still “relies on the physical support of communication technologies” (Brown 55). 

Brown discusses Shredder 1.0, a website that distorts a given webpage’s HTML (56). This project embodies a similar idea in that it also highlights the media that necessarily exists between the consumer and intangible information (56). Schmeig’s work may provide a more prescient example of materiality, however, because it not only allows the consumer to observe the physicality of the Kindle but also reminds the consumer that digital media creates a complex chain of information processing that cannot be simplified to “the tangible” and “the intangible.” The Kindle represents an intermediate point in the “dematerialization” of printed word, between the book and the computer. However, neither book nor computer are the epitome of “tangible” or “intangible” - the book is still an abstraction of a story, and the computer still requires a physical computer to access that story. 

Through this, we can understand materiality’s relevance to new media because it describes the changing nature of the way we access information. Brown is adamant on shutting down alarmists who see our increasingly virtual society as the “dematerialization” of the real world - after all, the “real world” was comprised of photographs, films, and other abstractions as well.

-Catie Ball

[mcstie]

Week 3 Reading Response

Modern technology allows for limitless technical reproductions of art and other culturally relevant works. We can no longer rely on the traditional method of critiquing art that values art in its unique relationship with the tradition of art because art can be replicated so easily. According to Benjamin, this mechanical reproduction lifts a work out of its original context to the artistic traditions, separating it from its unique “aura” that connects its permanence to its uniqueness (223). Modern methods of art proliferation mean that art can be created anywhere and distributed easily and instantaneously, making museums, art critics, and other tastemakers who previously dictated the validity of works increasingly less relevant. The writers of the Futurist Manifesto saw these strongholds of artistic tradition as hindrances to art’s potential progress, stating that art should come from struggle and emotion rather than adherence to tradition. These authors threw tradition to the wind, describing with excitement the phenomenon in which the older generation’s process is overturned and replaced with the fresh ideas and optimism of the newer generation.

The futurist optimism of the technological age allows modern society to rewrite the importance of authenticity, as information overload presents “originals” and “copies” to us as a homogenized mass of information. Today, we focus more on the immediate context of a work of art rather than “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (220). We are less concerned with the historical context of a work than we are with its content and its relevance to the immediate moment. This, I think, has to do with the idea that we are now a “systems oriented” society rather than an “object oriented” one (Burnham 42). In this, we place less emphasis on physical objects than we do on relationships between objects (42). We can see this in our modern willingness to combine apparently disparate elements of culture in order to create meaningful art and communication devices such as memes and music that samples from other music. As described in “The Art of Noise,” modern combinations of known entities and juxtaposition of seemingly disparate elements breaks “boredom stepping from familiarity” and creates art that is meaningful but not wholly original (6).

examples of this phenomenon include genre-bending music, music created with unconventional instruments, and other amalgamations of “everyday” items and art. 

Mechanical reproduction effectively “separated art from its basis in cult,” meaning that the scarcity of a piece is no longer what gives it relevance (Benjamin 226). This represents a populist shift in the way we consume media, especially film. Film allows the audience to assume the critic’s responsibility for evaluating a film - the audience identifies with the camera passively watching the film rather than the actors themselves, as would occur when watching a play (228). 

Benjamin describes the loss of “magic” in the mechanical production of films - cameramen penetrate into natural world and rework it in their image, removing the natural distance and ignoring the laws of the natural world (234). Much like Flusser’s description of photography as the amalgamation of “magic” and technical production, Benjamin’s writing conveys concern at the human reduction of art’s “aura” to a combination of dispensable, intangible actors and inaccessible machinery. Both of these authors see technologically reproducible works as less traditionally valuable because they bring the masses (and their myriad interpretations and commentaries on art) to works that had previously been mystical and unreachable. Through this loss, however, we gain a more collective experience in consuming media.

-Catie Ball

[mcstie]

Rhizome is dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology.

a javanized flesh explores the relationship between human and computational abstraction by attempting to codify an emotional story in a language a computer can parse and understand. The rise of capitalism spurred on the conceptualization of the computer- as the market economy grew, society worked to abstract items and phenomena in order to break processes down into simple and interchangeable tasks (25). One of the earliest examples of this was the Jacquard loom. This loom broke weaving, which had previously been done by skilled workers, into many simple tasks so that unskilled workers could work together and create a woven cloth, reducing the cost of labor (26). This idea of abstraction also occurred at the invention of communication systems like Morse code - a message could only be conveyed if it was broken into abstract pieces (dots and dashes) that could be transmitted and interpreted as a more complex message (35).  

However, the conceit in and effectiveness of this piece stems from the idea that there are still pieces of the human experience we have yet to codify. As a society, we believe human emotion is outside the reach of the computers that otherwise pervade our daily life. Though science works to codify emotion in terms of chemical reactions and firing synapses, we still shirk from the idea that a computer could be coded to understand emotion in a human way. As of yet, no computer has passed the Turing Test, a test of Artificial Intelligence proposed by influential scientist Alan Turing in which a human has a conversation with a computer and a human and has to discern which is which. Though humans have worked since the inception of computers to abstract and mechanize human processes, we have yet to abstract emotion.

Today, there are many critical attempts to identify patterns in the narratives we write

 and the music we play (the ubiquitous “four chord” progression of I-V-vi-IV, or the recycling of the drum beat from the Ronettes’ song “Be My Baby”),

 which is indicative of our tendency to manipulate skilled work into something codified and reproducible. This project takes this tendency one step further, rewriting a very human story as something only a java virtual machine or a programmer would recognize and understand. In this, the artists reduce a human experience beyond human recognition into computational processes, representing the increasing digitization of our society.

Catie Ball