Digital Glass

There was a piece on a BBC3 technology show a couple of weeks ago in which some Silicon Valley pundit said something along the lines of the biggest challenge now being to meaningfully harness all the data floating around. Think about all the digital information that people generate, from photos, to listening patterns to phone calls. Google seem to be taking the right direction, but I’m sure there’s also potential for something of artistic value to be drawn out of all this information. See this set on flickr for example.

Post-digital, to me, sounds like going beyond the mentality of “what can we do with these digital tools” to “what can we do with all this digital data”. That’s why I like my iPod so much — with LPs/tapes/CDs there was no way of sorting through the tracks, the artists, what I liked, what I didn’t like, what I’ve listened to and when. I’m willing to sacrifice the slight loss in sound quality because in the end the tools make the experience better.

/quis 09/01/2006

/quis - have a look at this, it seems to be in direct response to what you are saying…

Marius Watz: Universal Digest Machine, Installation. Java, MySQL (2005) http://spider.unlekker.net/

And I quote: “A trip through the hyperuniverse of the World Wide Web on full autopilot: The Universal Digest Machine is an installation featuring a web spider that crawls the net, digesting web pages and outputting a brief analysis of their contents. The display unit is an industrial thermal printer mounted on a plinth. For every page visited by the spider, a receipt is printed, falling on the floor unless taken by a visitor. The receipts become a sprawling heap of intriguing but ultimately incomprehensible artifacts, obviously representing information but no longer in a human-readable form.

Internet space is much like the physical universe - greater than any single person could comprehend or personally navigate. Since the spider is indiscriminate about the links it follows, it ends up in places most human users would never reach. As it does so it reveals a Terra Incognita of obscure web sites, giving equal space to Microsoft white papers, Disney collectibles and scat fetishism. Just as antique maps would be marked with dragons and fantastic monsters where the cartographers’ knowledge of the world ended, there may well be terrible and wonderful things lurking on the web just out of reach.”

I hope all those old folks Jon seems to be talking about aren’t lurkin’ out there.

/Jerry (US) 10/01/2006

It’s not digital that’s middle aged - and I think this is the original After-Digital post’s point as far as I can tell - but the internet - and i’d add to that, in it’s current computer-based stage.

The US digital theorist Paul Levinson has suggested that the computer ‘came of age’ when it stopped using writing/code as the interface between user and machine, but moved over to the user-friendly ‘windows’-based system (as developed by Apple Macintosh in 1984, not its PC namesake, ‘Windows95′ etc.). Here, the revolution was to conceive of the computer as a ‘desktop, with files and a wastebasket etc. - the windows being different ‘views’ you could have into the computer’s virtual storage space. Here, although the metaphors were still print-based, crucially, they were spatial - helping us to rethink the computer not as a series of flat pages, but a 3D space - that you could later ’surf’ as an ‘Explorer’ and so on.

Further back, the Gutenburg Press hailed the age of print in the mid 15th century and famously, the first Gutenburg Bible was assumed by some in Mainz, Germany - its home town - to be the work of the devil. It wasn’t until the end of the century that printers dared stop emulating manuscripts and their work started exploiting the potenial of exactitude and mass reproduction in their layout. This was print’s coming of age - coming into consciousness. However, I think that the speed and transience of print was not exploited until magazines and leaflets became as much a focus as books for the printing press.

It’s this calling for liberation - from the confines of a set space - that I see in the current plateau? crisis? of the internet. And, it’s here that the development of a spatial internet has unlimited potential..’

From the Social Issues Research Centre, http://www.sirc.org/articles/know_your_place.shtml, this:
“‘…there are notes in boxes that are empty.
every room has an accessible history
every place has emotional attachments you can open and save
you can search for sadness in new york”

Headmap manifesto…No, these words are not bad poetry. Nor are they song lyrics. They aren’t even from an advertisement for mobile phones. They form part of a technological vision of the future, heralding an age in which our spatial experiences can be overlaid with a rich layer of information - images, text, sound - through GPS capable mobile WiFi devices and a lot of community spirit. This is the Headmap manifesto, an exploration of the technological, and more importantly the social, potential of an ‘outside internet’ - external, spatialised computing.”

/katy b 24/01/2006

Jon: “Today’s digital technologies are never around for long enough for us to build a true understanding of their nature…”

…isn’t their very nature to keep evolving? -Emulating both the self-evolving ’structure’ of emergent software and market forces which are, whether we like it or not, inextricable from the evolution of technology. Infact the evolutionary analogy is disrtracting as it suggests a certain inevitablility to th e development of technology above and beyond and desptie market forces.

/Anonymous 24/01/2006

Jerry - Ithink that data eater doesn’t digest this data so much as spews it out again, unchewed. How much use is that?

/Anonymous 24/01/2006

Can ‘digital’ ever enter the socialist stage?

This is an interesting question and one that really needs some discussion partly because what we mean by a ’socialist stage’ isn’t very clear here. I’m wandering what you meant by it Jon? I’m not sure a ’socialist stage’ exists, myself.

Talk about China, though, in interesting in light of the recent Google search system for China that’s been in the news. Here, the discussion is about the way Google have tailored the system so that a search returns Government, not ‘free’ information. What find interesting is that this has highlighted how infact Google had already been doing this to some extent in Germany. There’s a reference, quite rightly, in the blog to China’s ‘analogue of corporate america’ but here we see the how the west functions little differently to China. the internet as is - largely ’small c’ conservative - should flow seemlessly between the two - it won’t be China’s Velvet Revolution. Nor ours.

/Timothy Alders 29/01/2006

There are so many points to the above post, it’s hard to deal with many of them, so a quick response to this post/counter-post:
“Jon: “Today’s digital technologies are never around for long enough for us to build a true understanding of their nature…”

Anon “…isn’t their very nature to keep evolving? -Emulating both the self-evolving ’structure’ of emergent software and market forces which are, whether we like it or not, inextricable from the evolution of technology. Infact the evolutionary analogy is disrtracting as it suggests a certain inevitablility to th e development of technology above and beyond and desptie market forces.”

Well, it seems to me that this idea that digital is evolving faster than we can get to grips with it is both true and a bit of a myth that panics us.

Digital is clearly in evolution and it has so many fronts (interfaces?) that no one can feel they ever understand anything of it other than at the micro-level.

Yes, it is an emergent/self-organising structure (sorry to quibble anon, but that is actually what Darwin suggested evolution was about so you’re not going to get one or the other) - but the ’speed’ of change will be slower than we think. Self organising structures work on positive and negative feedback, so for every few positive/dynamic mutations, there is the negative feedback which serves to balance the structure.

On the other hand to talk to ‘digital’ and the idea of ’self-organising’ is to make it sound like technology is finally out of our hands. And so the horror vision of Frankenstein returns but in much less original tales.

Some of the debates on this site right now - a return to the sensual - digital glass - read like we are back with the Romantics during the industrial revolution. Plus ça change?

/Gerald. F Scott 29/01/2006

Gerald, there are always ways we can look to past revolutions to discuss/dismiss today’s but as the original post says, the one coming will look like nothing we’ve seen before. You certainly aren’t going to catch it looking backwards. Or up your own ass. Quibble?

/anon 29/01/2006

I could have mentioned your spelling.

/Gerald. F Scott 29/01/2006

It wouldn’t be beyond the pale to imagine a universal compression code whose speed and “quality” were stratified rather like the divisions between dial-up, broadband and the not-yet-on-the-market. –

I agree with Jon – there is a constant tension with digital WWW between user and commercialism / money-making. But what is reassuring is how, after the dot com crash, the commercial gloom and doom – the www went from strength to strength – it does have an independent life to commerce and capital – but of course, it is always being compromised by gold rush stories started by ventures like the ‘million dollar page’ and the phenomenal money raised by Google etc at flotation – but like I say, I think it still offers an alternative to other media – look to blogs coming out of countries in conflict – from Arkansas to [London]derry

/joed 10/02/2006

I think the first revolution was one of effect and now, the second one, is one of affect - maybe as the computer literate inherit the world some of the poetic things asked or assumed in the earliest post might come to something - look at how quick podcasts took off in some quarters - already looking tired? I am not sure - what is missing in Jon’s post is the power of ‘listening’ - who would think the most common medium in the world would be the radio - you should have a post on story-telling in the digital world? – in the meantime I will listen to jon in the flesh or i guess i mean voice

/Cici 10/02/2006

In reply to Jon’s blog addressing some of our comments originally posted as ‘After digital’, we would like to reply…but first, we would like to bullet point some of the key statements we made:

We suggested the digital revolution was a velvet one – meaning that, in the main, it is happening without questions or with benign knowledge – in part, we feel this is because of the invisibility of the WWW – as apposed to a network of motorways, cell-phone antennas and other more visible networks.

Because of the perceived speed of the digital world – we put forward the idea of the digital age already entering a middle age - by this we meant, not that ‘we’ve got the hang of new media’ as Jon suggested, but that it is now in a mode of reflection, questioning what it has been doing. This is, we suggested, because it has reached a stage where it has not achieved many of the things put forward in its youth – ‘death of the book’ (print) is a famous example of this.

We thought the expansion of blogs, in a way, reflect this ‘crisis’. People, like Limited Language, are trying to make sense of the world – like a more public web of personal diaries. In a sense it’s about making visible the internet, so we made an analogy with the Arts and Crafts movement, of the late eighteenth century, which used technology to show how it could help traditional craft, but without becoming lost in the technology by removing the soul, presence and human touch of craft.

And finally we suggested that digital culture might be in a moment of recess where people are looking at how the web can be used. Middle age seems to us to be less Jon’s ‘fatigue’ and more about looking forward – to what can be achieved. It is a positive position to be in.

And our response to Jon’s post:

Jon questions speed in the context of Paul Virilio but makes the comment: ‘one quickly forgets how 56K dial-up used to limit one’s range.’ We feel this validates our point – things are not around long enough to be remembered or as Jon concludes: ‘Today’s digital technologies are never around for long enough for us to build a true understanding of their nature.’ Because we live in a material world and, increasingly, a temporal time-frame of consumption, how we experience time is, we argue, different – compressed.

Jon says of digital, “its time-based nature is outside our comprehension and against our nature.” Yes, but it’s not all about speed alone – buy now, gone tomorrow. Information arrives all at once, but then we select and download to digest it in our own time…swapping the high speed of the information highway for a more human temporality. A little like pulling the car over to the hard shoulder for a break – or the way you watch sushi on the conveyor belt, going past so fast it makes you nervous, eventually retrieving your choice: to wonder over at leisure.

Be it food grab or screen grab, this might still sound like the stuff of mindless consumption because it arrives pre-packaged. To be sure, digital plays into conformity, but we don’t agree that people consume it on autopilot. In ‘Postproduction’, Nicholas Bourriaud suggests that the Web surfer acts as a ‘semionaut’ who, like the DJ, connects new spaces, new narratives. For him, “The ‘semionaut’ imagines the links, the likely relations between disparate sites.” (He then goes on to suggest that the artists he promotes use this tactic to make sense of a world altered by the digital, although their work engages little with the technology itself but that’s another story…)

But, as Jon points out, Bourriaud’s wards aren’t the penniless artists of old but amongst the privileged few. He also suggests there is no ‘we’ in the digital world, and to speak of it as ‘one’ is to deny its composite nature. If you’re reading this, now, through the glass of the screen then you might talk about ‘digital natives’, ‘digital immigrants’ and ‘digital innocents’ – but can ‘Jessops Man’ be added to the last’s list? One of our points in the original post on digital technology was its invisibility. Jon’s introduction of a man buying a digital camera and a film roll at Jessops supports this – he may not know or understand a digital camera but can pay for it with a card with a magnetic strip, use an ATM, have his medical files ping from server to server as they are transferred from doctor to hospital. Revolution is built on consciousness and non-consciousness and the digital one is no different. Jessops Man is already plugged in, but has not achieved consciousness.

There is some overlap, to our minds, between the actions of the semionaut, the notion of consciousness and what Michel de Certeau, in ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’, calls ‘making do’…”the tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the strong, thus lend a political dimension to everyday practices.” As for the asymmetry of the digital age – say between the West and Africa – there is no argument. BUT, we feel (with our post-colonial hat on) that the mobile phone has had major effects in Africa. For instance, shoppers will use is as part of their bartering system; they phone relatives in other villages and towns to check the prices of fresh goods and, used tactically in this way, it has meant a more stable pricing structure for food in many communities. Also mobile phone ‘prepay vouchers’ have, in Africa, become an alternative currency; people text each other the airtime that can then be used to barter for goods. This means those in the more wealthy cities can instantly help those in other areas – telephony has created a new monetary system. “Can ‘digital’ ever enter the socialist stage?” asks Jon. (Well, has anyone?) This is still capitalism - yes - but it provides an example of the adaptability of digital systems…

The current need for a moment of reflection that we identified is welcome …a change of context or temporal mode allows us to see how human ingenuity can interplay with the digital in as many ways as there are personalised playlists in mp3 culture.

The commonly held binary that glass need be ‘handled with care’ or shattered isn’t the only way. It can be melted down and re-moulded into ‘something new’.

/Monika + Colin 11/02/2006

many points and views to respond to - forgive me for being a bit slow… I saw this in the Evening Standard last week (of all places) and it sums up one side of the argument -

“Banking on inadequate pay”
I was most interested to read your front page revealing that Barclays director Bob Diamond has earned a £15 million bonus (21 February).
My partner has been working as a cashier in a branch of Barclays in outer London for three years, and has just been told she will be getting a £25 pay increase this year.
This won’t even be enough to cover her rent and council tax increases. It is good to know the bank is sharing out its record £5.3 billion profits so well.
Name and address supplied.

A glimpse of Britain - “name and address supplied” (the inklings of I-D cards and the police state). Banking as digital paradigm (it’s all a question of numbers in the end). The sore point (graphic design is embedded in this pre-purchased future. Banks and financial services do their version of Peter Saville look, or the Jonathan Barnbrook antirom)

/JW 28/02/2006

A phrase Jon Wozencroft used when he taught me at Saint Martins in 1994 has stayed with me. ‘What do you get, what do you lose?’. whn we lstn 2r i pd,music efctvly snds lk ths. Our brains filling in, or ignoring the blanks that compression requires. We gain storage space, we lose quality. We gain ease of use, we lose texture and depth.

Cable TV drives me insane with the jpeg style of compression they use. Yet the engineer who came to my house, admitting seeing it after first insisting the picture was crystal clear, raised his hands and said ‘thats how its meant to be’.

I’m 32. i grew up with Star Wars and as a child read the making of books to learn how the special effects were achieved. Last month I was directing some post production work on a pop promo, compositing blue screen layers. The Flame operator was about 23. I remarked how fast and easy keying and compositing is now, and spared a thought for the patient inovators who hand composited film matts, negative, positive and image layers for each element in effects shots with over 200 elements, by hand. Exposing each element seperately onto the film. Each element shot as a model, not a cg construction. He had no idea what I was talking about, and was unaware that that was how it used to be done. So he had no idea what we had gained or lost. Speed and storage over texture and quality. If we are unaware of the losses, how can we possibly make the best of the gains?

/Adam Bartley 09/03/2006

In November 2009 we released the book ‘Limited Language: Rewriting Design: Responding to a feedback culture’ which re-engaged with this original post.

For more on the book as a whole: http://bit.ly/bookcomments

Monika + Colin

/colin 15/11/2009

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