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For my contribution to the week of PRACTICE, I offer the following question
concerning the electrification of digital objects:
Whenever discussing "digital objects" to undergraduates I find that it is
helpful to relate the well-worn etymology of "digital": that it is about the
finger, or more specifically, the width of the finger which came to mean the
gaps between. Immediately, this helps students to recognize that the
electrification of digital objects is a purely contingent matter, which arose
only after many non-electrical digital apparatuses. In fact, the computer, our
zenith of digital apparatuses, can be fashioned out of many different material
substrates---I then tell the undergrads about how I was once tasked with making
a computer out of Meccano, an old children's toy that uses connecting pins to
connect flat rods that have been punched with holes. I failed at the task, but
learned first-hand about the importance of these holes. That the holes are
*discrete* (separated, like the fingers) is vitally important for digitality.
This account of digitality inherits the ideality of its most precise narrator,
the nominalist philosopher Nelson Goodman (in his work Languages of Art, 1976).
Goodman sets up a tortuously analytical account of digital objects, bifurcated
into what he calls "notational schemes" and "notational systems". The prior,
*schemes*, are what we talk about when we discuss "the digital" (the latter
include semantical criteria, and go beyond the "merely" digital). Goodman's
criteria are convoluted ("disjoint" and "finitely differentiated"), but his
examples are familiar: "alphabetical, numerical, binary, telegraphic, and basic
musical notations" (p.140).
To kick-off my thoughts on how Goodman's "notational scheme" (aka: digital)
relates to PRACTICE, I'll introduce two recent accounts directly inspired by
Goodman (surprisingly, there are not many).
The first is Mario Carpo's two works on theories of architecture: The Alphabet
and the Algorithm (2011), and Architecture in the Age of Printing (2001). In
both of these works, Capro discusses the 15th century thinker Leon Battista
Alberti who used *digital* methods for his architectural creations. By
imagining architectural forms digitally, Alberti was able to transform the
practice of architecture from a craft to a science, capable of producing
identical reproductions that fit together in an interchangeable, modular
fashion. One of the more vivid examples is Alberti's development of a map
constructed from a set of (what we would now call) digital "data points" (in
his Descriptio urbis Romae). At the time, this was the most reliable, compact,
data format for geographical imaging.
The second is Sybille Kramer's argument that writing can be contrasted to
orality as a form of "notational iconicity". This strange term
("Schriftbildlichkeit" in the original German), highlights the fact that the
invention of the phonetic alphabet by the Greeks was no mere derivation.
Rather, because the alphabet breaks the naturally-continuous voice into
artificial, discrete ("digital") parts, it permits the isolation and dissection
of language. Kramer states that "notational visualization makes the *form* of
language visible." Through writing, then, we ignore the musicality of language
in favour of the visual. This leads, in the end, towards the "calculation" of
language which reduces and eradicates meaning, (foreshadowing our discussion in
the last week regarding the MEMORY of digital objects) one of the forms of "the
techniques of forgetting.”
~ Quinn DuPont (iqdupont.com)
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