Michael Wojcik wrote: > Of course there is still the question of semantics, as Evan pointed > out; or to put it another way, of the use-value of numbers under > various regimes of interpretation.
To expand on this a bit: a digital work has no intrinsic meaning; it's only an index into the spaces opened up by various realms of interpretation. An mp3 file doesn't have "songness"; that characteristic is produced (if it's produced at all) by a listener experiencing the event located at the coordinate labeled by the mp3 data in the interpretive space described by the MPEG-2 Level-3 Audio specification. Note there are two acts of interpretation here: one mechanical and one subjective. Matt Skala's theory of "bit color" nicely describes this distinction, and his initial example - an mp3 of silence - also shows how the subjective stage depends on cultural and historical factors, etc, sometimes in profound ways (there's no way to tell from the data which silence the recording represents). Thus the question of whether "the digital" is reducible to numbers is one of scope: do we mean that term to include the regime of its interpretation, and if so, are we including both parts (mechanical and subjective) of that regime, or only the former? -- Michael Wojcik Micro Focus Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
