Published summary of article in the Technische Universität & Universitat der Künste Hybrid Laboratory portal:
http://www.hybrid-plattform.org/news/detail/digital-materiality
August 2017
DIGITAL MATERIALITY
The following pixels you are about to read are my conclusions on the intensive seminar Digital Materiality, guided by Baruch Gottlieb at the Hybrid Lab from the Technische Universität and the Universität der Künste Berlin <3
This are some of my learnings and common ideas, remember Victor Hugo: ‘A stand can be made against invasion by an army; no stand can be made against invasion by an idea’, on some debates from all of us, the assistants (the workshop-group is a mixture of regular students and international participants). Some of the subjects that I am writing come out from an epistemological rift, they are no more than mere interpretations. The Hybrid Lab in very simple words is a combination from Art and Maths, and this seminar was the perfect combination of both. I do digital collage, and always thought my art was in a cloud or in electricity; even people that like my pieces ask “Diego, when are you going to evolve and make them real?” -What can I answer to that?. When people mention the word real, I usually feel the same like Neo before he met Morpheus, I thought I knew what was real. My art is physical, it is REAL! Also it is funny to see the reactions of people, but now I am very happy that I can explain all you are about to read.
We live in a material world, and by material I am not talking only about the human conduct orientated to materialise efforts, hours, attention, time... by materialism I mean that everything we know is tangible, even ideas as a result of material interactions, have a physical part.
Of course this is relevant to us when it becomes phenomena, morphological, in other words when it´s becomes subject to an empirical analysis in our knowledge system. Our ideas are stored in someplace of our being (maybe in a cloud, or in our enviroment, we still have room to research on that, but we are more focus on researching alternative ways to reproduce our materiality ambition). With a little bit of abstraction it is possible to understand that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, but many times this abstraction is not easy to achieve (not everybody is capable of getting out from the dimension he/she is submerged). For people like Feuerbach materialism is love, and if we live in a material world, we live in a world of love (don’t we?).
We can find some antagonistic positions in our present, although we are facing Post-Futurism (the movement which emphasised speed, technology, youth, sometimes violence, and objects such as the car, the aeroplane, and the industrial city), we can perceive a slow down originated by the so-called complexity. Always complexity slows us down. But that doesn’t mean that we are slowing down to understand and appreciate our present. In order to improve, or lets say make things more efficient, we keep on working in our system without trying to fix it or find another, so we keep on working on top of other things exacerbating this complexity, now everything isn´t just fast, is about immediateness. It is worth all this “progress”? Is complexity progress?
The digital world is not more than a reflection of our own behaviours into 1 and 0’s. We understand that behaviours are the materialisation from attitudes and they are a materialisation from beliefs. The Digital world is subjected to the same rules, same actors, same resources – perpetual motion is still an hypothetic scenario- even for building machines we need water, mineral, human power, electricity and Time. The same precious Time that rules our world, rules the digital world. There is no digital world possible without clocks, because this clocks guide the tasks in sets or series, we call them Cycles. Nature (like the machines) is also governed by cycles, mostly longer but cycles in the end. There is no innovation in our digital world. When we analyze all the digital world we can only identify what we already understand from our analog reality, that is why there is nothing new inside, maybe different but not new. Even the programs that are written are already present in our analog world, our creativity in the digital world is no more than an adaption from our analog world through another alphabetical code in a luminous interface and a mechanical body.
This alphabet is a writing system for our code, we use letters and numbers most, but all alphabets have in common that they are pure Visual. We can appreciate an homogeny consistency interpretative like a respectability and regularity. A cycle, made out of processes.
The process of how we convert an image into a digital code is as old as the first days when priests started to describe images. The process in which an image is converted into a certain code it´s called: description. Priests saw images, and they wrote into words to tell what they were interpreting; a CPU does exactly the same: they grid an image into small pixels and describe what they ‘see’ in every grid and write it into a code of 0 and 1. So you see, there is no innovation even in this process. What we do, is to analyse a phenomena into codes (words in our case) and from that codes we can recreate an image… of course there is a waste and loose of information we have to deal, same in digital, we and machines can only describe what we can perceive through our senses. There is a colossal importance in recording images.
Of course, if we talk of images , we also name Flusser (and yes, he can make things more complex if you don’t understand him), his point is very solid when he separate images into technical images and traditional images. "Images," according to Flusser, "are mediations (interfaces) between the world and human beings. Human beings 'ex-ist', i.e. the world is not immediately accessible to them - and therefore images are needed to make it comprehensible" (Flusser 2000: 9) To Flusser every medium has its own language of gestures. Traditional images (gesture of painting) are the ones that will guide us through the world, and Technical images (gesture of photography, of filming) are images of scientific theories, is also digital visualisation.
The photographic image, as all technical images, is therefore not to be seen as a simple abstraction from reality, but rather as an abstraction from scientific texts. This implies that technical images belong to an even higher degree of abstraction than texts. Although technical images are very different from traditional images since they are an abstraction of texts and not of reality, they are still images and therefore share some features with traditional image "liberate their receivers by magic from the necessity of thinking conceptually”. So when describing a picture, the machine is turning it into a more technical image. Das Medium ist die Botschaft.
Describing, can be track a long time ago in history with different results. When reading Platon we can notice Socrates complaining about the students because they learn to write. Wait, he wasn't being ignorant, he had a reason: he realised that when writing, there were feelings inside the knowledge, no pure knowledge like he wanted (we can appreciate a waste of elements when describing/writing as well). But Platon started to record the tech evolution (thanks God some students effort to excel their own professors). But there is some of actuality in Socrates concerns, today description is about our conducts, our conducts are transcripted and described into codes. This codes then are sold to marketers and then, voilà! is where Big Data is born. The digital materiality is measured by sensors, this sensors are translating all day our taste and feeling (what an exciting time for Bourdieu we are living) into a code. This sensors are, among others, the buttons, that innocent element inside a webpage is no more than a highly efficient tracking element (Big data perspective).
Things get complex for many reasons. There is a misinterpretation of complexity, we tend to confuse it with progress, success and efficiency. Instead of making things less complex we are relying on digital system to make tasks for us, but we need to build that digital systems and what is more important, we need to build an analog structure with it own cycle of resources to bring that digital system into life. We are making easier to record an image but more complex to support that image to be there. Progress would be to innovate an intelligent and less demanding way to solve tasks. We are saving forest without printing thousands of papers due to the digital support but we are digging jungles to get a piece of the up to 62 different types of metals inside our phones.
Andrew Feenberg can explain success and efficiency in the Ten paradoxes of Technology (2010), more exactly with the paradox of the Frame: efficiency doesn’t explain success, success explains efficiency. Efficiency is the measure of their worth and explains why they are chosen from among the many possible alternatives. Our common sense tells us that technologies succeed because they are good at doing their job; this explanation by efficiency is a little like explaining the presence of pictures in a museum by the fact that they all have frames. Of course all technologies must be more or less efficient, but that does not explain why they are present in our technical environment. For example, Facebook like Shakespeare (Baruch indicated that Shakespeare was successful because Gutenberg printed his book as one of the first in history, involving being one of the firsts best sellers), is successful because it is doing more than the simple service they offer, they are offering investors a platform to collect habits and data from users to sell it to marketers to do advertising. We can see that not always the most efficient is the one that prevail, for instances everybody know public transport is way more efficient than private cars, but somehow the industry manage to impose the American dream of the own car to make us addict or dependent to the petrol, we even adapt the cities to the cars (I really hope our generation makes the shift).
There is a theory that explains this system, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Naomi Klein, 2007). That in a easy explanation, is to create a problem while solving another, then some other company would come and fix it. Win-Win. An example is the abuse from resources, creating disasters, then another company come to clean the mess, and in the end everybody wins. (what do this people have inside their veins? oil? I always wonder, what is the first thing they think when they woke up in the morning?).
As i wrote before, the digital world is a part from our world (not apart), so if our analog reality is limited by resources, both realities are limited. There are power and economic relation that make possible the digital world. It seems to be infinite because we can´t see it all, Internet is not infinite and like any other thing from our world it is limited and is not zero cost. We are paying, for example, with letting advertising in our social media or blog pages. There is also a certain cost for where we store the digital material, the file to project: we need surface (yes, a portion of our limited surface on the earth, and for certain reasons they cant be build in the middle of inhospitable places) wires, designers, servers, electricity, metals, workers in china assembling the hard drives were everything is stored (don’t forget every single movement on our computers is stored in google’s servers like cookies and many more innocent names, that my friend, needs physical space to be saved).
This separateness can also apply to the process of Ranciére explained in his Politics of Aesthetics, revealing its intrinsic link to politics by analysing what they both have in common: the delimitation of the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, the thinkable and the unthinkable, the possible and the impossible. It is almost invisible the importance of humans in our digital reality. We are separated but still in all the cycle, in small but very important tasks. It is amazing how in this point humans and machines alternate their roles, in some point we are the machines in their reproductive process helping in their own development, doing this small tasks on their production that can´t be done by them, but they are suppose to do that in our world. It is not that the mission of a tool? Somehow in the last centuries humans turn into complete tools at the service of production, and sadly not production of ideas.
If we try to find the path in which man-power become a resource, we need to remember Taylor, who was the first to introduce the concept of little repetitive movements. Modern is specialisation . He was, with Ford, the visionaries of the actual process of industrial labour (our standard, either in communist or capitalist countries). "Divide et impera" or Divide and conquer, an ancient concept that still survives, in this standardisation where all have a tiny and insignificant role, only appreciable in the end results.
Along with Taylor´s distribution process, comes the concept used by liberal economists as well as Marxists, The Labor Theory of Value (LTV), theory of value argues that the economic value of a good or service is determined by the total amount of socially necessary labor required to produce it, rather than by the use or pleasure its owner gets from it.
Our current perception of value totally seems to ignore this value, even though there are some efforts like the FAIR TRADE associations with coffee and other commodities, but does anybody consider the LTV that goes inside every single element needed for the digital world to exist? There is a enormous human unconsciousness with all the elements we need, for example, to produce a pixel. Yes, in the words you are reading there are thousands of them, please step back yourself a little bit and you will find millions of pixels. This is sold as progress; of course, I have 1000000 pixels, and you? Poor you.. Ok, I will try not to be sarcastic, but lets make a general overview on some of the necessary labor we need to produce a pixel (remember for each part there is a social labor, made by the workers and the communities). First of all we need some minerals, this minerals they usually come from Africa, South America <3, some of them from Russia… they extract them from mines, mines that eat, literally and devastate the soil forever, destroying not only the ecosystem but also the health from the workers and animals, take all the clean water (it is needed pure water for some processes, don´t even ask how is it then delivered back) to extract the metals like arsenic, gallium, indium and the rare-earth elements (REEs) cerium, europium, gadolinium, lanthanum, terbium, and yttrium. I don’t wanna go deeper but here we see the social efforts in one pixel but only for the metals parts. We still need the electricity to keep the machines working (lets ignore the resources needed to make and deliver that Taylor’s assembly machine used at the factory), usually it comes from thermo reactors, it means we need to burn something to get the energy, usually is Oil and Coal, the same resources that brings instability to all over the countries rich in this resources, the plastic needed also comes from the same oil, after refineries, so here let’s save some value and make it only for Oil. Vamos, go on, then we need of course the time and effort of the workers that are working in the factory, the logistics also, the silicious and other elements were the pixels are assembled, and then we need all the other elements that are inside the display. All this efforts are only in a pixel, which in dollars we can’t pay because there is no such a minuscule division of coin, maybe a nano dollar would fit. Ok, so an LTV applies for all this elements, The "surplus" in this context means the additional labour a worker has to do in his/her job, beyond earning his own keep. This isolation of parts of the process have a social cost, indeed.
We always talk about time, but are 8 hours of work today the same like 8 hours 40 years ago? are they more productive? We need to redefine the quality of time. Today everything is turning into immediate, we overpass the time frame of fast. Processes are continue evolving but not the standardisation from the workers efforts. I can´t visualise if this is happening because all our attention is in the machines and the fear to loss jobs against them or any other reason.
I would love to go deeper in this analysis, but in the paragraphs above we try to show you how big the iceberg is, and all the parts we are ignoring and in some way approving (there should exist the psychological theory of value, to count our feeling when we get conscious of all this process). In the end, does anybody care about the mountains that we are emptying and then dumping as waste? or the thousand of workers that die every month due to the pollution or working conditions? Then, an old friend comes to my mind: does the end justifies the means like the breakdown of Brazilian forest to get the rare metal Neodymium needed in mobile phones?.
Overproduction and waste are the clear examples that the human scale is wrong, we really need to start exploring the organic support for our digital material, scientific prove that it is possible to store information in some proteins of DNA, they can even need another sort of energy. Effective?
But there is also a rare material needed in the production of the digital materiality: Workers!. King Lear (Shakespeare) is a kind of elaborate case history of people translating themselves out of a world of roles into the new world of jobs. This is a process of stripping and denudation which doesn’t occur instantly except in artistic vision (Benson, Constable, Lanham 1991). But Shakespeare saw that it had happened in this time. He wasn’t talking about future, but we still feel some values of literacy, privacy and separateness.
It is too early to talk about Perpetum mobile on machines, but we can appreciate that a system has really achieved it. Somehow capitalism finds a way to always get a new cheap place with low regulations and unconsciously liable to feed it. In the seminar Baruch present a text of Jennifer Cutter, in which she explains how capitalism use also the feminism movement as a tool. Companies show themselves like equalisers and progressive, including women in different positions but through her perspective they are using the women in that position because they can pay them less salary with the same efficiency. Are efficiency and Ethics tied together?
After reading Isaac Asimov, I always wonder how are we translating our ethics into the Artificial Intelligence, that means literally, giving a system the possibility to put things together (inter + legere). It has it own capability but attached to our own rules, because we can’t create something alienated to our system of rules and ethics. So here we will notice that A.I. can bring us the same solutions than us but faster, the difference again is in the Time it takes. Innovation again is up to us. Until today, we always need the presence of a human in the process of taking innovative decisions. I wouldn't fear A.I. if i wouldn't fear humans. If you fear humans, then you know you have an extra thing to worry about…
Conclusion:
We are the digital materiality, or better say, digital materiality is us no more than us. I mean, applying the same principles of energy (energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it transforms from one form to another) and also following the principles of description (the ones done by the priest in the beginning of history, describing an image into a code) I can easily think that what we are converting into digital is nothing more than our own ideas, thoughts, laws, personality, humanity… Digital Materiality is the result of our efforts to achieve immediateness.
The digital behaviours are a reflection of our own behaviours, we are not innovating in digital. Of course over there, there would be nothing of this without us, in all the chain of the digital materiality (and analog of course) we can find human presence. I see all this like a process, a process that is a reflection of us. Like the Bibles were reflections and interpretation of each writer, the same happen with us. Every coder interprets in a different way how a solutions needs to be achieved. Is the responsibility of the results on the writers shoulders? Are they responsible for the Ethics of their own tools/programs? Where is the limit of the Digital and analog responsibilities?
To know more about the digital essence we have to dig deeper in Human essence. Every software is a group of codes and instructions written by a writer, a human writer which is writing and transmitting his perspective on solving something, every individual has it own Aesthetic (perceiving through senses); a policeman would develop something with his values, a doctor also, a seller also… they are all leaving their own ideas and way of doing something into a code. That code now has a part of them.
The prefix digital doesn’t change the condition of the materiality. It change only the support in which it is reflected, and all digital needs a part of analog (no on the other way round).
Like McLuhan told, artists are the distant border line radars, we are sensors sensible to detect this and are the artists the ones able to program the sensory life. But there is something failing in today artist, we are incapable of solving underlying issues with some common Ethics, Ethics comes from the greek word habits; in practice, ethics seeks to resolve questions of human morality by defining concepts such as good and evil, the branch of knowledge that deals with moral principles. Some simple question is still in debate: do we want freedom to do something or freedom from something?
Maybe one day we need to develop a branch of Psychology to analyse program behaviours in order to understand why they are taking that decisions, what reflection of our habits are inside that program. In the end, there is an Art here, a technic we are suppose to understand with errors as possibilities, and the control (cyber) is still ours.
2017
DIÆGO ARIMAYN CAPALBO
„durch die Macht der Wahrheit habe ich als Lebender das Universum erobert"
