phenomenology of digital media
the phenomenology of digital media
Doug Goodwin [3/2005]
course overview
Technology is an evolving ideal which recommends itself at the moment of its own failure. Our world has been seduced by this cycle of failure and fixes to such degree that we forget that technology is a manifestation of culture, not the other way around. This course will investigate the cultural forces driving the explosion of digital media. The goal will be to reach an understanding of the historical, psychological, social, and cultural contexts which inform and recommend digital media even at the point of their own failure. Many branches of inquiry including aesthetics, psychology, economics, logic, standards, representation and semiotics will be investigated for their role in propelling digital technologies.
Without apparent irony, technology recommends itself and its practitioners with language borrowed from the period of manifest destiny. Technology associates itself with hard work, soft morality, and accelerated fortunes that frontier life promises to all participants. Technology uses this stance as a means to its own empowerment, and this arrogance is ripe for critique.
Through readings, discussion, prototypes, and thought experiments we will explore historical and evolving claims for authenticity. A practical and extensible critical framework will result for the discussion of digital media. This is not a course in software: no programming will be required of students. Projects challenging the ascendency of digital media or those which explore the will be encouraged. Lab hours will be provided for those who wish to explore the rifts and failures in digital phenomenology in situ.
The abstraction systems used in the design of digital devices will be presented: variables, iteration, encapsulation, boolean logic, objects, databases, design patterns, classes, objects, data structures, aggregation, networking, artificial intelligence, systems design, etc. We will consider the relationship of these abstractions and the recent movement in community building.
a defining technology
Computers have emerged as the defining technology of our time. There’s plenty of evidence that tech has been embraced as our century’s new paradigm, a metaphor for defining ourselves and our activities. Digital computation has remade popular entertainment. Everywhere people seem willing to sacrifice their humanity in order to pursue innovations in digital self-definition. There is no need to sacrifice the humanity that escapes standards and discrete approximations. This course will interest everyone wishing to engage digital technology, to utilize digital tools and processes, or to interrupt the rendering of humanity into bits.
This course is for anyone who wishes to understand the structures, methods, and language employed by developers of computational devices. This is not a course for programmers or information technologists per se, though everyone could benefit from a reappraisal of digital technologies and computation, especially with regard to the fundamental assumptions underlying engineering professions.
even digital is analog
Digital technologies all exist in an analog world. These computational devices are engineered to produce discrete (”digital” or “binary”) information structures even though the devices are themselves analog. Digital really does exist (or define) an abstract world that exists without weight or mass. Anything that enters or leaves the digital realm must be approximated, and here lie the most obvious points of intervention.
language structures
Computation is driven not by mathematics, but by language. You will learn about the data structures and methods for the manipulation of data. State machines and serial processing. Lossy and lossless compression. Investigate the text (ie: the code) that drives this revolution and consider the ideological cants therein. Investigate the politics that drive this revolution, and consider the metaphors that are being used to encode our new reality.
your place
Finally we’ll investigate the blossoming of new communities including open source projects, the Creative Commons, and extreme programming.
- introduce the theoretical foundations of visual meaning
- consider digital strategies for representation emphasizing what is being discarded in encoding procedures
- consider competing branches of compression, lossy vs lossless
- consider the precise brutality inherent in the translation of gesture into bitstreams
- uncover the dominance of text and language in computer programming
- consider the tendency of media to reproduce antique forms
- search for emerging forms
- consider algorithms historically and practically
Information Technology tropes
i/o
data structures & databases
digital grammar
serial processing: Turing’s state machines
parallel processing: the Gaia computer
black boxes
conditional iterations
redundancy
self-reflection
aggregation and granularity
waves and particles
asynchrony and synchrony
post post structuralism
utile taxonomies
hieirarchies
xml vs relational data
self-fulfilling prophecies
psychological models
digital vernacular
survival skills
social networking
collaboration extreme production
mailing lists
www, rss, the semantic web
opensource community/development
creativecommons.org
media literacy
lies
digital is forever
we live in a digital world
digital is easier
digital is artifact and defect free
push button mastery
death of author -> birth of author-reader
a democratic medium
the medium conveys its brillance to the work
metaphors (eames & bolter)
matrix
web
clockworks
vessel
spindle
fragmented narratives
remixes, dubs, etc.
new impressionism
access to dream logic