(the teeming void)

I'm slowly developing this notion of transmateriality; in this post, some media theory and a nice example from computer science. In the next I'll try to connect all this with some current art work, and back to the notion of the transmaterial.

Thanks to a prod from my friend Brogan Bunt, I've been reading Friedrich Kittler, a literary and media theorist who has made some striking forays into computational media. In a paper from 1995 he grapples, like Kirschenbaum, with the grounding of computation in matter, distilling this position to a wonderful aphorism: "there is no software." Kittler begins by announcing the end of writing; that texts "do not exist anymore in perceivable time and space" but have been miniaturised to the scale of integrated circuits. This miniaturisation, in which writing escapes the bounds of human perception, is facilitated by Turing's core principle of computing, which sets out minimal conditions for computation and proves its independence from hardware - the ability for any number of different physical machines to implement a universal computer. This principle, Kittler says, "has had the effect of duplicating the implosion of hardware by an explosion of software." "Ordinary language" is overtaken by a new hierarchy of programming languages, layers that reach from the command line down to assembler and the very protocols embedded in the silicon itself.

Kittler plays out this "descent" in which each layer depends on the one below it; the word processor depends on DOS, which in turn rests on the hardwired BIOS. Ultimately "[a]ll code operations, despite their metaphoric faculties such as "call" or "return", come down to absolutely local string manipulations and that is, I am afraid, to signifiers of voltage differences." In other words, although they resemble "ordinary" language, programming languages return us to the imperceptible, inaccessable, too-fast and too-small world of the microprocessor. So, "there is no software at all," except as defined by the "environment of everyday language" that surrounds computation.

In a paranoid turn Kittler analyses the tendency of computer culture to "systematically obscure hardware by software, electronic signifiers by interfaces between formal and everyday languages." In the GUI, but also in high level languages such as C (let alone Java), the physical machine is increasingly concealed from its users, and its programmers, in the name of functionality and "friendliness."


Finally Kittler considers the limits and thresholds of "programmable matter"; he points out that current computing hardware relies on the isolation of discrete elements from each other and thus a limit to connectivity. This contrasts with the "maximal connectivity" of the physical systems - "waves, weather and wars" outside the computer. The current approach to computing hardware is essentially more of the same: more transistors, more elements, smaller circuits with better isolation. Kittler instead suggests that the only way to "keep up" with the physical complexity of the world is to match it with "nonprogrammable systems" made of "sheer hardware": "a physical device working amidst physical devices and subjected to the same bounded resources." In such devices once again "software as an ever-feasible abstraction would not exist any more."

Interestingly Kittler ends up close to where my earlier work on art and artificial life (published as Metacreation) came to rest. In considering the desire for emergence in a-life art, I wondered about the constraints imposed by the physical substrate - the "coarse, rigid grammar" of digital electronics. My favourite demonstration of what lies beyond this grammar is the evolvable hardware work of Adrian Thompson, in which circuit designs for programmable chips (field gate programmable arrays - as in the image above) are evolved using a genetic algorithm and tested in hardware for their performance in a particular task. It's perhaps not surprising that successful circuits were evolved over many thousands of generations; but the fun part is that when analysed, these circuits were completely unlike any human-designed computing machine. In Kittler's words they were "sheer hardware," treating the chip as a "maximally connective" physical substrate rather than an abstracted set of discrete elements. Some chips drew on external influences, such as electromagnetic radiation, to achieve their evolved ends; so the chip is not formally isolated (but to quote Kittler again) "a physical device working amidst physical devices." Not only that, they were often "tuned" to the physical specificities of a single chip, despite the FPGAs being notionally identical - the exact opposite to the hardware-indpendence of the Turing Machine.

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At the recent UTS symposium I gave a short presentation titled "After Inframedia: Presence and Transmateriality." The presence stuff I covered earlier, but the second idea - which I touched on very briefly in this 2003 paper - is much less developed. So here goes.

The relationship between matter and "information" or "the digital" has been a recurring theme in new media theory for more than a decade. We could sketch it very roughly as follows. In the early to mid 90s, as digital hype was gathering pace, artists and cultural theorists began to critique the apparent drive towards disembodiment in technoculture. Simon Penny's 1991 text "Virtual Reality as the end of the Enlightenment Project" is a good (and early) example, even if VR now looks a bit like a straw figure in these critiques. This critical project of grounding the digital in the material (and the body) has continued. In 2000 Felix Stalder wrote of the "ideology of immateriality" underpinning the so-called "new economy." Around the same time Katherine Hayles published a more complex investigation in How We Became Posthuman, asking "how information lost its body" but also considering the inevitably embodied effects of this supposedly immaterial stuff (this is well covered in her paper The Materiality of Informatics).

Hayles introduces a conceptual pair: inscription and incorporation. Inscription is "normalized and abstract ... a system of signs operating independently of any particular manifestation" [Posthuman 198]. Inscription refers to the properties of a text, for example, that can be transcribed without regard to its specific embodied manifestation - digital computation thus relies on inscription, in moving patterns of data through various substrates. Incorporation is its flip-side, referring to the inescapably embodied aspect of a sign. Both inscription and incorporation are verbs - practices or processes - rather than ontological states; and they oscillate, a bit like presence and meaning for Gumbrecht: "incorporating practices are in constant interplay with inscriptions that abstract the practices into signs" [199].


Today I came a cross a more recent paper by Matthew Kirschenbaum, who pursues this investigation into the materiality of the digital, and like Hayles is approaching it from the perspective of textuality. In “Every Contact Leaves a Trace” (pdf) Kirschenbaum critiques the neo-Romantic, screen-focused tendencies of digital textual theory that tend to emphasise ephemerality and instability. He uses digital forensics to moves us from the screen to the hard drive, showing exactly how data is embodied (as in this image: a magnetic force microscopy image of a hard drive surface, from Pacific Nanotechnology). In the process he introduces another pair of concepts: formal and forensic materiality. Formal materiality refers to machine-readable data that reveals material specificities - in Kirschenbaum's paper, the use of a hex reader to discover traces of not-quite overwritten game code on an old Apple II floppy disc.

Forensic materiality refers to the material residues or byproducts that mark out one digital instantiation as different to another; for example the physical instantiation of copies of a file on two different hard drives will be different due to the material specificities of the drives - as when a misaligned write head again leaves traces of overwritten data. Yet these files are, for the computers concerned, formally identical. As Kirschenbaum writes, this shows how

"computers ... are material machines dedicated to propagating a behavioral illusion, or call it a working model, of immateriality."

This really nails it for me. It's exactly the functionality of this immateriality that earlier critiques of the disembodied digital overlook. It is an illusion, but it's an illusion that (mostly) works, and so is easily maintained: this is a hard-working model.

I'm developing an idea of transmateriality (sorry about the coinage), that draws on Hayles and describes exactly the "conundrum" that Kirschenbaum poses here; but that also has, I think, some wider implications, specifically for the media arts. Briefly, it proposes that the digital is, of course, always and inevitably embodied; that concepts like "data" are functional abstractions for describing the propagation of material patterns through material substrates. But that at the same time these material patterns - and here I mean everything from optical pulses to hard disk substrates, luminous screens and speakers pushing air - these material patterns, and the sensations and aesthetics that result are profoundly shaped by data acting as if it were symbolic and immaterial. Transmateriality is an attempt to "ground" the digital without losing sight of its (let's say) generative capacities. It also seems to resonate with a lot of current work in the media arts - but more of that later.

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Jens Hauser, curator of the Still, Living show at BEAP, pointed me to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's formulation of "presence culture" vs "meaning culture." Hauser used those ideas in his framing of that exhibition, proposing an understanding of bio-art through an aesthetics of presence. This got my attention, to say the least, and seemed to connect with my own attempts to theorise audiovisual, generative and data practices. How does "presence culture" manifest in the new media arts? I've just now finished reading Gumbrecht's book, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. I certainly haven't digested it properly; these notes are part of that process, and I'll follow them up with some more detailed thoughts on presence culture and the media arts shortly.

Gumbrecht's project centres on the humanities as an academic discipline; a discipline he understands as dominated by a cluster of concepts grouped around "meaning culture":

“Metaphysics” refers to an attitude, both an everyday attitude and an academic perspective, that gives a higher value to the meaning of phenomena than to their material presence; the word thus points to a worldview that always wants to go “beyond” (or “below”) that which is “physical.” ... “Metaphysics” shares [the role of] scapegoat ... with other concepts and names, such as “hermeneutics,” “Cartesian worldview,” “subject/object paradigm” and, above all, “interpretation.” [xiv]

In this paradigm the exclusive role of the humanities is to interpret the meaning (associated with essence, truth, mind, spirit and the immaterial) of a world which the human cogito is in, but not of. Gumbrecht argues that this is a relatively modern state. In presence cultures, by comparison, humans understand themselves as bodies within a material cosmology - Gumbrecht uses Medieval culture as an example. Rather than being produced - through interpretation - beyond or below material things, knowledge in a presence culture is revealed; it occurs in "events of self-unconcealment of the world" or moments of revelation that "just happen" [81]. Through Heidegger's notion of Being, Gumbrecht asks us to imagine a form of knowledge that is "not exclusively conceptual", prior to, or not dependent on, interpretation.

For Gumbrecht the meaning/presence binary is not a simple opposition, and his argument is not conventionally "critical" in that he wants to replace one with the other. Instead the relationship between the two is exclusive but dynamic: "What this book ultimately argues for is a relation to the things of the world that could oscillate between presence effects and meaning effects." [xv] "Presence and meaning always appear together ... and are always in tension. There is no way of making them compatible or of bringing them together in one "well-balanced" phenomenal structure." [105] "Presence phenomena" become "effects of" presence, "because we can only encounter them within a culture that is predominantly a meaning culture. ... [T]hey are necessarily surrounded by, wrapped into, and perhaps even mediated by clouds and cushions of meaning." [106]

Aesthetic experience plays a significant role here, as a source for exemplary instances of presence. For Gumbrecht aesthetic experience is about "epiphanies" or moments of intensity; fleeting, visceral instants of being that might be triggered by good food as much as great art - even (for Gumbrecht) the kinetic beauty of a touchdown pass in a gridiron game. Interestingly he writes, "there is nothing edifying in such moments, no message, nothing that we could really learn from them ... what we feel is probably not more than a specifically high level in the functioning of some of our general cognitive, emotional and perhaps even physical faculties." [98] What we desire here is is "the state of being lost in focused intensity" [104] - an intensity that might be accessed through other means than art - for example, extreme physical states. We desire it, Gumbrecht suggests, because we're overfed with meaning culture - quoting Jean-Luc Nancy Gumbrecht writes: "there is nothing we find more tiresome today than the production of yet another nuance of meaning, of 'just a little more sense.'" [105] The effect of getting lost in this state of intensity, is to "prevent us from completely losing a feeling or a remembrance of the physical dimension in our lives" - to remind us of our being "part of the world of things." Gumbrecht links this to a state of extreme serenity or composure, of "being in sync with the world", which is not to say in harmony or accord, more an embodied feeling of being in, with, and of, the world.

More on Gumbrecht soon - meantime I'd welcome your thoughts and links on these ideas in relation to contemporary art, and especially media art.

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Lisa Jevbratt has been doing data art for some time now. Her 1:1 (1999) was one of the first data-vis works to gain critical attention in new media art circles. I re-read some of Jevbratt's writing recently, and the artist pointed me to this 2005 paper, which in part sets out the concept of the Infome. Jevbratt seems to be changing direction - towards bio/eco practices - but her work remains significant, especially while data is the new code/black/whatever, for the Processing generation. The Infome idea is particularly interesting, because it creates a distinctive sense of just what data is.

Jevbratt's Infome is a kind of data cosmology - the Infome is an "all-encompassing network environment/organism that consists of all computers and code." Once you get past the biological analogy, the Infome offers a way to treat data as a kind of material that is concrete and self-sufficient, but also shaped by the (social, political, technological) forces outside it. Data is indexical, but not in the empirical sense of measurement or simple correspondence. Instead Jevbratt uses another material (geological) analogy; the Infome is a kind of landscape in which external forces and structures are overlayed and condensed. Another nice twist is that visualisation becomes recursive: "Images can now simultaneously be reality, since they are part of the Infome, and an imprint of that reality, as if the image produced by a potato stamp were also a potato."

Jevbratt's images of the Infome in 1:1 and Infome Imager Lite aspire to this kind of material directness, making a "slice" or "imprint" of the data. She describes the images as "real, objects for interpretation, not interpretations." This desire to present the data "in itself" closely resembles the "pure data" aesthetics of the audiovisual databenders I mentioned in "Hearing Pure Data" (2004). We can make the same critiques of Jevbratt's work - that we can't see the data in itself, only its specific mapping. Jevbratt does take great care to explain the mappings used, and best of all in IIL she encourages the user to experiment with changing mappings and datasets - an artistic precursor of the public data literacy now mentioned in relation to social data-vis services Swivel and ManyEyes. The critique still stands though; it's clearest in the way Jevbratt wraps all these visualisations around the rectangular picture plane - a structure that has no inherent relation to the data, but a significant relation to the art-world context that these works function in.

For Jevbratt these data-impressions allow us to "use our vision to think" - information and pattern arise from a perceptual process, rather than a computational analysis. Like much other data art, Jevbratt resists providing information, in the sense of meaning or message; instead she offers a substrate for information, a field of potential meaning. She writes of seeking "something unexpected," "hints, suggestions, and openings" that lead us into the Infome itself, its immanent, collective dynamics, even its emergent, distributed agency. It's a kind of data mysticism, but also an attempt to sense the real but otherwise imperceptable shapes of digital culture.

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Recently read this paper, by writer and online cult studs pioneer Alan Liu, which raises lots of ideas and yet more questions around data aesthetics and practices. It's a few years old, but with a few exceptions remains quite relevant. What's more it's a great read, one of the wittiest and most enjoyable things I've seen in a long while.

Approaching from writing and textuality, Liu tackles the XMLification of everything, the Taylorist dogma of the separation of content from presentation (hello, Blogger) and the subsequent waning of "cool" web design: "non-standard, proprietary, hand-coded, and other clearly infidel (or ... artisanal) practices of embodying content inextricably in presentation." Instead, Liu sees the web becoming a modular, minimalist set of containers for what he calls "data pours" that "throw transcendental information onto the page from database or XML sources reposed far in the background." Literature-wise, Liu regards these data-driven incursions as "blind spots" for both readers and writers, where authorship surrenders to parameterisation or a database query.

Liu gathers a set of artworks around the concept of the data sublime (later tackled by Manovich and Warren Sack, among others) and the question of "what can still be cool" in the post-industrial, database age. Through Kittler, he recalls the Modernist literary interest in the noise in the channel - "like tuning your radio to a Pynchonesque channel of revelation indistinguishable from utter static" -and points out that contemporary data aesthetics seem interested in the same immanent revelation, but here the sources of that data-plenitude are highly rational and structured. Data practices s/mash them up, as if in attempt to feel their inner consistency; Liu identifies this drive with the "ethos of the unknown" - a search for "an experience of the structurally unknowable."

Liu's ideas map onto current data art well enough, though rather than data pours threatening authorship, a new group of authors deploys parameterisation, mapping, munging and filtering as its main techniques. The "mother tongue" now, the source of plenitude, seems also to be increasingly social, rather than natural or linguistic (eg Linkology, The Dumpster, Listening Post). And pulling against the sublime and the ethos of the unknown is its empirical opposite, the seeking of pattern and information. The surface between these seems to be the place to be; as in the beautiful Neuromancer quote in Liu's paper, it's a liminal state where forms emerge and disintegrate. Familiar territory for the arts, as Liu points out.

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