How digital can you get?

1
How digital can you get?

• Rethinking the digital
• and the analog
• Marianne van den Boomen

2
Vannevar Bush (1945)As we may think

• A memex is a device in which an individual
  stores all his books, records, and
  communications, and which is mechanized so that
  it may be consulted with exceeding speed and
  flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate
  supplement to his memory.
• It consists of a desk, and while it can
  presumably be operated from a distance, it is
  primarily the piece of furniture at which he
  works. On the top are slanting translucent
  screens, on which material can be projected for
  convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets
  of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an
  ordinary desk.

3
Vannevar Bush (1945)As we may think

• Trails as links
• Created on the fly by user/reader, not
  preformatted
• Between complete documents or images

4
Vannevar Bush (1945)As we may think

• An analogue medium
• Photographed on microfilm
• Smallest entity image
• No further parsing
• No edit, select, cut, copy, paste

5
Vannevar Bush (1945)As we may think

• Contemporary new media themes
• Machines as an extension of body or mind
• Convergence of separate media into one device
• Dream of total transparancy and direct mind
  access

6
The digital and the analog

• Digital produced or represented by a computer
• Analog produced or represented by any other
  medium

7
The digital and the analog

• Digital translatable, transportable and
  transformable by virtue of numerical
  representation

Digit 1) number 2) finger
8
The digital and the analog

• Analog translatable, transportable and
  transformable by virtue of conceived proportial
  similarity

Not perceived ressemblance, but
conceived simularity (epistemological
labor)
9
Digital/analog dichotomy

• Analog tracable intrinsic relation between input
  and output
• Digital non-tracable extrinsic relation between
  input/output and assigned numbers

10
Digital/analog dichotomy

• Baudrillard (1983)
• The cool universe of digitality has absorbed
  the world of metaphor and metonymy

11
Digital/analog hybridity

• The noisy analogue universe of metaphor and
  metonymy has absorbed the world of cool
  digitality
• No direct access to digital objects
• Access always mediated by analogue translations,
  interfaces metaphors

12
Oreo analogue/digital sandwich

• No digital cream without the analogue cookies
• Spirits instead limitless possibilities,
  seamless communication, global brain
• Fooled by the infinity of numbers transferred to
  digitality

13
Digital and analogue hacking

• Digital numbers fingers, open to hands-on
  hacking
• Analog similarities analogies, open to
  epistemological hacking