Digital Materialities (original) (raw)
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Pragmatism Today, 2018
Regarding current trends in the philosophy of technology, and particularly in the philosophy of media, one can pursue their research in two major directions. It comes down to either focusing on the media-inherent processes of the hardware (e.g., their idiosyncratic temporalities, the relations between digital states and analog continua, etc.), 1 or appropriating technology purely as its effect on society (i.e., as a reception of a new medium at its advent and later on, when it becomes commercial success). 2 The study of cultural techniques, however, for better or for worse conquers the middleground between these two approaches. While it tends to retrace popular media ("popular" in this case refers to the most eminent objects we use daily, such as doors, notebooks, lamps, ladders, etc.) from its everyday users to their various rudimental utilizations, it also refutes its hardware-obsessed counterpart with conceptualizing media not in itself, but as an assemblage that is made up from technological devices on the one hand, and those processes, attitudes and practices that are adopted for engaging with them on the other. 3 10 See for instance Bernhard Siegert, "(Not) in Place: The Grid, or, Cultural Techniques of Ruling Spaces," in Id., Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real (New York: Fordham UP, 2015), 97-120, which drafts the genealogy of technologies of the grid from parcels to cells, from Roman times through America's Critical Period to the Bauhaus era in Germany.
Immateriality of the work vs. materiality of the body? Digital literature
2016
This article shows how digital literature thinks about and works with the body of the reader in a time when the dominating role of the immaterial is more and more questioned. Digital texts play with their immateriality and their seemingly purely intellectual perception by making it their subject and pointing to their material environment, including the reader’s body. Works by Serge Bouchardon, Shelley Jackson, Annie Abrahams and others show that it has become impossible to separate between the ‘traditional’ and the ‘technological’ reading experience insofar as through them, we experience not only the machine and / or our body, but both—while they are inseparably joined in a network or device out of which new possibilities of use and experience arise.
Diseña, 2019
En este artículo abordaré la interfaz gráfica como un arreglo de objetos digitales que se encuentran estructurados en una matriz. Esta matriz se caracteriza por una materialidad que no es, necesariamente, técnica o simbólica, sino que tensiona la condición de ambos tipos de objetos, generando objetos digitales, mismos que han sido largamente problematizados en la literatura sobre ontología digital. La progresión de mis argumentos, apoyada en literatura sobre materialidad digital, partirá de esta problematización para ubicar los modos en que esta matriz habilita a estos objetos en un proceso de flujo y transformación. Así, busco refutar la idea de que la interfaz es una superficie de mediación virtual. Ello, comentando dos presupuestos que asumo como trampas: la metafórica, la idea de que diseñar interfaces implica configurar metáforas; y la conductual, esto es, la idea de que es suficiente conocer el comportamiento del usuario.
Metaphilosophy Vol. 43, No. 4, 2012
We find ourselves in a media-intensive milieu comprising networks, images, sounds, and text, which we generalize as data and metadata. How can we understand this digital milieu and make sense of these data, not only focusing on their functionalities but also reflecting on our everyday life and existence? How do these material constructions demand a new philosophical understand- ing? Instead of following the reductionist approaches, which understand the digital milieu as abstract entities such as information and data, this article pro- poses to approach it from an embodied perspective: objects. The article contrasts digital objects with natural objects (e.g., apples on the table) and technical objects (e.g., hammers) in phenomenological investigations, and proposes to approach digital objects from the concept of “relations,” on the one hand the material relations that are concretized in the development of mark-up languages, such as SGML, HTML, and XML, and on the other hand, Web ontologies, the temporal relations that are produced and conditioned by the artificial memories of data.
Preface to Physicality, 2006
Physicality from the sidelines: potential hurdles and solutions in the development of novel interaction styles Original Citation Bonner, John V.H. (2006) Physicality from the sidelines: potential hurdles and solutions in the development of novel interaction styles.
Materialist Perspectives on Digital Technologies
Nordicom Review, 2016
The present article brings critical media research and science and technology studies (STS) into dialogue with approaches to digital literacy and digital competencies in educational contexts. In particular, it focuses on material aspects of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as technical infrastructure, economic conditions, ecological consequences, and code-based as well as embodied forms of impact, and argues that digital applications and devices have ambiguous and often contradictory affordances and effects that need to be addressed in academic literature and pedagogical practice. The main objective is to inform on-going debates on the nature and content of digital literacy and digital competence from a critical materialist vantage point, and to facilitate learning and teaching about, rather than with, digital technologies by highlighting salient issue areas in need of continued critical attention.
Technoetic Arts: a Journal of Speculative Research , 2012
This article will contribute to a synthetic understanding of the factors that influence the subject's experience with digital data, in the presence of a new kind of 'materiality' that is formed in the confluence of physical matter and Information and Communication Technologies that I call Material-ict. The aim is to offer society a critical and creative way to deal with the process in which the electronic and physical dimensions of reality merge and enhance the awareness of the paradigm change that the Internet of Things is bringing to our experience. The article can contribute to the development of a new cognitive paradigm to challenge the current view that objects and environments are inanimate, and the shaping of a framework from which to reconsider interactions between people, social processes, things and environments in the society of knowledge. This framework offers insights into educative, technological developments and cultural programmes to integrate actants (actor-network theory) and citizens in the hybrid experience in which Internet, social processes and matter merge. The objective is to construct the first steps of an analysis framework to understand a few of the most important features that support the emergent model of representation that is impacting the subject's experience with digital data. In order to construct this framework, this research is grounded in the intersection of art, media and experience. The main dimensions analysed in the article are (1) the merging of digital and analogue forms of experience; (2) new actors and forms of interaction; (3) forms of heterogeneous knowledge construction; (4) lively interfaces and animated environments; and (5) biotechnological convergence. The article will show how the
Structures, forms, and stuff: the materiality and medium of interaction
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 2013
Though information is popularly, and often academically, understood to be immaterial, nonetheless, we only encounter it in material forms, in books, on laptops, in our brains, in spoken language, and so forth. In the past decade, HCI has increasingly focused on the material dimensions of interacting with computational devices and information. This paper explores three major strands of this research-tangible user interfaces, theories of computational materiality, and craft-oriented approaches to HCI. We argue that each of these offers a formulation of the materiality of interaction: as physical, as metaphysical, or as tradition communicating. We situate these three formulations in relation to debates on the nature of media, from philosophical aesthetics (the ontology of art, in particular), media studies, and visual cultural studies. We argue that the formulations of materiality, information, and meaning from HCI and those from the humanities have deeper underlying similarities than may be expected and that exploring these similarities have two significant benefits. Such an analysis can benefit these differing threads in different ways, taking their current theories and adding to them. It also serves as a basis to import philosophical art concepts in a robust way into HCI, that is, not simply as prepackaged ideas to be applied to HCI, but rather as ideas always already enmeshed in productive and living debates that HCI is now poised to enter-to the benefit of both HCI and the humanities.