By now we have (in the previous articles in this series) seen that digital data is neither immaterial nor identically reproducible. Every instance of every bit of digital data is materially unique in time and space. However despite the fact that all digital data is in principle “knowable”, since it is produced by human activities, […]
History has not always been chronological, but history has always been stories, moral parables which reinforce or justify institutions or behaviours. Oral history conveyed the authority of the “histor” or “wise one”, lessons of experience and privilege of lineage and traditional tribal role. Only with written history we have the chance to compare conflicting accounts. […]
“I’ve never seen such excitement about double entry bookkeeping!”-Dmytri Kleiner Blockchain technology has given us is the ability to exchange money tokens directly without an intermediary. In a future stateless communist society we will certainly need such technologies, if indeed we still need quantified exchange. In the meantime, lets be honest, these technologies are about […]
(This will be the first of two instalments on standardization. Here I will elaborate the analogy between the rigour demanded of the materials in advanced electronics and that demanded by the people whole labour to produce them. The second part will be the shared history of standards institutions, global industry and science) Our current age […]
ATMs (Automated Teller Machines) are convenient not only because they do not sleep or notice what you look like, but also because we restrain our imagination of what we can expect them to do. We don’t expect we could make small talk with the machine while making our transaction, we never think we could ask […]
“by the middle of the fourth century the silent revolution had been accomplished, and that the cultivated Greek public had become a community of readers.” [1] Here is a civilisation on the cusp of literacy with all the realizations that this affords. Literacy for the first time strips human being of its origins, so that […]
“ I differ toto caelo from those philosophers who pluck out their eyes that they may see better; for my thought I require the senses, especially sight; I found my ideas on materials which can be appropriated only through the activity of the senses. I do not generate the object from the thought, but the thought from […]
Material, substance may be infinite, or unimaginably, inarticulably extensive, but materiality, that which crosses into the domain of human affairs is certainly much less extensive. Predicating Spinoza’s “substance” and Feuerbach’s materializing “love”, is a crisis from which the western world is still recovering today: a technological revolution brought on by a technical development, a technology […]
[WiP this is #1 in a series of 12 weekly essays unpacking the concept “Digital Materiality”. They are prepared in the context of the seminar of the same name held every Thursday at 2pm at the UdK Hardenbergstr. ] “We are living in a material world and I am a material girl!”- PETER BROWN, ROBERT […]
The bold demands on the cover of Inventing the Future by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams generated much popular discussion on the Left. Sadly, none of these demands will serve to provide better auspices for the great majority of humanity. These demands are worthy of attention because of the apparent sincerity with which they are declared, not […]
