Abstract Photos

August 21, 2010 (07:38 PM EDT)

I posted a bunch of my abstract photos from 1989-1994 to flickr.

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July 19, 2010 (12:31 PM EDT)

The paradigm of digitality, is—especially at a technological level—a reification of the modernist grid. Fundamentally a process of segmentation of ordering, its contents are essentially identical, divorced from the physical variability inherent to other material constructs by the unrelenting oppositions of binary code (the aura of the digital). The meaning of these codes stand apart from the form of the work (the aura of information), once it has been rendered into an unstable, human-readable form. It is the transcendent part of the early abstraction that finds itself mirrored by the ways that the underlying physical encoding of reality in data samples, paradoxically both literal in its insistence on measurement of the discrete physical features of the world, and immaterial in how this meaning is held apart from the electro-magnetic switching of microtransistors within blocks of matter.

For silicon, the material of both quartz crystals and glass, to become digital is to literally become opaque, the process of sight no longer being a matter of seeing-through, but of seeing-within: insight, transcendent vision; this transition is the digital. The ideology it creates is one that takes Clark’s observation about advanced technology and magic and turns it from imaginary futures to the lived experience of the present, in the process filling the space of the digital with both imaginary, instrumental forms of “life,” (from computer viruses, to worms, spiders, bots and spyware), whose function is parasitic. At the same time, the lifeworld become machinic: “lifehacking,” and DNA as a variety of digital code, manipulated and modeled within the digital technology that enables its manipulation.

It is in this convergence of machinic, semiotic, and biologic that we find the paradigm of the digital intersecting with the political economy and the problema posed by the human agency in relation to the devices deployed and autonomous within this digital realm. The issue becomes not simply a matter of economic or class structure, but of machinic relations within realism of greater and lesser control produced, maintained and reified by how digital technology and the ideology of the digital reinforce each other.

Within this space the modernist grid lies as the enabling paradigm for structure and organization of elements that can and cannot be reconciled, controlled, valorized. It is in this breaking into samples that the potential for quantization and value extraction-exchange becomes possible. Those ways of being formerly not valorizable become the new domain of valorization: indexes of happiness, demographics tailored to unique individuals—the affective domains—whose action is to distract from the adjustment of life and lived to the demands of an ever more extensive, comprehensive grid of data whose goal is the complete accounting of the life world (the aspiration to the state of information).

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July 16, 2010 (12:05 PM EDT)

Consider three apparently identical images: (a) is an uncompressed raster file specifying each and every pixel displayed; (b) is a compressed version of the same raster data; (c) is a version of the same image, but produced and described using vector graphics. The apparent content of the image is irrelevant—it could be a photograph, typography, or simply a collection of linear elements—because any type of image can be stored in one these three ways.

The human-readable product of each of these three images are identical, so completely similar that there is no difference between the data on display in a human-readable form in any of these images; thus it is impossible for a human observer to distinguish between them based on their human-readable form.

However, inspite being apparently identical, each of these is an individual, separate, digital object. This remains the case with these images no matter how frequently they are rendered human-readable, copied or otherwise reproduced as digital files. The idea that they are actually the same is an illusion created by the aura of information. It is this aura—that all digital information remains constant equivalent, no matter what types of transformations are applied (in this case both compression and the distinctions between raster and vector storage of image data). Each digital file and the rendition of that code as a human readable object (the apparently identical images) comprise separate, individual instances whose human readable instantiation produces the illusion that they are the same. It is the belief in the equivalency between these distinct data files that contain distinct, and divergent code, that reflects the aura of information in action.

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June 15, 2010 (08:32 AM EDT)

CTheory Global Online Seminar on Critical Digital Studies
June 17, 1pm PDT (Pacific Daylight Time), 3pm EDT (Eastern Daylight Time)

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June 11, 2010 (12:01 PM EDT)

Immaterial Value and Scarcity in Digital Capitalism is now published on CTheory.

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May 13, 2010 (07:30 AM EDT)

Here is a short teaser sample from an article soon-to-be published on CTheory:

... designation is agnotologic capitalism: a capitalism systemically based on the production and maintenance of ignorance. [13] The accusations of fraud against banks such as Goldman Sachs for creating derivatives “designed to fail” and then claiming that these commodities are of the highest value—demonstrates this process of misinformation designed to obfuscate, confuse and confound functions to create ignorance. This situation is partly a function of ideological blindness, and partly a reflection of the all-too-human desire to believe in positive scenarios such as the well known, but hypothetical, “free lunch.” Coupled with an affective performance, the agnotological dimension can only produce a social dynamic of misinformation.

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March 18, 2010 (04:45 PM EDT)

Looking at the political and other divisions in the United States, more and more I am struck by a minor issue that came up while researching The State of Information: the idea of ambiguity. It didn’t seem like a particularly significant issue at the time, but more and more it’s becoming obvious that how someone responds to ambiguity determines much of their outlook on the world around them.

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March 18, 2010 (04:16 PM EDT)

Call for entries

Deadline for submissions: Friday, March 26, 2010

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November 30, 2009 (11:26 PM EST)

The accumulation and preservation of information has been a fundamental condition of human society throughout its entire history; to a lesser or greater extent, this history is coincident with the preservation, propagation and presentation of specific information sets and the paradigm-technologies they enable—“culture” and “society” being simultaneously the vehicles and contaners for these specific information sets, described by the horizons they produce. Information differentials scale between the microlevel of the individual within a society in competition with other members for status, wealth, authority to groups within societies, to different paradigms jostling for dominance. The aggregate actions of each level of this construct depend on the indivdiual choices and actions of specific members whose cumulative impacts emerge at with variable coherence at different levels of organization. Because success depends specifically on both access to relevant information, and the more specific ability to apply and employ it, the organization as a whole has an in-built bias towards the accumulation and concentration of information maximally: the baseline condition for success within such structures historically has been one determined by an information differential: those lying at the greater end of the gradient tend towards success and dominance, with those falling at the lesser end tend to fail, excluding such mediating factors as already established positions and authorities that tend to replicate themselves.

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November 14, 2009 (10:47 AM EST)

Lately it seems like we, collectively, are stuck in the past, the 1980s to be accurate. I don't know what happened to the present (nevermind about the future, that was always already an imaginary)? I increasingly get the feeling that we aren't going to be getting anything of or from the present for a while at least. Instead, we have this strange obsession with revisiting the past artifacts of our culture and redoing/remaking/recreating them at a higher resolution and with more detail, but without anything that we haven't already seen.

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