Kathi Berens's List: elit musings

• We become trained by the photographic image to imagine the real on its terms, a media archaeologist would insist, rather than “recognizing” the quality of the image in any direct, untutored way.
• Media archaeology therefore has the advantage of both a legacy of literary and cultural theory as well as the perspective of science and technology, and therefore materiality not only matters in media archaeology, it is the very subject of study.
• Issues of scale have been part of digital humanities for a long time, but along the way digital humanists became interested in critical editing, repository building, and the development of tools for annotation, visualization, mapping, and other activities
• popular theories of the era wished away the physicality of the material substrate in which electric charges were stored.
• Whereas commodity fetishism conceals the social character of traditional production, treating digital media as immaterial whisks from view important questions of investment, ecological impact, social costs, control, and access.
• The work of bibliographers and critical editors may have led some, materialist literary scholars to attend to the forensic details of print production, but media studies has for the most part paid little attention to close reading of material texts or their means of production. However, media studies is increasingly informed, wittingly or not, by theories of poiesis, of making, a term that recognizes no conflict between analyzing formal qualities and active performances.

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• A big problem is that in order to be able to examine the code one has two options: producing an extremely lengthy textual output of it in Lingo, or get an old version of Director (before version 11) to open the source files and examine them in the interface they were developed in.
• I would like for them to either release the old versions of the software to the public, or provide some kind of a “reader” version of Adobe Director 10.5, which would allow readers to at least view the source code through its interfaces (see image below).
• est problem is that, despite a recent update to a version 12, Director seems to be a mostly abandoned project by Adobe. How much longer will Director files and the Shockwave format be supported?

•  

  The bigg
• Ricky: In the same paper you explain how Andrews leaves messages in the code of his digital works.
• Some of the objects are unused in version 2.0 yet remain within the source file as vestiges of a previous conceptualization of the work.
• nceptualized the work from an animated floating head chasing a ship to a game about language moving on screen. The code for t
• he floating head remains inside of future versions of the game, but their behavior lives on in the code that regulates the blue texts and allow us to interpret the texts in that light.

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• technical beings and living beings are involved in continuous reciprocal causation in which both groups change together in related and indeed synergistic ways.
• This dynamic has implications for the “folding of time,” a phenomenon Bruno Latour (1994) identifies as crucial to understanding technological change.
• The “stitching” (actually an impressed pattern) on my Honda Accord vinyl dashboard covering, for example, recalls the older leather coverings that were indeed stitched. So pervasive are skeuomorphs that once one starts looking from them, they appear to be everywhere
• all technics imply, instantiate, and evolve through complex temporalities.
• the process of writing-down was an integral part of his thinking, and the paper and pencil were as much a part of his cognitive system as the neurons firing in his brain.
• The “new unconscious”, also called the “adaptive unconscious” by Timothy Wilson (2002), a phrase that seems to me more appropriate, creates the background that participates in guiding and directing selective attention
• Consequently, mobility and universally coordinated time subtly shift what is seen as human. “The new phenomenality is beginning to structure what is human,” Thrift writes, “by disclosing ‘embodied’ capacities of communication, memory, and collaborative reach in particular ways that privilege a roving engaged interaction as typical of ‘human’ cognition and feed that conception back into the informational devices and environments that increasingly surround us” (p. 186).
• passengers encountered landscapes moving faster than they have ever appeared to move before.

  • See also Bogost in How To Do Things With Videogames -- chapter on ?? empathy?
• an indication that the mechanisms of attention had become habituated to faster moving stimuli.
• My colleague Rita Raley tells of showing the film Parallax View and having her students find it unintentionally funny, because the supposedly subliminal images that the film flashes occur so slowly (to them) that it seems incredible anyone could ever have considered them as occurring at the threshold of consciousness. Steven Johnson (2006), in Everything Bad is Good for You, notes a phenomenon similar to faster image processing when he analyzes the intertwining plot lines of popular films and television shows to demonstrate that narrative development in these popular genres has become much more complicated in the last four decades, with shorter sequences and many more plot lines.
• These developments hint at a dynamic interplay between the kinds of environmental stimuli created in information-intensive environments and the adaptive potential of cognitive faculties in concert with them. Moreover, the changes in the environment and cognition follow similar trajectories, toward faster paces, increased complications, and accelerating interplays between selective attention, the unconscious, and the technological infrastructure.   

  • crucial.  Cite this.
• there is a mediated relationship between attention and the environment much broader and more inclusive than focused attention itself allows.
• Whenever dramatic and deep changes occur in the environment, attention begins to operate in new ways. 
• epistemic actions
• modify both the environment and cognitive-embodied processes that adapt to make use of those changes.
• Although deep attention seems at first glance preferable to hyper attention (especially to academics), in some situations hyper attention is more adaptive, for example in the case of an air traffic controller
• As I have argued elsewhere (Hayles, 2007), these environment changes have catalyzed changes in the mechanisms of selective attention.
• Hyper attention is characterized by preference for multiple information streams, flexibility in rapidly switching between information streams, sensitivity to environmental stimuli, and a low threshold for boredom, typified, for example, by a video game player

  • This is fundamentally relevant to TOC on iOS.
• That being said, I think that deep attention is a precious social achievement that took centuries, even millennia, to cultivate, facilitated by the spread of libraries, better K-12 schools, more access to college and universities, and so forth. Indeed, certain complex tasks can be accomplished only with deep attention:  working through a mathematical theorem, grasping the movement of a Bach quartet, understanding a difficult poem. It is a heritage we cannot afford to lose.
• Baldwin suggested that a feedback loop operates between genetic and epigenetic change, when populations of individuals that have undergone genetic mutation modify their environment so as to favor that adaptation.
• does not run between genetic mutation and environmental modification
• the feedback loop here
• but rather between epigenetic changes and further modification of the environment to favor the spread of these changes
• making the subliminal threshold a moving target
• Now let us suppose that the complex temporalities inherent in human cognitive processing are put into continuous reciprocal causation with machines that also embody complex temporalities. What is the result? Just as some neural processes happen much faster than perception and much, much faster than conscious experience, so processes within the machine happen on time scales much faster even than neural processes and way beyond the threshold of human perception. Other processes built on top of these, however, may not be so fast, just as processes that build on the firing of neural synapses within the human body may be much slower than the firings themselves. The point at which computer processes become perceptible is certainly not a single value; subliminal perception and adaptive unconsciousness play roles in our interactions with the computer, along with conscious experience. What we know is that our experiences with the diverse temporalities of the computer are pushing us toward faster response times and, as a side effect, increased impatience with longer wait times, during which we are increasingly likely to switch to other computer processes such as surfing, checking email, playing a game, etc. To a greater or lesser extent, we are all moving toward the hyper attention end of the spectrum, some faster than others. Nicholas Carr (2010) in The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains documents many empirical studies demonstrating the cognitive effects of these changes, leading him to argue that we must take positive steps to preserve the cultural heritage of (what I have called) deep attention. 
• Weaving together the strands of the argument so far, I propose that attention is an essential component of technical change (although under-theorized in Simondon’s account), for it creates from a background of technical ensembles some aspect of their physical characteristics upon which to focus, thus bringing into existence a new materiality that then becomes the context for technological innovation. Attention is not, however, removed or apart from the technological changes it brings about. Rather, it is engaged in a feedback loop with the technological environment within which it operates through unconscious and nonconscious processes that affect not only the background from which attention selects but also the mechanisms of selection themselves. Thus technical beings and living beings are involved in continuous reciprocal causation  in which both groups change together in related and indeed synergistic ways. 
• I propose that attention is an essential component of technical change (although under-theorized in Simondon’s account), for it creates from a background of technical ensembles some aspect of their physical characteristics
• Attention is not, however, removed or apart from the technological changes it brings about. Rather, it is engaged in a feedback loop with the technological environment within which it operates through unconscious and nonconscious processes that affect not only the background from which attention selects but also the mechanisms of selection themselves.
• This, then, is the context within which Steve Tomasula’s electronic multimodal novel TOC was created. TOC is, in a term I have used elsewhere, a technotext (Hayles, 2002): it embodies in its material instaniation the complex temporalities that also constitute the major themes of its narrations.
• Heterogeneous in form, bearing the marks of ruptures created when some collaborators left the scene and others arrived, TOC explores the relation between the creation and development of networked and programmable machines and human bodies, with both living and technical beings instantiating and embodying complex temporalities that refuse to be smoothly integrated into a rational and unitary scheme of a clock tic-tocing. 
• Through its interfaces, TOC offers a variety of temporal regimes, a spectrum of possibilities enacted in different ways in its content.
• spatialization of temporality
• Unlike a single moment, narrative (especially in her case) will be defined by the ending
• In response, she thinks “that makes it possible for a sister to have intercourse with her brother,” a non-sequitur that subjects the logic of the tautology to an unpredictable and illogical swerve. 
• With the ending, she thinks, the story’s significance will become clear, although she recognizes that this hope involves “a sticky trick that depended on a shift of a tense,” that is, from present, when everything is murky, to past, when the story ends and its shape is fully apparent
• She seems to realize that she may never achieve “a sense of the whole that was much easier to fake in art than in life.” 
• The juxtaposition of time and distance (“upon a time, a distance”) recalls the spatialization of time that the model understood as the necessary prerequisite to the ordering of time as a predictable sequence
• the epistemic breaks that fracture societies when they are ripped from one temporal regime and plunged into another.  
• exterior spatialization and interior experience: hands move on a clock, but (as Bergson noted) heartbeat, respiration, and digestion are subjective experiences that render time as Duration and, through cognitive processes, as memory.

  • Menstruation
• time as a process is more protean, associated with Bergson’s Duration rather than time in its spatialized aspects.
• The difference engine, that is, is a “gadget” that can operate like the Freudian unconscious, combining disparate ideas through puns and metonymic juxtapositions to create the illusion of a consistent, unitary reality.
• humans construct time through measuring devices, but these measuring devices also construct humans through their regulation of temporal processes.

  • This is the section of the essay that might augment my discussion of the tablet/human interaction.
• The resulting human-technical hybridization in effect conflates spatialized time with temporal duration.
• the transformation from time measured to processual time has catastrophic effects.
• “Archeologists later estimated that entire villages were swept away, because they had been established at the base of dikes whose builders had never once considered that time could break.”  

  • Lovely.
• This conflation of time as experience and time as measured,
• Hyper attention is characterized by preference for multiple information streams, flexibility in rapidly switching between information streams, sensitivity to environmental stimuli, and a low threshold for boredom, typified, for example, by a video game player
• participates in guiding and directing selective attention
• Attention is not, however, removed or apart from the technological changes it brings about. Rather, it is engaged in a feedback loop with the technological environment within which it operates through unconscious and nonconscious processes that affect not only the background from which attention selects but also the mechanisms of selection themselves.

  Cop
• humans construct time through measuring devices, but these measuring devices also construct humans through their regulation of temporal processes.
• Whenever dramatic and deep changes occur in the environment, attention begins to operate in new ways.
• Attention is not, however, removed or apart from the technological changes it brings about. Rather, it is engaged in a feedback loop with the technological environment within which it operates through unconscious and nonconscious processes that affect not only the background from which attention selects but also the mechanisms of selection themselves. Thus technical beings and living beings are involved in continuous reciprocal causation in which both groups change together in related and indeed synergistic ways.
• Temporal complexity works in TOC like a Moebius strip, with one temporal regime transforming into another just as the outer limit of the boundary being traced seems to reach its apotheosis.

  • Compare to the original installation of TOC: text/img hung from ceiling in shape of a moebius loop.
• TOC has more to reveal about human desire, metaphors, and socius than it does about technical objects. Often treating technical objects as metaphors, TOC needs a theory of technics as a necessary supplement, even as it also instantiates insights that contribute to our understanding of the co-constitution of living and technical beings.   
• TOC is something of a patchwork
• TOC gestures toward a new regime, then, in which artistic creation is happening under very different conditions than for print literature.

  • Compare to app development.
• The accelerating pace of technological change may indicate that traditional criteria of literary excellence are very much tied to the print medium as a mature technology that produces objects with a large degree of concretization. In newer technical milieu, changing so fast that a generation may consist of only two or three years, the provisional meta-stability of technical individuals may become even less stable, so that it is more accurate to speak of continuous transformation than meta-stability at all
• TOC anticipates this by revealing the inherent instability of temporal regimes, the cataclysmic breaks that occur when societies are wrenched from one regime and plunged into another,  and the inability of the narratives to create any temporal regime that will be both durable and all-encompassing. In this, it may be viewed as commenting on its own conditions of possibility.
• TOC is inhabited by complex temporalities that refuse to resolve into clear-cut sequences or provide definitive boundaries between living and technical beings.

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• 'disruptive,' though for me that term is now unfortunately relegated to the cringe-worthy basket since its adoption by the startup community
• Strangely enough, I see less nonsense and much more sense in all of my creative practice -- and construct each piece with sense in mind, rather than randomized nonsense.
• Each piece is created through a finely-honed framework that is orchestrated from the very beginning: this 'conceptual housing' acts to dictate both the form and content of a piece, down to the last incremental detail. I also empathize with a certain section of a general readership base that could find my works difficult. Extracting meaning from layered work takes time, concentration, an appreciation of whimsy and lateral interpretation skills.
• I think of all my work as having a literary quality
• When the reader/player decides to move on, or finds the way out of that 'scene', I sometimes use video sequences to give a sense of shifting from one frozen time-capsule to another. Like a vehicle.
• Gaming and code are traditionally male-centric domains. I asked Mez if she thought of her work as subversive not only on the level of altering the expected norms of language, but also as a woman working with code.
• I do so love to recreate/manipulate standardized protocols and conventions, and all my works have [at their core] a definitive social commentary function.
• curiosity, play and repeated questioning/collapsing of institutionalized concepts including the very fabric of established male-centric discourse.
• "-ist"

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