Over the next month I will be posting a few notes each week with responses to questions of digital culture. The questions and answers are drawn from the current semester’s digital culture 0101 class taught by Richard Rinehart at the BAM/PFA. As a teaching assistant for this class I am privileged to read responses from about 100 students and community members participating in the class.
The first week of the class we discussed the history of computing technologies and the inventors of the various computing and algorithmic technologies. Dan Garcia from Berkeley’s computer science department joined us for a guest lecture on the technical basis of current computer technology. HIs lecture also hinted at the future of technology and the increasing trend towards quantification and digitization. He hinted at a future complete with an even closer relationship between humans and computers through concepts such as ubiquitous computing and wet computing.
Following this lecture I asked participants to respond to the following question:
Today we learned about the efforts of many scientists, engineers,
mathematicians, and entrepreneurs throughout history to quantify and
technologize the world around us. Both Richard Rinehart and Dan Garcia left
us with the notion that it either is now, or ultimately will be, possible to
quantify/digitize anything imaginable. How do you respond to this prospect?
How do you think this may/may not apply to abstract notions such as love,
fortune, grace etc??
It’s not important what or what cannot be digitized, but rather what gives meaning. I’m thinking of 3 examples over time, historical to today.
First historical, Pontillism is a style of impressionist painting from the late 19th century defined in Wekipedia as: A style of painting in which small distinct points of primary colors create the impression of a wide selection of secondary and intermediate colors.? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism)
In a sense this technique was a very early digitization technique which enabled the artists such as Seurat to create distinct images and moods by building up the painted image from a series of elements or ?points? roughly equivalent to what we would call pixels today. This style like most in art came and went. The digitization effect was interesting and controversial at the time but did not become a leading or lasting movement. So the technology did NOT lead the art, but enabled it. And the art moved off in other directions despite the availability of a new technique or technology.
More recently, say in the mid to late 60’s, with the explosion of digital integrated circuit technology, such devices as digital wrist watches became widely available. Originally what Dan Garcia would call the ?output? device, namely the display on your wrist showed the time in digital format. That was very cool and presumably very accurate, but interestingly enough was soon replaced by a return to analog display, viz.: the familiar hands on the watch. So again technology involving digitization was introduced, became briefly popular, and was displaced by something more meaningful to the user.
Today digital technologies pervade our lives. Applications such as medical imaging benefit us tremendously, and digital media/art/culture is at the forefront of artistic expression. We see this as a complete change in culture. But where will art go from here? What will or will not be digitized? Perhaps lessons from the past tell us that the technology will pull us and enable us, but in the end we will choose based on human values what directions to take. We will digitize what has value and meaning (and what can be quantified) and cast the rest aside.
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