Post-digital

Florian Cramer

Typewriters are not the only media which have recently been resurrected as literally post-digital devices: other examples include vinyl records, and more recently also audio cassettes, as well as analog photography and artists’ printmaking. And if one examines the work of contemporary young artists and designers, including art school students, it is obvious that these ‘old’ media are vastly more popular than, say, making imageboard memes.

Source: Florian Cramer's What is Post-digital article (2014, APRJA)

Cramer frames the discussion noting "Post-digital: a term that sucks but is useful."

• Disenchantment with the 'digital'
• Revivial of 'old' media
• Comparison with Postcolonial, Contrast with Post-history
• Digital = Sterile High Tech
• DIGITAL = LOW-QUALITY TRASH?
• DIGITAL ≠ BINARY; DIGITAL ≠ ELECTRONIC
• Analog = undivided; analog ≠ non-computational
• Post-digital = against the Universal Machine
• Post-digital = Post-digitisation
• Post-digital = Anti-'New-Media'
• Post-digital = Hybrids of 'old' and 'new' media
• DIY vs. Corporate

The fingerboard of a violin is analog: it is fretless, and thus undivided and con- tinuous. The fingerboard of a guitar, on the other hand, is digital: it is divided by frets into discrete notes.

Proponents of ‘post-digital’ attitudes may reject digital technology as either sterile high tech or low-fidelity trash. In both cases, they dismiss the idea of digital processing as the sole universal all-purpose form of information processing. Consequently, they also dismiss the notion of the computer as the universal machine, and the notion of digital computa- tional devices as all-purpose media. Prior to its broad application in audio- visual signal processing and as the core engine of mass-media consumer technology, computation had been used primarily as a means of audio-visual composition.

Aymeric Mansoux

In discussion on what is publishing, and the origins of XPUB, Aymeric Mansoux in Spring 2023 described a work-in-progress formulation of the post-digital that involved:

• Entanglement / Karen Barad
• Situatedness / Donna Haraway
• Bootstrapping / Douglas Englebart