User:Kim/reading/Johanna Drucker: Performative Materiality

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Johanna Drucker: Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approches to Interface published on digital humanities quaterly, 2013

from what it is to how it works

digital technology is still perceived and described as immaterial

synopsis

In "Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approches to Interface" Johanna Drucker articulates the need to challenge the common understanding of digital materiality as immaterial and move towards a performative model. This performative model arises from a conceptual shift from fixed entities to events, an understanding of of a thing not along what it is but what it does.
The text focusses on interfaces, which Drucker understands as a space that holds regulated potential and is structured for use.
Drucker examines different examples of interfaces on the basis of forensic features, distributed materiality, performative acts, enunciative dimensions and systemic ecologies. She ends the text with a pledge to interfaces that render visible and endorse acts of interpretation and that allow for uncertainty and inconsistency.
The text was published in Digital Humanities Quaterly an open-access, peer-reviewed, digital journal.

Johanna Drucker is a US American author, artist, theorist and critic. She currently holds a professorship at UCLA department of information studies. Druckers work evolves around graphic design, media history, history of vizualization and knowledge, fine art and digital humanities.

"Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approches to Interface" held a few revelaions in that it articulates ideas I had in mind, vaguely, instinctively. With countering ideas of immateriality Drucker and I have a common starting point. Like always, Drucker manages to address banal objects and challenge their implications for perception and use.

forensic and formal materiality

  • Matt Kirschenbaum, mid 1990s
  • forensic materiality refers to evidence
    • forensic elements in documents: ink, paper, stains, fingerprints
    • observation through empirical methods (inspection)
  • formal materiality refers to codes and structures of human expression
    • in print: organization of layout, literary composition
  • drucker criticizes: describing object/ subject with these methods is rooted in ontology rather than performance -- what they are rather than what they do

What something is has to be understood in the terms of what it does

from entities to events

  • reading is writing (is reading)

If every reading produces a text anew then the production of a text is the fundamental work of reading

  • Meaning is use (Wittgenstein), and use is always circumstantial and situational
  • shift from concept of things as fixed entities to them as events

approaching materiality

literal materiality

  • drucker distinguishes literal form forensic or formal approaches
    • literal materiality: modeled on mechanistic approach that understands objects as self-identical and observer independent
    • yes, materials have properties but their value/ relation/ meaning is not fixed but situational and lies in the interpreting subject
  • criticizing Media Specifity - can slip int literal approach
    • drucker claims that materials do not (only?) determine design or aesthetic developments

distributed materiality

  • understands and entity dependent on servers, networks, software, hosting environments...
    • like biological entitiy depends on environment and climatic conditions

distributedness disturbs assumptions of singularity or stability

performative materiality

  • production of work is an interpretive event
  • we dont absorb a work/ object in a mechanistic way - no text is transferred to the reader

In a performative approach the cognitive capacities of the reader make the work through an encounter

  • importance of social and historical situatedness, which performance of a work is always embedded in/ read through

systems ecology

  • new materialisms (thinking of Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti)
  • flux, change, fundamental instability in all material systems
  • here the aggregate is more than the sum of its parts – its the relations between them

non representational

  • artifacts as constitutive rather than representational
  • mapping, organization and layout create a world view and do not correspond to any order of things in the world

interfaces

The interface is not an object. Interface is a space of affordances and possibilities structured into organization for use. An interface is a set of conditions, structured relations, that allow certain behaviors, actions, readings, events to occur.

  • dominant paradigm in hci comes from engineering
    • grounded in user-as-consumer model (task driven, goal oriented)
    • vs humanities approach is based in flow experience, distraction, motivated by process...
  • this rootedness also dominates the vocabulary we use in interface design - and infiltrates engineering principles into wider field

Texts and speakers are situated within pragmatic circumstances of use, ritual, exchange, and communities of practice. They are affected by it, and so is what they “read” or “receive” through an interface.

  • Can an interface support acts of interpretation rather that simply returning selected results from a pre-existing data set? How can it be changed by acts of interpretation in turn?

Discussion of examples

  • Google search page
  • Encyclopedia of Chicago
  • Stanford Website

Drucker separates this analysis in 5 parts:

Forensic features

  • Code and Infrastructure: in digital environments, forensic qualities are not self evident, require deeper analysis of server, systems, codes in which sites are stored, accessed, displayed

Distributed materiality

  • relation
  • Drucker about the google interface: "the apparent simplicity of the display sits like a skin pulled over a mass of complexities"

How might responsiveness emerge from use?

Performative Acts

  • against eye-tracking to comprehend how we read, because the performance of a text is not mechanical but cognitive (individual and situated)

Enunciative Dimensions

  • Who speaks and to whom?

The “I” of Google who creates the “you” of the user of the search engine has already interpolated the subject into the structure of the page in such a way that certain desires and interests are subordinated, even stigmatized.

  • google presumes completeness and transparency: to give access to everything of the web
  • can we bring situated perspective, point of view into graphical user interfaces?

Systemic Ecologies

  • analysis of larger dimensions of organization: looks at flows of energy and capital and interconnections

implications for design

  • can we introduce conventions for showing uncertainty and ambiguity into digital models?
  • such that render the interpretive act itself more visible?
  • build information systems that can tolerate inconsistency among types of knowledge representation and organization of it
  • build network, interface that exposes, calls attention to its made-ness
  • ontologies are ideologies - naming, ordering etc are interpretive acts
    • these acts give form to a world view of knowledge, experience and reality

All acts of migration, from one medium to another, one state of instantiation to another, are mutations.

  • an interface that enacts, supports activity of interpretation
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