Digital Material

DIGITAL MATERIAL
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INTRODUCTION

Digital Material : Tracing new media in everyday life and technology

Intro- from the virtual to matters of fact and concern

At the beginning of the 21st century, computers are so widely distributed and used, yet we still call them ‘new media’ Some of the old spell still haunt the discourse about the so-called new media. Which new questions arise merge when new media are taken for granted, and which puzzles are still unsolved?
‘’’’’Is contemporary digital culture indeed all about ‘you?’ or do we still not phatom the digital machinery and how it constitutes as ‘you’?’’’’’

Popular discourse of the logo’s framed new media chiefly as possessing new and amazing qualities. Hypertext virtual reality and cyberspace were predominant buzz words. They announces a new frontier of civilization wether from an optimistic utopian perspective – pointing to the emergence of virtual communities, new democracy, and a new economy – or from a more pessimistic and dystopian angle – with warnings against the digital divide, information glut, and ubiquitous surveillance.

‘general transformations of atoms into bits’ and of matter into mind. These lines of reasoning were characterizes by what we may call digital mysticum, a special brand of the technological deternism in which digitallity and software are considered to be ontologically immaterial determinants of new media.

New media frames as ‘hyper’ ‘virtual’ and ‘uber’

Though this kind of discourse was criticized right from the start as a specific ideology (barbrook and Cameron – 1995), it proved to be persistent, and traces of it can still be discerned in the current academic discourse. When new media appeared on the radar of media and communication studies, the initial attempts to ground digitally consisted of remediating theories from the study of ‘old’ media, such as the performance arts, literature, and cinema, or even taking ‘remediation’ itself as the regulative mechanism of digital media.

The complexity of digital code is necessarily black boxed in the user-friendly interfaces, and this makes assumptions of mysterious immateriality hard to exercise. ((((real and material in effect, not in fact]]]]]] the paradox of immateriality. The simple use of the plural turned the immaterial, the realm of abstract thought, into palpable parts of something that is, although it cannot be touched, an inseparable part of the material world.

Software cannot exit by itself but is intrinsically embedded in physical data carriers – as stuff which may defy immediate physical contact, yet which is incorporated in materiality rather than floating as a metaphysical substance in virtual space. Society made durable – digital cultures.

The age of disembodied, immaterial virtuality and cyberspace is upon us, and therefore we are compelled to think about material objects – Mitchell. The contributions cover different areas of digital culture, but they all endorse a material understanding of digital artefacts by situating their objects of research in a dispotif that comprehends the dynamic connections between discourses, social appropriating and technological design.

Processor, memory, network screen and keyboard: metaphorical concepts, heuristic devices which highlight specific aspect of new media configurations. They need software to work. They provide access to different digital machines.

Processor – beating heart of computer system. Memory – devices for storage and retrieval. Metaphorically stands for history, recurring patterns and persistent ideas. Network – enables connections, transmissions, extensions, metaphorically interrogates how the social-cultural assemblages of contemporary machinery are connected to society and daily life. Screen & keyboard – how users interact with digital machines through interfaces. Screen – represents how the machinery reflects and retracts its users, how their activities are channeled. How hardware and software and visual culture are related. Keyboard- how users interact with machinery, metaphorically how users appropriate with digital tools.

Processor/memory/network – social cultural assemblage of contemporary machinery. Processor – contributions that focus on questions pertaining to how digital machinery carries out certain cultural programs or instructions. How and by whom executed and created.

[national propaganda effectively in the context of global entertainment – gaming especially – Americas army) developed inside military machine – Nieborg

(Muller argues that participation can be best understood in terms of formatted spaces that are culturally determined)

Enna Kotkanp argues that a different approach to the design of e-learning environments such as 'WebCT' and 'Blackboard' is needed when educational tools change their objectives towards under interaction rather than content transference.

Pro – execution and calculation me – storage and retrieval of data, thereby producing reproducing and negotiating cultural artefacts. ‘things are only contemporary by composition, and some parts are always related to memory and the past’

Imar de Vries – utopian visions about mobile communication embody an age old quest for ideal communication. Which utopian discourses of progress are incongruent in certain aspects with how mobile technologies are experienced in everyday life.

Memory – de mul/w. Benjamin – Mul claims that a database ontology can serve as a suitable paradigm model to account for art, both by its technology affordances and its metaphorical power.

Benteke Waaldijk shows that the promise of seeing everything on the web bears clear similarities to the promise of seeing the world at world exhibitions. In both cases there is a disparity between ideological promises of seeing and the vulnerability of being watched and controlled as well as an oscillation between global and local positioning of citizenship.

Isabella van Elferen – a fascination with the past is a constitutive part of cybergothic music cultures that celebrate the mixing of human and technology of past and present.

Network – William Urichiio – Users possibilities to add and alter content have changed our concept of archiving in old and new media.

Minko tobias Schafer – User appropriation of file scheming technologies challenge the established media industry where business models rely on controlling the distribution of media objects, user activities should not be conceived of as unequacally subversive.

Marinka copier – playing online games is so much interwoven with trivial daily activities that the idea of entering a ‘magic circle’ when playing a game no longer suffices, they are networks that are anchored in our every day life.

Douglas rushkoff – foresees a new digitized world of playing in which we can be active agents in producing the stories that make the world go round, thus generating new narrative networks by controlling the buttons and breaking hegemonies.

Screen & keyboard – perceptual interfaces and conceptual metaphors that serve as points of passage between user & machine. Screen – function as a remembrance or lotus of passage that hybridize and connect different realms and categories.

Frank Kessler – claims that debates about the real or authentic quality of recorded images has shifted since the emergence of new media, where an image is no longer pre-recorded and data become mere mutable. How indexicality still holds validity for digital images.

Eva nieuwdorp – notion of interface can serve as a central tool to regognite the ‘linial’ character of such games that are not situated within a clearly delineated virtual game world.

Nana verhoef – the Nintendo ds, as a theoretical objects, means a rupture from the cinematic and televisual screen dispotif in terms of multiplicity of mobility and a shift from perception to tactile productivity.

Keyboard – how users interact with digital material. How users have hands-n contact with digital machinery.

Thomas poell – Ewether and how concepts of public sphere and multiple public spheres can be used to understand the off-web forums and blogs in public debate. ?????

Mariiane van Boomen – Unravels ‘sign tools’ these material metaphors as condensed icons that absorb and conceal their indexical relations to software and hardware processes.

Ann Sophie Lehmann – how media artsits make use of similary complex and custom – made tools as artists in the pre-industrial age, but contrary to representations at the painter at work, the practice of making digital art is rendered invisible.

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