Digital Materiality of the Internet-of-Things

date-added: 2015-01-19 04:14:58 +0000 date-modified: 2015-04-01 06:51:10 +0000date-added: 2015-01-19 04:14:58 +0000 date-modified: 2015-04-01 06:51:10 +0000This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, CreativeWorks London Hub, grant AH/J005142/1, and the European Regional Development Fund, London Creative and Digital Fusion

Digital culture, materiality and Nineteenth-Century studies

The rhetoric of the virtual stubbornly clings to digital culture, even though our experience of working within it is of a resisting medium that only behaves in certain ways. The persistence of the virtual demands attention: why do we cling to such a description even while we quite willingly recognise the interpenetration of the world beyond the monitor and that represented on it? In education we’re encouraged to use Virtual Learning Environments, as if somehow these spaces are not as real as classrooms; we participate (or read about others participating) in virtual worlds such as Second Life or World of Warcraft, places that imitate the real world, providing access to fantasies that are underpinned by very real economics; and we exploit the World Wide Web, believing in its textual metaphors (pages, hypertext) while ignoring its presence as a medium. In my contribution to this forum I want to suggest that our insistence on the immateriality of digital culture enforces an ontological distinction that overdetermines the materiality of the world beyond the monitor while misrecognizing the new things that are displayed upon it. Rather than continue to use the virtual as a category, I would like to argue using an alternative term, the apparition.1 Unlike the virtual, which foregrounds its effect of the real with reality itself present only as absence, apparition has two meanings: the first is an immaterial appearance, a ghostly presence that, like the virtual, can signal an absent materiality; the second is simply the appearance of something, specifically the emergence of something into history. It is this latter meaning, I suggest, that permits materiality to re-enter digital discourse

Materiality and surface of the digital print

This paper discusses how the materiality and surface of the digital printmaking process may be seen as visually evidenced in the resulting printed imag

Graphic Thinking and Digital Processes: Three Built Case Studies of Digital Materiality

Think strategic link between computer programming; digital modeling; the data; matter and CNC manufacturing in the various stages of the architectural project is key to update our discipline with new technologies. Our proposal to articulate and digital graphic thought processes; developable folded geometries and compositions is rooted in an expanded graphic thinking through multiple conceptual tools that are already part of the operational structure of our discipline

Art in the Age of Networks - Networks as a Way of Thinking

The theme-based and material-based units (with lessons and lesson sequences) propose a curriculum for one academic semester in an undergraduate visual arts school (for sophomore, 2nd year, or junior, 3rd year students). However the lessons could be modified and tailored to any age group developmentally. This curricular framework aims to foster collaboration (within individuals, materials and disciplines), explore networked pedagogy and networks in pedagogy as a collaborating force through and with the visual arts and explore the materiality of the code and the digital media. The course also engages with new media theory and literature, investigates the materiality of the digital media as collaborators, mediators and metaphors and reflects on how technology affects pedagogy and allows students to tailor projects according to their own interests. The course content is flexible in its approach with plenty of elbowroom. The 3rd Unit of the suggested curriculum also seeks to advocate for social justice; students cultivate perspectives about the power of digital media to address social issues, they probe into matters of social justice or injustice with the featured artists and make connections with the artistic processes and goals of the artists (listed in the lessons) to reflect on the sociopolitical context of their own art making. The students also think about networks as an abstract or tangible concept (digital, social, physical, and biological networks) and create works in an open-ended, student-centric environment that encourages critical thinking, independent decision-making and enables them to chose their own nature/ track of projects.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cstae_resource_higher_education/1002/thumbnail.jp

Erasure, an attempt to surpass datafication

Selfies, email archives, twitter posts, likes, places, late night chat logs, health insurance records, bank transfers, search histories… all those bits of identity, involuntarily immortalised as personality profiles in corporate server farms. Could erasure offer some respite from endless datafication? This “undead media” (Chun 134) not only facilitates the surveillance apparatus, the persistence of data also affects how we remember. Digital death (post-mortem digital data ownership concerns) exemplifies how the structure and inner workings of network technologies and software platforms affect our experience in a tangible way. The following research is concerned with what kind of role the materiality of Internet technologies plays in post-mortem digital legacy, and how it bleeds into our mourning practices. It explores these questions by examining how Facebook and Google deal with digital death, and what kind of consequences the materiality of the network entails. The notions of materiality are understood here as a space of interaction between code and hardware (Hayles) and perceived materialization of phenomena iteratively configured by dynamics of “intra-actions” (Barad 140). In the examples considered I look at how terms of agreement apply to memory in the form of externalised tertiary retention in the process of “grammatization” (Stiegler 3). The research also looks at the biological human memory’s materiality and its need to forget (Kirschenbaum). I discuss the ne.me.quittes.pas project as a means to propose digital data funerals as an artistic strategy to make data tangible and to explore how these layers of stockpiled data constantly re-configure our identities. I argue that digital data funerals offer a symbolic ritualised gesture that draws attention to the materiality of data through tangible and physical degradation, in an attempt to surpass post-mortem datafication, and surveillance

Reconsidering the substance of digital video from a Sadrian perspective

The digitisation process is debated as video’s deficiency, where pixels are conceived as isolated fragments without an existential link to the source image. This article explores the ontology of digital-video through Mulla Sadrā’s (1571–1641) theory of Substantial Motion. Sadrā, a Persian-Islamic existentialist, proposed that substance (material/visible and immaterial/invisible) undergoes an internal change. Through imperceptible internal change, intimate connections exist between the smallest parts and the One, visible and invisible. We can think of these dynamic connections in terms of pixels and frames. From the view of Sadrā’s substance, pixels are explored as open to change. The apparent weaknesses of digital materiality become potentials towards understanding its existence in time

Five Principles for Digital Service Innovation in Social Care

Digitalization in the public sector is growing to also include areas such as social care. We investigate the digital service innovation process within home care services in a Danish municipality. Inspired by theory on social materiality, we argue for an approach to digital service innovation within social care as an ongoing and entangled development of human and technological resources. We take an abductive approach as we combine theory on social-materiality and digital service innovation with empirical insights. Based in this, we propose five principles of importance for successful digital service innovation in social care: 1) mutual adaption; 2) piloting; 3) empowered; 4) situated re-innovation, and 5) continuous innovation.Â