欧博官网(PDF) On the Existence of Digital Objects
A theory of digital objects
Jannis Kallinikos
First Monday, 2010
Digital objects are marked by a limited set of variable yet generic attributes such as editability, interactivity, openness and distributedness. As digital objects diffuse throughout the institutional fabric, these attributes and the information-based operations and procedures out of which they are sustained install themselves at the heart of social practice. The entities and processes that constitute the stuff of social practice are thereby rendered increasingly unstable and transfigurable, producing a context of experience in which the certainties of recurring and recognizable objects are on the wane. These claims are supported with reference to 1) the elusive identity of digital documents and the problems of authentication/preservation of records such an identity posits and 2) the operations of search engines and the effects digital search has on the content of the documents it retrieves.
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Musing Heideggerian Cyberspace
Jon Davey
2007
Where we do we make our “being?” Since our existence [being-there = Dasein] is the original place of intelligibility, fundamental ontology must clarify the conditions of having any understanding which itself belongs to the entity called Dasein. Today Dasein in increasing becoming more and more digital, in fact all activity is digital or becoming digital in one mode or another, it’s ubiquitous! On the pragmatic side corporate architecture as well as its daily interaction and transaction are all digital. With the advent of games as well as webmasters using VRML or some equivalent of it posses the questions and concerns as who will design the digital domains, graphic artists, IT personnel, game developers and where will we make our being? As architects and designers where will our “digital gesamtkunstwerk” be? Making places for human inhabitation in a nonphysical space raises interesting questions concerning presence, authenticity, adaptability, orientation, and suspension of disbelief...
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Toward an Interality-Oriented Philosophy (IOP) of the Digital
Peter Zhang
This article examines the digital through the lens of interality and Flusser's thought. It claims that the digital affords an interological sensibility. It sees the Hive as a mythical symbol of the digital, which constitutes a new khora or milieu that reconfigures everything in it. Some of the key notions elaborated in the article include: intermind, the virtual, the digital doppelgänger, control and becoming, the acceleration of reality, etc. The article calls for openness toward no knowledge when humanity is faced with the unknown so it can improvise a new existential gyroscope adequate to the new real. [Peter Zhang. Toward an Interality-Oriented Philosophy (IOP) of the Digital. China Media Research, 15(4):13-22] 4 A man coins not a new word without some peril; for if it happens to be received, the praise is but moderate; if refused, the scorn is assured.-Ben Jonson [T]hinking is not a continuous, discursive process-thinking "quantizes."-Vilém Flusser The digital is something we use and are used by on a daily basis but do not quite comprehend. This familiar stranger has become our constitutive other, our new dwelling. We have since been taken on a giddy journey of becoming with neither destination nor return. Myriad signs around us indicate that the digital has been and will continue to be a formidable agent of transformation. The world itself as we knew it once upon a time has been pulverized and become one with the digital sandstorm. At this post-historical, neo-nomadic moment, "know thyself" immediately entails knowing the digital. We are challenged to grasp something discursive prose made up of strings of letters is not adequate to precisely because it has rendered this means of knowing obsolescent. We have reached a point where we cannot but let go of our rational bearing because everything rational is mere content in this new medium. Literal (i.e., letter-based), linear, logical thinking has to give way to statistical, probabilistic, cybernetic, programmatic, game-theoretic, quantum-theoretic, neo-atomistic, pointillistic thinking. Ontological thinking will be overthrown, overcome, dissolved, and absorbed by interological thinking. The digital transforms our mode of existence, reconfigures our patterns of consciousness, and reshapes our collective unconscious. As members of a community of inquiry, our cause resides and proceeds in between questions and dialogues, experiments and lucky finds. We are faced with a project without precedent. To try to construct a neat system is to betray our cause. We have to own up to the fact that we simply don't know, and present our findings in a form that reveals our sense of no
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CfP Digital Material/ism: How Materiality shapes Digital Culture and Social Interaction. First Issue of Digital Culture & Society. Abstract deadline: February 1, 2015.
Ramón Reichert
The idea of a society, in which everyday smart objects are equipped with digital logic and sensor technologies, is currently taking shape. Devices connected as learning machines to the “Internet of Things” necessitate further research on issues related to digital media and their materiality. In this context, media, culture and social theories, dealing with the materiality of digital technology, have gained increasing relevance. Investigations of digital material have given rise to a wide range of (new) research questions, approaches, and issues. From the early 2000s onwards, we can identify two major strands of research that developed: (1) from the technological and material conditions of hardware and software towards (2) the social/political/economic/legal infrastructures and power relations of proprietary networks and platforms. The eventual establishment of research fields such as software studies, critical code studies, media archaeology and the notion of the post-digital − represented by scholars such as David Berry, Wendy Chun, Alexander Galloway, Mark Hansen, Katherine Hayles, Friedrich Kittler, Lev Manovich, William Mitchell, Anna Munster, Adrian Mackenzie, Jussi Parikka, Eugene Thacker, and others, − can also be understood as indicators of an institutionalisation of ‘media-materialistic’ research. For the first issue “Digital Material/ism”, the newly founded Digital Culture & Society journal calls for further methodological and theoretical reflection on issues of digital materiality and digital materialism. Approaches may be rooted in (digital) media and cultural studies, as well as social sciences. Interdisciplinary contributions, for example, those from science and technology studies, are likewise welcome. Paper proposals may relate to, but are not limited to, the following topics: - the internet of things, smart objects and ambient intelligence - augmented environments - wearables (and augmented reality) - hardware studies and Open Hardware - hacker, Maker and DIY Culture - post-digital media research - media ecologies and e-waste - agency of assemblages We invite submissions, which may react to, and expand on to the following questions of “Digital Material/ism”: 1. Field Research and Case Studies We invite papers on socio-technological developments related to digital media materiality. Articles may examine usage and production, as well as spaces and contexts of smart objects; e.g. wearable computing devices, or beacons. Contributions may be based on (empirical) case studies. They may likewise address discourses of truth and evidence related to digital media materialism; e.g. in a metaphorical sense (see Boomen 2014) or as governmental alignment, such as “forensic materialism” as suggested by Kirschenbaum (2008). How do materialistic positions tacitly use metaphors of clinical or administrative control to assure the relevance and societal benefits of their devices? How is the notion of ‘smart/ness’ used in order to promote new forms of technological interactions with, and surveillance of the physical environment? 2. Methodological reflection We invite contributions that address methodological issues of approaches focused on digital media materiality. What are the methodological implications of such technological developments? What ethical challenges do researchers face; e.g. related to the data enabled by new digital media technology and their material features? 3. Conceptual/theoretical reflection We invite papers that address key notions in the discussion of digital materiality, and question epistemological assumptions. “Materiality” is a crucial term, which only entered the discussion of digital media studies in the 2000s. Historically, how was the notion of materiality developed with regard to digital media? Moreover, in which philosophical traditions do the key representatives of “Digital Materialism” place themselves? In what ways do they assume canonical models when examining the ‘transcendental,’ ‘empirical,’ or ‘historical-material’ conditions of data networks? Following Matthew Kirschenbaum’s (2008) conception of “formal materiality” as “the imposition of multiple relational computational states on a data set or digital object” (Ibid, p. 12), we are interested in the practical relevance of the materiality of recording, storing and processing (alongside the technical modelling of storage, digital objects, discrete data and metadata-guided processing operations). Thereby, we subsequently consider the results of Matthew Fuller’s (2003; 2008) work, “Software as a historical knowledge base”: it has its own history and does not only follow technological norms and standards, but also yields social, institutional and cultural settings. Deadlines and contact information Initial abstracts (max. 300 words) and a short biographical note (max. 100 words) are due on: February 1, 2015 Authors will be notified by February 16, 2015, whether they are invited to submit a full paper. Full papers are due on: May 1, 2015 Please send the abstracts and full papers to: Ramón Reichert – ramon.reichert@univie.ac.at Annika Richterich − a.richterich@maastrichtuniversity.nl References Boomen, M. van den (2014) Transcoding the Digital: How Metaphors Matter in New Media. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam. Fuller, M. (2008) Software Studies. A Lexicon. Cambridge: MIT Press. Kirschenbaum, M. (2008) Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, Cambridge: MIT Press. Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Harvard: Harvard University Press. Montfort, N. (2003) Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction, Cambridge: The MIT Press, pp. 85-93.
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THE ONTOLOGY OF TECHNOLOGY A Heideggerian Perspective
Roisin Lally
The question concerning technology lies at the heart of human existence. As such it must take a central place in philosophy today. This importance, however, is veiled by a historical interpretation of technology as instrumental. This instrumentalism is the result of an ambiguity in the Aristotelian legacy that arises from an understanding of reality rooted in a theory of the categories, on the one hand, and a theory of causality on the other. This has left us with an ambiguous understanding of human making split by the twofold structure of artistic and representational thinking. The former is characteristic of empirical knowledge, the latter epistemological knowledge. This thesis follows Heidegger in arguing that an integral understanding of technology can only be achieved through a creative retrieval of Aristotle's ontology that interweaves the question of causality and the question of the categories, which we have outlined below as the interplay between potentiality and actuality, between being and non-being, and between truth and untruth. While indebted to Aristotle, this involves an important re-thinking of the nature of ontology, for it is made possible by exposing the limits of Aristotle’s theory of time, which understands time as a succession of present instants, and moving towards the Heideggerian understanding of presencing as the opening of a horizon in which things perdure. Consequently, this is an ontology in which technology is tied to our notion of time just as much as to our notion of being. After establishing this temporal ontology as the basis for an understanding of technology, in a unique way we apply it to the particular case of 3D printing and come to see that this technology is indeed more than an instrument; it is an interweaving of the epistemic and the poetic, the rational and the artistic. Thus I accept the consensus in contemporary philosophy of technology that questions of technology must be understood in terms of their political and social implications. However, unlike many thinkers in this field I also argue that they can be fruitfully understood in terms of a temporal ontology. I call this temporal ontology of technology, hyperology.
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The Human Presence in Digital Artefacts
Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE)
Text and Genre in Reconstruction: Effects of Digitalization on Ideas, Behaviours, Products, and Insitutions (book)
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Digital Artifacts as Quasi-Objects: Qualification, Mediation, and Materiality
Hamid Ekbia
Digital artifacts have novel properties that largely derive from the processes that mediate their creation, and that can be best understood by a close examination of such processes. This paper introduces the concept of "quasiobject" to characterize these objects and elucidate the activities that comprise their mediations. A case study of "bugs" is analyzed to illustrate exemplary activities of justification, qualification, and binding in the process of bug fixing in Free/Open Source Software development. The findings of the case study lead to broader reflections on the character of digital artifacts in general. The relationship of "quasi-object" to other similar concepts are explored.
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The Ontological Foundations of Digital Art
Roisin Lally
Eidos, 2018
In recent decades, the internet has become our predominant public space and yet the role of art in this space remains largely unthought. This paper argues that graphic art, and in particular digital graphic art, has great power to shape and transform our thinking and experience. But with that power comes an enormous political and ethical responsibility, a responsibility too often ignored by programmers and computer scientists. This paper uses the work of Denis Schmidt and Jacques Taminiaux as important resources for developing a Heideggerian response to this lack.
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The ontological revolution: On the phenomenology of the internet
Alexandros Schismenos
SOCRATES, 2016
Cogitation described as calculation, the living being described as a machine, cognitive functions considered as algorithmic sequences and the 'mechanization' of the subjective were the theoretical elements that late heideggerian anti–humanism, especially in France was able to utilize 1 , even more so, after the second cybernetics or post-cybernetics movement of the late '60s introduced the concepts of the autopoietic and the allopoietic automata 2. Recently, neurologists pose claims on the traditional epistemological field of philosophy, proceeding from this ontological decision, the equation of human cognition to cybernetic systems. The emergence of the worldwide web in the 1990s and the global expansion of the internet during the first decades of the 21st century indicate the fallacies of the cybernetics programme to mechanize the mind. We stand witnesses to a semantic colonization of the cybernetic system, a social imaginary creation and expansion within the digital ensemblistic – identitarian organization that cannot be described by mechanical or cybernetic terms. Paradoxically, cyberspace, as a new being, a form of alterity, seems to both exacerbate and capsize the polarization between the operational and the symbolic. The creation of the internet might be more than an epistemological revolution, to use the terminology of Thomas Kuhn. It might be an ontological revolution. I will try to demonstrate that the emergence of the Internet refutes any such claims, since its context and utility can only be described by means of a social epistemology based on the understanding of social significances as continuous creations of an anonymous social imaginary proposed by Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997). I will try to explore some social-semantic aspects of the cyberspace as a nexus of social representations of the individual identity that forms a new sphere of being, where the subjective and the objective merge in a virtual subjective objectivity with unique epistemological attributes and possibilities. Abstract Cogitation described as calculation, the living being described as a machine, cognitive functions considered as algorithmic sequences and the 'mechanization' of the subjective were the theoretical elements that late heideggerian anti–humanism, especially in France was able to utilize 1 , even more so, after the second cybernetics or post-cybernetics movement of the late '60s introduced the concepts of the autopoietic and the allopoietic automata 2. Recently, neurologists pose claims on the traditional epistemological field of philosophy, proceeding from this ontological decision, the equation of human cognition to cybernetic systems. The emergence of the worldwide web in the 1990s and the global expansion of the internet during the first decades of the 21st century indicate the fallacies of the cybernetics programme to mechanize the mind. We stand witnesses to a semantic colonization of the cybernetic system, a social imaginary creation and expansion within the digital ensemblistic – identitarian organization that cannot be described by mechanical or cybernetic terms. Paradoxically, cyberspace, as a new being, a form of alterity, seems to both exacerbate and capsize the polarization between the operational and the symbolic. The creation of the internet might be more than an epistemological revolution, to use the terminology of Thomas Kuhn. It might be an ontological revolution. I will try to demonstrate that the emergence of the Internet refutes any such claims, since its context and utility can only be described by means of a social epistemology based on the understanding of social significances as continuous creations of an anonymous social imaginary proposed by Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997). I will try to explore some social-semantic aspects of the cyberspace as a nexus of social representations of the individual identity that forms a new sphere of being, where the subjective and the objective merge in a virtual subjective objectivity with unique epistemological attributes and possibilities.
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The Importance of Being Digital
Lorella Viola
The Humanities in the Digital: Beyond Critical Digital Humanities
In this chapter, I present the post-authentic framework, a theoretical framework for knowledge creation in the digital, and I introduce two concepts central to the framework, symbiosis and mutualism. In light of the considerations reasoned in Chap. 1, I discuss and question the relevance of notions of authenticity and completeness in relation to digital objects. I take the example of a digital cultural heritage object to highlight how ideas of authenticity and completeness have consequences not only for the production of digital heritage and with respect to heritage values and practices but, more widely, for our understanding of digital objects and knowledge production in a digital society. Finally, I rework such notions using the formation of the digital heritage collection ChroniclItaly 3.0 as an example of how the post-authentic framework can guide the fluid interactions between human and technological processes that are required in the contemporary context of digital knowledge c...
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