Someone asked, looking at the statues in the Greek and Roman section of the Met, why there were so many bodies without heads, and heads without bodies. Turns out there was a time when Christians took a fancy to knocking the heads off of statues. Power shifted, paradigms shifted– Christianity moved from the margin to the center; from a form of atheism to the primary form of theism.
There’s a particular humanity and sense of personality that is still transmitted from these faces. A connection is still possible, even across the centuries. These artifacts, even with the ravages of time, radiate meaning. Contrast that with the digital artifact, once corrupted– it becomes unreadable.
Imagine a culture that encoded all of its artifacts in digital media. Then think about a power shift where the new authority erased the digital artifacts of its predecessor. It’s difficult, if not impossible, for power to imagine its end. We assume that what exists will continue to exist. What tools will the archeologist of the future require to unearth the digital culture that we’re creating today?
After spending hours in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, your mind spins. So much taken in, so much to process, to sort through, to connect up, to start whole new trains of thought. The items kept and displayed in the Met are often exemplars of their type.
But as Montebello notes, it’s the ability of the curator to find a particular item, a painting, a cultural artifact and tell a coherent story about it; to connect that story to the others floating around the culture in which the object was embedded. The value of the curator’s thought and writing ensures that the objects in the collection have value and that the value continues to grow and deepen.
Compare this to the value of the digital object. While our understanding of a digital work can grow in depth, can the artifact itself actually grow in value? The digital object’s relationship with time has been one of depreciation, its existence ephemeral. The business of the digital has been managing a downward slope toward commoditization, and ultimately a price of zero (Of course there are strategies of renewal).
Will the digital object ever have the same investment characteristcs as the items in the Metropolitan’s collection? In the Computer History Museum, the collection is comprised mostly of the physical computers– the software isn’t much to look at. While Jonathan Ive’s designs will certainly earn a place at the Cooper-Hewitt, will there be a day when we will see digital objects in a physical building like the Metropolitan Museum? If there is such a thing as a digital art object it may displace the Museum. Is there a reason to view such a work in such a place? The digital object can only be viewed in a digital venue. Unlike the artifacts in the Met, the digital object is not unique. It’s always a copy, it can always find its way to you through the Network. And the most valuable currency in establishing a collection? Curatorial expertise.
I’m thinking about a media player/writer that consumes a sequence of 140 character microblogging posts that contain TinyURLs. The viewing area of this application shows the specified video, audio, image or text. The URLs are decorated with the start point and end point of the quoted material.
The player can be pointed at purchased lists, personally created lists, shared lists, dynamically created lists, and real-time lists from affinity groups or individual authors. The lists can be filtered to show only video, only audio, only images or only text. Of course, one can select any combination of media types as well.
It’s also a writer, these same microblogging posts can be composed, URLs constructed and attached, and then sent to the real-time stream. It can also create sequences and share them. Other controls include:
Rewind
Fast-Forward
Slow-Motion
Pause
Skip to next
Skip to specified keyword
Mark, and return to Mark
Loop
Copy and Paste
Auto-Scroll text at specified reading speed
All devices, mobile or stationary, are supported– as are all syndication formats RSS, Atom, etc. The viewable output can consumed on iPhones, Android devices, Kindle, Chumby, computers, televsions and GPS devices.
Some additional uses for the system might be:
Turn-by-turn GPS directions
Cooking Recipes
Assembly instructions
Music instruction
Any kind of education / testing content
An example of a live two-way sequence might be: I send you a sequence that shows you how to get from where you are to my house. You get halfway there and don’t understand the next instruction. You ping me with a question about that part of the direction sequence. I respond in real time with a clarification. With the additional clarification you’re back on track. The instruction set we discuss, either via text or voice, exists in a format we both can access and reference any point in the sequence.
It was an article in the New York Times about online backup of files from a local hard drive that provided a glimpse of the larger migration in progress all around us. The great migration of data from the earth to the sky; from the hard drive to the cloud. When all your local files have duplicate copies in the cloud, their backups– could you really say which was the original and which was the copy?
The Network and the digital fundamentally changes the way we think about a thing. Things are singular, they occupy a specific set of spacial coordinates along the arc of time. In a given moment, in a slice of time, the thing occupies a single point in space. Often we prefer to stop the flow of time when we consider the qualities of the thing.
The digital thing, living on the Network, cannot assume its existence. It is not extension of matter in space, but rather bits in a particular pattern in a volatile memory system. The digital thing has a biological impulse, it must exist in multiple exact copies because each copy is so fragile. Continued existence necessitates this strategy.
The digital thing is not singular, it is a multiplicity by nature. When a unique digital thing is created on a local system, it wants to be duplicated to increase its chance of survival. All duplication is not created equal, duplication to the cloud actually increases a thing’s chance of survival. Interestingly, the pre-produced purchased digital thing, an MP3 of a song for instance, always already exists in the cloud. It doesn’t need to be duplicated and transferred, it only needs to be matched.
Once a digital thing has assured its multiplicity and persistence through time through a migration to the cloud, its next imperative is presence via a connected device. The digital thing wants to seep back out of the cloud into any and every device that can portray it. Sync-ing, versioning, caching, duplicating– these are some of the biological actions of the digital thing.
There are a few companies building pieces of this ecosystem for the digital thing. Ray Ozzie, with Mesh, probably has the most complete vision. One can imagine business models revolving around encryption. When the identity of a digital thing is masked through encryption, its persistence is financed through subscription. When the data is in the open, an attention/gesture economy guarantees persistence. Other models will certainly surface.
For those digital things that are publicly visible through the Network, the next biological imperative is to attract pointers, hyperlinks. The more pointers a digital thing can attract the greater its chance of survival. Like a physical thing, an unseen, unspoken digital thing has a very shadowy existence.
The digital thing seeks to live as a multiplicity within a networked mesh with the ability to manifest its presence through as many attached devices as possible. To attract pointers, a highly efficient system for producing hyperlinks must co-exist with the network of things. Network meshed objects need search, track, microblogging (Tw*tter) and RSS to produce links– and links are always to some thing.
Pointers are digital things as well, they’re just moving through a faster stream. Their velocity gives them a fundamentally different character. Think of Einstein’s ideas around the relationship between matter, energy, light and velocity.
The primitives for this ecosystem exist today. Its outlines can be seen dimly through the pointers flowing through the stream. How does such an ecosystem manifest in the full presence of its being? Like a memory or a learned skill, it is created through neural pathways— it is only through human attention and focused energy. It’s not what we wish or hope, but rather what we do. Acting on partial information within a barely visible system is an act of faith. But like the man said, “there’s nothing you can do that can’t be done.”
