[spectre] M. Punt: Postdigital Analogue

[Andreas Broeckmann]

LEA Volume 9, Number 10
<http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/>

Editorial

< Human Consciousness and the Postdigital Analogue >
by Michael Punt, E-mail: <Mpunt@easynet.co.uk>

As Steven Wilson points out in his review of the
book Ars Electronica,
=46acing the Future, this book is "a marvelous
resource that will be much
appreciated by artists, critics, historians, and
anyone interested in the
convergence of art and technology." (See LDR
Vol. 9, No. 8, August 2001)
Among other things, the book provides a
historical record that catalogues
the changing perceptions of the emergence of
digital technology as a
popular medium. Seventeen years ago, for
example, Gene Youngblood reminded
us that the computer translates the continuous
phenomena of the world into
discrete units. At the same time, Peter Weibel
pointed out that whereas the
analogical follows principles of similarity,
congruency and continuity, the
digital uses the smallest discontinuous, non-
homogeneous elements. Five
years later Roy Ascott, with characteristic
visionary insight, appealed for
a restoration of the metaphor to the agenda in
order that the undivided
whole could once again be regained. It was a
call that Nick Herbert
responded to a year later in a lucid and
accessible account of quantum
physics, concluding with some irony that
holistic physics really would
erase the distinction between subject and object
and there would be a real
danger of getting lost in space. Facing the
=46uture's history lesson ends in
1998 with Friedrich Kittler's confirmation that
in the realms of electronic
warfare we resisted this danger since copying
a "hostile CPU is easier,
cheaper, and therefore more likely to
proliferate than copying a hostile
phase radar." This is not merely the carry-
through of old technology into
the new (as, for example, film and video), but a
return to the ideal of the
analogue. According to Kittler's analysis of
warfare, in less than a decade
digital media recovered the relevance of the
principles of similarity,
congruency and continuity. This apparent
persistence of the analogue
invites us to consider that the morphological
resemblance between pre- and
post-digital modes of expression (or industrial
and enlightenment, for that
matter) could be significant symptoms of the
hesitance of users to abandon
"felt" experience in favor of the =E9clat of
>seductive technologies of
description.

At the distance that Ars Electronica: Facing the
=46uture allows us, it
becomes apparent that empowered users
negotiating with digital media have
found themselves engaged in this recurring
cycle, in which the idealization
of representation is in conflict with the
dominant technology, which
disavows daily experience as an undifferentiated
circulation of metaphors
for desire and resistance. As much was at stake
in the pre-cinematic age,
when Jules Etienne Marey, for example, inquiring
into the nature of
movement, regarded the new techniques of
chronophotography as inferior to
graphic methods using smoked drums and scribes
attached to pneumatic
sensors. Photo-technology used shutters that
insisted upon the moment as a
finite duration and consequently ruptured the
flow of movement as
experienced in a flux of time. The pseudo-
guarantees of objectivity that
this scientifically acceptable idealization
could offer, however,
outweighed the deficits, and the representation
of movement as an
incremental sequence in a small finite and
discontinuous moment became an
acceptable norm to the extent that the subject
was indeed collapsed into
the object and temporarily "lost in space."
However, whereas
chronophotography chained vision to the
materiality of the body, in the
post-chronophotographic analogue the principles
of similarity, congruency
and continuity found new life in the cinema of
narrative integration (the
movies) which rescued the subject in a seamless
reality of the infinitely
malleable virtual bodies, for whom the eye was
transcendent.

The intellectual project of Ars Electronica,
=46acing the Future leaves
little doubt that the digital revolution was,
 from its technological and
conceptual inception, always destined to be the
postdigital in which
similarity, congruence and continuity found new
applications. At stake in
the postdigital analogue however, is more than
the recovery of the subject:
it is nothing less than the question of whose
vision of paradise prevails.
The postdigital analogue points to a version of
paradise that is not a
finite discontinuous place or a non-homogeneous
moment of time, not Eden in
a nostalgic future, but a thick membrane in
which local conditions, desire
and resistance are constantly stabilized to form
a whole identity. Where
the digital proposes the perfect finite
conditions for a perfect existence
regardless of matter (as for example in the
human genome project), in the
postdigital analogue (as for example in the
ironies of genetic and wet
biological art) human consciousness is regarded
as almost infinitely
malleable, able to shape its identity in
response to local and
technological conditions and aware all the time
of the range of
possibilities not yet developed, both digital
and analogue.