Code Drift: Essays in Critical Digital Studies
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Code Drift Essays in Critical Digital Studies Code Drift Essays in Critical Digital Studies Arthur and Marilouise Kroker Editors Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture (PACTAC) NWP CTheory Books Victoria, Canada Code Drift: Essays in Critical Digital Studies (c) 2010, New World Perspectives / CTheory Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact [email protected] First published in Canada in 2010 Printed and bound in Canada ISBN 978-0-920393-08-6 Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Code drift [electronic resource] : essays in critical digital studies / Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, editors. Type of computer file: Electronic monograph in PDF format. ISBN 978-0-920393-08-6 1. Information technology--Social aspects. 2. Information society. 3. Computer and civilization. I. Kroker, Arthur, 1945- II. Kroker, Marilouise, 1943- T14.5.C632 2010 303.48'34 C2010-900683-6 Contents Preface 1 Arthur and Marilouise Kroker Code Drift 4 Arthur and Marilouise Kroker Fractal Philosophy (and the small matter of learning how to listen): Attunement as the Task 20 of Art Johnny Golding Digital Magic, Cybernetic Sorcery: On the Cultural Politics of Fascination and Fear 52 Stephen Pfohl Digital Resisto(e)rs 81 William Bogard Something is Happening 107 Jordan Crandall Becoming Dragon: A Transversal Technology Study 127 Micha Cardenas A Conversation with Spirits Inside the Simulation of a Coast Salish Longhouse 153 Jackson 2Bears Illuminated Darkness: Nightmares, Blind Spots and Biofeedback 176 Ted Hiebert Lenticular Galaxies – The Polyvalent Aesthetics of Data Visualization 192 Sara Diamond Toward a Theory of Critical Computing: The Case of Social Identity Representation in Digital Media 244 Applications D. Fox Harrell Moving Across the Internet: Code-Bodies, Code- Corpses, and Network Architecture 290 Christopher Parsons Code and the Technical Provenance of Nihilism 318 Brad Bryan Creative Destruction Versus Restrictive Practices: Deleuze, Schumpeter and Capitalism's Uneasy 345 Relationship with Technical Innovation Simon Glezos Atmospheric Alientation, Carbon Tracking and Geo-Techno Agency 373 Anita Girvan A Sonic Economy 400 Stephen Kennedy Contributors 412 Preface ARTHUR AND MARILOUISE KROKER What is the fate of the regime of computation? A global techno-culture inscribed by the terrorism of the code or an emergent age of networked individualism driven onwards by the ecstatic visions of augmented reality, mobility, and connectivity? When the regime of computation suddenly slams into the real world of globalization, when code is forced to tangle with the always messy world of blown away referential values -- the real world of gender trouble, stormy challenges to the big signifiers of race, class and ethnicity -- we finally know that we are living in the beginning days of something radically new, namely a culture of code drift. All the pure signs are present in code drift, from the radiating positivity of the terrorism of the code to the irrepressible creativity of augmented reality. How could they not be? The formal structure of all programming language also carries within itself traces of the modernist episteme with its endless variations of the supposedly counter-languages of form and syntax. So too, code drift is most certainly always framed by the politics of the pure signs of these the most computational of all times: pure cybernetic terrorism, pure mobile contingency. But for all that, when the language of the code follows its fatal, but no less inevitable, passage across the real world of globalization, when form is deeply inflected with the syntax of the human, non- human, and post-human, we are suddenly propelled into a new era of indeterminate trajectories, unpredictable inflections, strange complexities. Call it what you will -- hauntologies, specters, disavowals, disappearances, the missing third term -- one thing is clear, understanding code drift urgently requires that the technical language of the regime of computation be 1 Preface supplemented by that which it thought it had successfully excluded, namely the always doubled imagination of the artist, the poet, the philosopher, the hacker, the gender outlaw, the systems administrator gone bad, the visionary of unknown borderlands of the body, mind, and spirit. For all these, a digital culture moving at the speed of light is most interesting when emphasis is placed on that which is the dreaded object of escape velocity -- the surrounding darkness with its complex passages between light and dark, speed and slowness, exclusions and inscriptions, codes and remainders, computation and that which is irresistibly - indeed joyfully inevitably - incapable of being numerically signified under the sign of the bin or the hex. Tracing the curve of technology as it now arcs relentlessly, and with no small measure of ideological hubris, towards mobility, connectivity and augmentation, a creative group of digital theorists gathered at PACTAC on two occasions -- June 2009 and March 2010 -- to collectively consider the specter of the digital future. Travelling from many different parts of the digital spectrum -- visual artists, photographers, philosophers, computer theorists, performance artists, thinkers of the sonic, capitalist and genomic economies -- there was a very real sense of code drift in the air. Somehow within the creative mystery of collective reflection on a common digital project, barriers to thought were successfully eclipsed by the creative imagination, allowing the full complexity of the digital future to reveal itself. How else to explain what happened: stories of code drift inflected by the rich imaginary of fractal philosophy, becoming dragon, illuminated darkness, digital resisto(e)rs, technology as magic, lenticular galaxies, phantasmal media, digital conversations in a coast Salish longhouse, and augmented realities in life and fiction. Here, the spirits of many different thinkers, from Borges to Deleuze, were summoned to stand at the gateway of the digital future, not so much to haunt the present as to remind us again and again that in Code Drift: Essays in Critical Digital Studies there is rehearsed anew the traditional practice of the intellectual imagination -- namely mixing past, present and future into sensitive attunements for understanding issues related to technology and society. That the digital future will 2 Code Drift be replete with complex iterations and slippery codes was hauntingly brought into presence by Stelarc's performance lecture, "The Comatose, the Cadaver, and the Chimera: Avatars have no Organs," presented as part of the continuing Critical Digital Studies workshop at PACTAC. Supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada [Image, Text, Sound & Technology (ITST)] as well as by a SSHRC grant in support of Arthur Kroker's Digital Inflections project, sponsored by New World Perspectives, convened under the auspices of CTheory, and held at the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture at the University of Victoria (Canada), Code Drift is the first of a continuing series of publications and workshops on the digital future. We are most grateful for the hard work and dedication of Ted Hiebert, Aya Walraven, and Simon Glezos in helping with the organization and tech support for the workshop as well as presenting at the workshop itself. We would also like to thank Nicholas van Orden (English, UVic) for his careful copy-editing of the text. Editors, CTheory Pacific Center for Technology and Culture University of Victoria 3 Code Drift Code Drift ARTHUR & MARILOUISE KROKER Code Drift Neither global nor local Today we are mobile We are Code Drift We remix/mutate/disseminate/jailbreak Code Drift is the once and future nervous system -- the genetic drift of all augmented data bodies. We are AR We are Data Flesh We are Code Drift Software Genomics Code Drift is an attempt to draw together the great discourses of biology and digitality, essentially to consider the implications of mapping the language of genomics onto software codes. We want to argue that data has come alive in the form of our extended network of technological organs, that the growth of information culture is the real world of evolutionary development literally, not metaphorically. When data comes alive, when data becomes the dominant life-principle with us as its willing 4 Code Drift prosthetics, we are suddenly swept along in a larger digital cosmology the future of which is yet unclear. But this we do know: digital cosmology has its own laws of motion -- code drift; its politics are based on the deeply paradoxical situation of our being tethered to mobility; the first sighting of what will soon be its dominant form of subjectivity are the enhanced data bodies of augmented reality; and the human condition which it leaves in its wake can only be characterized as one suffering digital trauma. Not Toffler's vision of "future shock" where a stunned humanity is overcome by the accelerating rate of technological change, but something much more elemental, namely that the same awesome event that Nietzsche once described as the death of god and the beginning of something fundamentally new is now upon us again, except this time it's not so much the death of god, but the sudden eclipse of god's successor before this new onrushing event of code drift, tethered mobility, enhanced