Been thinking about my exchange with Walter on the relationship between the numeric and the digital. I think (Walter, please jump in here) that what we might have is less a difference in terminology than in emphasis: the digital, by virtue of being discrete, is always inherently numeric. That is to say, discrete objects are objects that we can count. Yes, agreed. That the digital is by definition numeric, however, is not the same as saying its mathematical nature is always equally essential. Again, see the Ada Lovelace epigraph to Knuth's essay. Or in the Photoshop Sharpen example I gave at the very end of class, an autographic image is suddenly subject to formal (and mathematical) manipulation by virtue of its being reduced to an allographic set of discrete elements (pixel values, which--theoretically--could be manipulated by a group of rules other than those of the binary mathematics built into my microprocessor).
Posted by mgk at February 12, 2004 10:28 AMThanks, Matt for this rumination. And thanks, too, to Walter for posing the question so insistently in class -- it really helped me to focus on my 'big picture' warm vibes about Aarseth's Cybertext. quoting Matt's post: "an autographic image is suddenly subject to formal (and mathematical) manipulation by virtue of its being reduced to an allographic set of discrete elements (pixel values, which--theoretically--could be manipulated by a group of rules other than those of the binary mathematics built into my microprocessor." Aarseth's ergodic focus, perhaps paradoxically (because it, too, is a binary of sorts with non-ergodic as its pole), gets at something that fundamentally challenges the dominant binaries that are operational, not just about digital media, but about all sorts of accepted and unexamined epistemological and ontological constructions of our world view. While we can't imagine that the pixels will be manipulated by anything other than the binary processes of the microprocessor, Aarseth allows me to begin thinking about the what ifs...to yank myself outside the box. Breaking down the inherent properties of the meaning for digital -- in going beyond the simple equation of it with numeric to understand as discretely and closely as possible what exactly that implies again causes me to regard my everyday understandings with a greater degree of wary skepticability, in so far as the extent to which I accept them for more than their face value. Having Aarseth himself pop up in our blog was pretty mind-blowing, too! Such surprises lurk here....
Posted by: Kimberlee at February 15, 2004 12:53 PM