1.3 not to use old
tools for new problems, scholarship requires a cybersage, digital
humanities projects, critical programming studies, plan of the
dissertation
schedule
2.1 modernism
and postmodernism, regressive subjectivity, Heideggers America,
inventing the posthuman
3 4 1 (+) [-6+]mCQKkirschenbaum-extreme_inscription (108) 20131001m 0 -6+ progress/2012/08/notes_for_kirschenbaum-extreme_inscription.html Interesting examples of new subjectivities by Zanni and Flanagan You are your C. (108) New subjectivitiesare also emerging. You are your C is the title of a net art project by Carlo Zanni dedicated to electronic soul mirroring : when the project is accessed online, the contents of the viewerƒs hard drive are displayed on the screen as the standard Windows file tree, as though they were simply another component of the World Wide Web. . . . [Phage], which she [Mary Flanagan] describes as a virus, uses fragments of old media files residing on the userƒs hard drive to enact a 3-D representation of the computerƒs subconscious (executed in VRML).
3 4 1 (+) [-6+]mCQKkittler-protected_mode (156-157) 20131001 0 -10+ progress/2012/12/notes_for_kittler-protected_mode.html Alludes to early days of microprocessors when literary theorists and hobbyists could hack hardware. (156-157) This wormƒs-eye view did not always prevail. In the good old days when microprocessor pins were still big enough for simple soldering irons, even literary critics could do whatever they wished with Intelƒs 8086 Processor. . . . The silicon chip, which was as stupid as the hobbyist and user, could accommodate all of this because the Von Neumann architecture recognizes no difference between commands and data. . . . This [binary coding] is an activity that only Alan Mathison Turing when he finally had his universal discrete machine of 1936 at his technical disposition one World War later is said to have preferred over all mnemonic aids and higher programming languages.
3 4 1 (+) [-6+]mCQKleorke-rebranding_the_platform (263) 20131003d 0 -2+ progress/2013/06/notes_for_leorke-rebranding_the_platform.html Notes insight that Wii like Bolter and Grusin hypermediacy while Kinect privileges immediacy, but theoretical approach limited to Juul. (263) In their theoretical approach, the authors rely almost solely on Juul s book A Casual Revolution(2010); a useful study of the turn towards casual and social gaming, but by no means the only account of the videogame industry that is relevant to their discussion. (263) But it doesn t substantially depart from the formula developed by the first book in the series, with the close analysis of a single platform framed by a lucid discussion of its technical capabilities and constraints in constant focus.
3 4 1 (+) [-6+]mCQKmalabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain (33) 20130922 0 -1+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_malabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain.html Centralization in question; correlation between brain function and political understanding of hierarchical command and control. (33) In the same way that neuronal connections are supple and do not obey a centralized or even truly hierarchized system, political and economic power displays an organizational suppleness in which the center also appears to have disappeared.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKbogost-alien_phenomenology (103) 20130910n 6 -2+ progress/2012/04/notes_for_bogost-alien_phenomenology.html Explicitly connects software projects to critical code studies; platform studies that seem like critical programming studies include Bogost I am TIA, Fry Deconstructulator. (103) While I am TIAmetaphorizes only one component of the Atari VCS console, Deconstructulatoroffers an operational, exploded view of the entire NES [Nitendo Entertainment System] memory architecture, particularly its sprite and palette systems. (105) Even without the fancy packaging of Deconstructulator, source codeitself often offers inroads in alien phenomenology particularly when carpented to reveal the internal experiences of withdrawn units.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKbork-journal 20121223 20121223 1 -1+ journal_2012.html Strong connection between reading that ancient text of electronic computing and the way Bogost suggests we try to think about processes, emphasizing programming.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKhardt_negri-empire (89-90) 20140816m 0 -10+ progress/2014/10/notes_for_hardt_negri-empire.html Weber analysis has synchronic depth where Foucault diachronic, scission, dualism, procedural, paradoxical, influencing critique of modernity. (89-90) Whereas Foucaultƒs analysis is vast in its diachronic breadth, Weberƒs is powerful in its synchronic depth. . . . The form of the process of closure is as critical and conflictual as the genesis of modernity. In this respect, Weberƒs work has the great merit to have completely destroyed the self-satisfied and triumphant conception of the sovereign of the modern state that Hegel had produced. (90) Weberƒs analysis was quickly taken up the the writers engaged in the critique of modernity, from Heidegger and Lukacs to Horkheimer and Adorno. They all recognized that Weber had revealed the illusion of modernity, the illusion that the antagonistic dualism that resides at the base of modernity could be subsumed in a unitary synthesis investing all of society and politics, including the productive forces and the relations of production. (90) The experience of the revolution will be reborn after modernity, but within the new conditions that modernity constructed in such a contradictory way. Machiavelliƒs return to origins seems to be combined with Nietzscheƒs heroic eternal return.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKjameson-postmodernism (36-37) 20130929o 0 -9+ progress/2012/04/notes_for_jameson-postmodernism.html Re-evaluate representationality of technological artifacts via Walkman study nodding towards Apple. (36-37) It is immediately obvious that the technology of our own moment no longer possesses this same capacity for representation . . . but rather the computer, whose outer shell has no emblematic or visual power, or even the casings of the various media themselves, as with that home appliance called television which articulates nothing but rather implodes, carrying its flattened image surface within itself. (37-38) I want to suggest that our faulty representations of some immense communicational and computer network are themselves but a distorted figuration of something even deeper, namely, the whole world system of a present-day multinational capitalism. . . . It is in terms of that enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of economic and social institutions that, in my opinion, the postmodern sublime can alone be adequately theorized.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKjameson-postmodernism (299-300) 20130930e 0 -6+ progress/2012/04/notes_for_jameson-postmodernism.html MTV leads right into current immersive virtual reality combining visual and audio, where Sterne can be used to interpret spatialization of music in listening practices; omnipresence of reproducible events like NPR versus great works, boundary with simulation as sound track production, cartoon as early VR. (299-300) MTV above all can be taken as a spatialization of music, or, if you prefer, as the telltale revelation that it had already, on our time, become profoundly spatialized in the first place. . . . You no longer offer a musical object for contemplating and gustation; you wire up the context and make space musical around the consumer. In that situation, narrative offers multiple and proteiform mediations between the sounds in time and the body in place, coordinating a narrativized visual fragment an image shared marked as narrative, which does not have to come from any story you ever heard of with an event on the sound track.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKjameson-postmodernism (302-303) 20130930i 0 -5+ progress/2012/04/notes_for_jameson-postmodernism.html Writing/code same operation as human-oriented arguments occur in machine-invented associations, the unit operation: Jameson is clearly a writer not a coder; he can only think of awful fates straying into the machinic, feels impossible dual task of studying modern objects of the built environment in situated context and depth. (302-303) As for the mainstream moderns, however, those waiting patiently in line for a room in just such a museum, any number of them seem capable of a thoroughgoing rewriting into the postmodern text. . . . But boredom is a very useful instrument with which to explore the past, and to stage a meeting between it and the present.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKjameson-postmodernism (307) 20130930l 0 -3+ progress/2012/04/notes_for_jameson-postmodernism.html SCA of virtual realities only likely places to find such phenomena. (307) Modernism must thus be seen as uniquely corresponding to an uneven moment of social development, or what Ernst Bloch called the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous, the synchronicity of the nonsynchronous (Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen): the coexistence of realities from radically different moments of history handicrafts alongside the great cartels, peasant fields with the Krupp factories or the Ford plant in the distance. (309) In the postmodern, then, the past itself has disappeared (along with the well-known sense of the past or historicity and collective memory). Where its buildings still remain, renovation and restoration allow them to be transferred to the present in their entirety as those other, very different and postmodern things called simulacra.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKjameson-postmodernism (409-410) 20131001a 0 -15+ progress/2012/04/notes_for_jameson-postmodernism.html Cognitive mapping especially useful for studying artificial automata, programmable objects exhibiting subjectivity. (409-410) In contrast, what I have called cognitive mapping may be identified as a more modernist strategy, which retains an impossible concept of totality whose representational failure seemed for the moment as useful and productive as its (inconceivable) success. . . . The three types of spaceI have in mind are all the result of discontinuous expansion of quantum leaps in the enlargement of capital, in the latterƒs penetration and colonization of hitherto uncommodified areas. (410) The first of these three kinds of space is that of classical or market capitalism in terms of a logic of the grid . . . the desacralization of the world . . . slow colonization of use value by exchange value . . . the standardization of both subject and object.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKjameson-postmodernism (411) 20131001c 0 -6+ progress/2012/04/notes_for_jameson-postmodernism.html Global social and machine operations are both absent causes that are tracked via their symptoms. (411) these new and enormous global realities are inaccessible to any individual subject or consciousness . . . something like an absent causes, one that can never emerge into the presence of perception. Yet this absent cause can find figures through which to express itself in distorted and symbolic ways. (412) In this context, what I want to suggest is that these forms, whose content is generally that of privatized middle-class life, nonetheless stand as symptoms and distorted expressions of the penetration even of middle-class lived experience by this strange new global relativity of the colonial network.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKjohnson-what_is_cultural_studies_anyway (73) 20131103d 1 -14+ progress/2010/11/notes_for_johnson-what_is_cultural_studies_anyway.html Rethink each moment in light of the others rather than adding together sets of production, text, and lived studies: compare to criticism of platform studies. (73) Production-related studies imply a struggle to control or transform the most power means of cultural production. . . . Text-based studies, focusing on the forms of cultural products, have usually concerned the possibilities of a transformative cultural practice. . . . Finally, research into lived cultures has been closely associated with a politics of representation upholding the ways of life of subordinated social groups. (73) It is not therefore an adequate strategy for the future use just to add together the three sets of approaches, using each for its appropriate moment. . . . it may be more transformative to rethink each moment in the light of the others, importing objects and methods of study usually developed in relation to one moment into the next.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkirschenbaum-extreme_inscription (93) 20131001 0 -5+ progress/2012/08/notes_for_kirschenbaum-extreme_inscription.html New media scholars have ignored the hard drive despite its consistent presence in this history of electronic computing; Heim and others refer instead to its black box aspect. (93) basic drive technology remains remarkably unchanged since it was first introduced by IBM in the 1950s. The hard drive is therefore central to any narrative of computing and inscription in the latter half of the twentieth-century, yet it has never received extended consideration from scholarly observers of new media. (94) That the physical seclusion of the hard drive renders it an almost literal black box should not be underestimated in the extent to which its mechanism has gone unremarked in discussions of electronic textuality. (95) Little wonder then that electronic writingƒs first generation of theorists turned their gaze toward the screen rather than the disk. The cathode ray tube was the implicit and often explicit starting point for most discussions of electronic textuality because it was only as bit-mapped fonts on the screen that electronic letterforms become recognizable as writing.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkirschenbaum-extreme_inscription (95-96) 20131001a 0 -5+ progress/2012/08/notes_for_kirschenbaum-extreme_inscription.html Extend electronic textuality beyond flickering signifiers on the screen. (95-96) Nick Montforthas recently coined the term screen essentialismto refer to the bias towards monitors and display devices in new media studies, where the vast preponderance of critical attention has been focused on what happens on the windowed panes of the looking glass. . . . I believe that if we expand its definition to include machine-language markings and machine-readable inscriptions as well as alphanumerical writing, then the history and theory of electronic textuality must come to encompass more than just the screen-deep flickering signifiers that have thus far occupied critics in their investigations of new media.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkirschenbaum-extreme_inscription (96) 20131103a 0 -5+ progress/2012/08/notes_for_kirschenbaum-extreme_inscription.html Random access disk storage public debut in 1958. (96) Among the attractions at the 1958 Worldƒs Fair in Brussels, Belgium, visitors would have beheld Professor RAMAC, a four-ton IBM machine capable of offering up responses to usersƒ queries on a two thousand year historical span ranging from the birth of Christ to the launching of Sputnik 1. . . . The RAMAC was capable of storing five million 7-bit characters on 50 vertically stacked disks, each two feet wide and rotating at 1200 RPM.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkirschenbaum-extreme_inscription (98) 20131001b 0 -7+ progress/2012/08/notes_for_kirschenbaum-extreme_inscription.html The RAMAC Professor the first computer personality. (98) Computers were thus on record as instruments of prediction and prognostication, not retrospection. The RAMAC, by contrast, represented what was perhaps the first digital library. . . . As perhaps the earliest computational personality on record (almost a decade before Weizenbaumƒs ELIZA), the Professor was thus marked out as a first-world citizen of a post-colonial present rather than a trans-historical remember of things past. (99) Like the telegraphƒs automatic writing or the call of the telephone, the book that can be read without being opened offers up a whiff of the uncanny, the hint of haunted media.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkirschenbaum-extreme_inscription (101-102) 20131001c 0 -6+ progress/2012/08/notes_for_kirschenbaum-extreme_inscription.html Signal processor means analog voltage detection converted to binary representation is second-order because data storage is digital to analog to digital, producing real virtuality but itself unreadable in contrast to printed text. (101-102) It is a signal processor. . . . Likewise, to read data from the surface of the platter, these patterns of magnetic fields (actually patterns of magnetic resistance), which are received as analog signals, are interpreted by the headƒs detection circuitry as a voltage spike that is then converted into a binary digital representation (a one or a zero) by the driveƒs firmware. The relevant points are that writing and reading to the disk is ultimately a form of digital to analog to digital signal processing not unlike the function of a modem and that the data contained on the disk is a second-order representation of the actual digital values the data assumes for computation.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkirschenbaum-extreme_inscription (102 endnote 31) 20131001e 0 -14+ progress/2012/08/notes_for_kirschenbaum-extreme_inscription.html An instrument can see what reader reads: here is that special type of computed reality, like the PET scan. (102 endnote 31) Prior to MFM (Magnetic Force Microscopy), samples of magnetic recording media were imaged by treating them with a ferrofluid, a liquid magnetic suspension that produced patterns visible under an optical microscope. Today MFM is being supplemented by a newer technique call spin-stand imaging. . . . Three monitors provide views: one shows an optical magnification of the surface of the sample, the second displays instrumentation and settings, the third displays reconstructed images, both AFM and MFM. . . . If we do the math eight bits in a byte we can see that we might, assuming optimal conditions, be able to image seven or eight bytes per minute. . . . Though recoveries of complete files are theoretically possible (through what is known in the trade as heroic efforts ) the process would be extremely painstaking and requires weeks or many months.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkirschenbaum-extreme_inscription (102) 20131103c 0 -16+ progress/2012/08/notes_for_kirschenbaum-extreme_inscription.html Volumetric means traces only detectable by machinery, cannot be read by humans. (102) It is volumetric. . . . Typical aerial densities are now at around 10,000,000,000 bits (not bytes) per square inch. . . . some researchers speculate that we are about to hit the physical limit of how weak a magnetic field can be and still remain detectable, even by new generations of giant magnetoresistive drive heads and stochasitc decoding techniques. . . . an individual bit representation is currently a rectangular area about 4.0 um high and 0.5 um wide; by contrast, a red blood cell is about 8 um in diameter, an anthrax spore about 6 um. Individual bit representations are visible as traceable inscriptions using laboratory instrumentation like Magnetic Force Microscopy.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkirschenbaum-extreme_inscription (103 endnote 32) 20131001f 0 -5+ progress/2012/08/notes_for_kirschenbaum-extreme_inscription.html Good argument in note why codex book is also volumetric in this MSA where book is not a signal processor or differential. (103 endnote 32) Authors are often asked to add or remove content so as to bring their raw page counts into alignment with the multiples of a signature. . . . These quick examples, from early modern to contemporary publishing, indicate that the codex is volumetric in all three of its dimensions, length, breadth, and depth.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkirschenbaum-extreme_inscription (103) 20131001h 0 -13+ progress/2012/08/notes_for_kirschenbaum-extreme_inscription.html Apotheosis of codex links FAT to long history of language machines. (103) Every formatted hard disk stores its own self-representation, a table of file names and addresses known (on Windows systems) as the File Allocation Table (FAT). . . . The basic unit for file storage is not the sector but rather clusters, larger groupings of typically 32 or 64 contiguous sectors in a track. . . . (In a very basic way, then, all electronic data is hypermediato the FAT). . . . The FAT itself a purely textualized constructed and that data structures it maps, is arguably the apotheosisof a rationalization and an atomizationof writing space that began with the discrete pages of another random access device, the codex.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkirschenbaum-extreme_inscription (104) 20131001i 0 -21+ progress/2012/08/notes_for_kirschenbaum-extreme_inscription.html Motion-dependent means inscription and reading only occurs at particular rotational speed, riding on air cushion; rotation limits, try vibration, MSA air bearing technology essential to materiality of hard drive versus book. (104) It is motion-dependent. . . . Once the computer is turned on, the hard disk is in near constant motion. The spindle motor rotates the platters at up to 10,000 revolutions per minute. . . . once the head is in position at the appropriate track it simply waits for the target sector to rotate past. The rotation of the disk is what allows the head to detect reversals in the magnetic fluctuations on the surface of the platter (see differential, above). . . . (Thus, even the length and breadth of bit representations vastly exceed the flying height of the drive head). The rapid motion of the disk creates an air cushion that floats the head of the drive. Just as a shark must swim to breathe, a hard drive must be in motion to receive or return data. . . . Thus, a key aspect of the hard driveƒs materiality as an agent of digital inscription is quite literally created out of thin air.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkirschenbaum-extreme_inscription (105) 20131001k 0 -10+ progress/2012/08/notes_for_kirschenbaum-extreme_inscription.html Tie Wiener to Heidegger ready-at-hand, Freud magic slate. (105) Paradoxically, however, just as important is the fact that the same volumetric area on the surface of the disk can be recycled and rewritten. The ability to erase and change data rapidly was in fact a key characteristic of the computer as envisioned by pioneers like Norbert Wiener. . . . Interestingly, holographic storage, which some see as eventually replacing magnetic media data is stored in a solid array of crystals is not generally reusable. . . . Such a technology would explore current conventions of data storage, reconceiving human computer interaction as fundamentally as random-access non-volatile (but variable) storage media did in the 1950s.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkirschenbaum-extreme_inscription (107) 20131001l 0 -2+ progress/2012/08/notes_for_kirschenbaum-extreme_inscription.html Inscription, memory go from scarcity to superfluity, making possible Manovich big data; reference to Derrida Archive Fever. (107) This is a sea-change in the production and recording of human knowledge, one whose implications go far beyond the hard disk drive as a technology of writing and inscription alone. As Derridanoes in Archive Fever, what is no longer archived in the same was is no longer lived in the same way (18).
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkirschenbaum-extreme_inscription (109) 20131001n 0 -13+ progress/2012/08/notes_for_kirschenbaum-extreme_inscription.html Is there a kernel of the subject apart from digital accumulations? (109) Or to take one final instance: you are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that, says Don Delillo in the voice of a government technocrat in White Noise(141). While superficially compatible with Gordon Bellƒs statements, these literary examples all complicate the ambitions of a project of MyLifeBits, whose rhetoric at times is disarmingly literal. . . . The real question . . . how do these accumulations, these massive drifts of data, interact with irreducible reality of lived experience? . . .
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkirschenbaum-extreme_inscription (110) 20131001o 0 -10+ progress/2012/08/notes_for_kirschenbaum-extreme_inscription.html Question myth of total convergence; heterogeneity of digital inscription; effects of control, docility through DRM. (110) Part of what enables the myth (or the meme) is the slippage between media convergence and total recall. . . . This essay has worked to discover the heterogeneityof digital inscriptionto the furthest extent possible, indeed to the nanoscale where, with the aid of a magnetic force microscope, individual bits take on their own weight and heft (like snowflakes, no two are quite alike). Even without the aid of such exotic instrumentation, however, the non-virtual realities of our contemporary media ecology should lead us to question the homogenizing myth of convergence. . . . To put the matter even more bluntly, what happens when the titanic ambition of my desire to save a copy of every song Iƒve ever listened to collides with the iceberg of DRM?
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkirschenbaum-extreme_inscription (111) 20131001p 0 -9+ progress/2012/08/notes_for_kirschenbaum-extreme_inscription.html Hashing to produce redundant expressions of original data, immateriality through lack of localized imperfections from highly engineered materiality: like 2x and 10x rules in electrical and electronic circuit design. (111) Every sector of data on the disk includes error correcting codes derived according to established algorithms; the basic idea is that the mathematics generates a bit sequence that serves as a redundant expression of the original data (this is called hashing). . . . Absent are the range of small, localized glitches characteristic of other media the typo in the newspaper, the scratch on the vinyl record, snow on the TV channel that remind us of their mundane materiality. . . . While it is just this kind of behavior that is often cited as evidence of digital mediaƒs putative immateriality, the hard driveƒs error-free performance is in fact the laborious and artificially achieved end product of decades of computer science and engineering.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkirschenbaum-extreme_inscription (111-112) 20131001q 0 -13+ progress/2012/08/notes_for_kirschenbaum-extreme_inscription.html Must study storage if interested in texts as representations: fits well with my call to study ECT in general if interested in the philosophy of computing. (111-112) There is a fiction then that computing is all about numbers, especially ones and zeros. But computing is really all about storage. Data cannot subsist without material representation. Given this, the history and technology of storage should be a prime locus of inquiry for anyone interested in computing from the standpoint of technologies of writing, textuality, and inscription in short, the stuff of representations. . . . In essence youƒll never see storage in that youƒll never encounter your data in its entirety, in a format akin to the tree views we now take for granted (that which You Are Your C exploits). Instead you will filter, mine, search, retrieve. . . . The kind of serendipitous discovery of old files and applications recounting in Microserfts will become a function of the fluke search result, not manual tidying.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkirschenbaum-extreme_inscription (112) 20131001r 0 -3+ progress/2012/08/notes_for_kirschenbaum-extreme_inscription.html Read back von Neumann architecture concretized in library building organization, as Japanese artist I cannot recall enacts logic gates. (112) You can almost see the von Neumann architecture being concretized at the macro-level as the bricks and mortar of the library building the central processing unit are re-engineered to house a state of the art media and information center, packed with computers themselves packed with state of the art disk arrays and hard drive clusters. The books meanwhile, the random access devices of old, are being placed recursively it would seem in storage, shunted away to a remote locale where they will be available upon request. At a moment when we would clearly not be wrong to speak of storage as a cultural condition a storage generation or storage fever the hard drive is not the only relevant technology.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkittler-gramophone_film_typewriter (xl) 20111227 0 -2+ progress/2011/09/notes_for_kittler-gramophone_film_typewriter.html Kittler sees this Heideggerian shimmering on the boundary of polar opposites as well, although I detect in his language a reticence at throwing oneself life long into programming. (xl) Heidegger said as much with his fine statement that technology itself prevents any experience of its essence. However, Heideggerƒs textbook-like confusion of writing and experience need not be; in lieu of philosophical inquiries into essence, simple knowledge will do.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkittler-protected_mode (158) 20131001a 0 -8+ progress/2012/12/notes_for_kittler-protected_mode.html One-way function of programming languages; one-way subjectivity of consumers: why inline assembler example is significant, as well as paying attention to initial one instead of zero required for correct hardware operation initial power on state of pmrek. (158) At the risk of having already done crazy long ago, the only thing one can deduce from all of this is that software has obviously gained in user-friendliness as it more closely approximates the cryptological ideal of the one-way function. The higher and more effortless the programming languages, the more insurmountable the gap between those languages and a hardware that still continues to do all of the work. . . . The sum hides the addends, the product the factors, and so forth. (158) In any case, the subjects of the Microsoft Corporation did not simply fall from the sky, but first had to be produced like all of their media-historical predecessors the readers of books, film audiences and TV viewers. The only problem now is how their subjugation can be hidden from the subjects in order that they fall in step with the global triumph march.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkittler-protected_mode (161) 20131001d 0 -12+ progress/2012/12/notes_for_kittler-protected_mode.html Foucault power argument from mute efficacy of technical implementation: look at ICs to understand society as form of technology studies. (161) With this authority and through this authority, conversations could in fact still be conducted; however, technically implemented privilege levels draw their power precisely from mute efficacy. (162) As a result, a double shadows the analysis of power systems, that immense assignment that was Foucaultƒs legacy. To begin with, one should attempt to abandon the usual practice of conceiving of power as a function of so-called society, and, conversely, attempt to construct sociology from the chipƒs architectures. For the present at least, it is a reasonable assumption to analyze the privilege levels of a microprocessor as the reality of precisely that bureaucracy that ordered its design and called for its mass application. . . . It is no coincidence that in the 80386, it is precisely the input and output commands that are protected by the highest privilege level in an empire in which the public views the rest of the world only through the haze of television news, even the thought of foreign policy is a privilege of the government. . . . Whether there are better ones is beside the point because they would in any case also have to be bureaucracies; but a competition between different systems and different bureaucracies would as such already allow the subjects of MS-DOS to breath a little easier.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkittler-protected_mode (162-163) 20131001e 0 -15+ progress/2012/12/notes_for_kittler-protected_mode.html Classic power dilemma because highest protection allotted to input and output, yet this is how the user uses the machine. (162-163) With its move out of front offices and everyday language into the micrometer realm, power has also changed the processes and the working surfaces. . . . In silicon itself there can be, to borrow from Lacan, no other of the other, which is also to say, no protection from the protection. . . . At the level of the machine, then, protection mechanisms have no absolutely protected hiding-place. Because microprocessors must despite everything remain usable to users, that is, communicate with them, Intelƒs Protected Mode describes a classic power dilemma. (163) What such prohibitions conclusively demonstrate, however, is only the impossibility of perfect access control. . . . Once the difference has been rendered programmable, however, it is already vulnerable to all sorts of circumventions.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkittler-protected_mode (164) 20131001f 0 -9+ progress/2012/12/notes_for_kittler-protected_mode.html Vulnerable to circumventions, such as changing address boundaries of Real Mode (higher addresses trigger Interrupt 13) with an Assembler routine. (164) A single subordinate clause in the manual discloses that any address boundaries in Real Mode are no more and no less than presuppositions programmed into the system start-up. . . . Instead of the deliberately low default value that the CPU automatically loads into the hidden sections of its segment register at every reversion to Real Mode, programs could also set completely different values. (164) One hundred lines of Assembler, but only of Assembler, solve the problem of a postmodern metaphysics. At the risk of going crazy, they lead through MS-DOS beyond MS-DOS. Along with the infamous sound barrier at which the operating memory in DOS remains limited to a ridiculous mega-byte, all of the advantages for which Windows is praised dwindle to nothing. In a drastic paradox, it is precisely the most antiquated of all operating systems that provides the trap door out of the operating system.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkittler-protected_mode (165) 20131001g 0 -6+ progress/2012/12/notes_for_kittler-protected_mode.html Chaos in engineers empiricism against computability of theory, but saving power in danger of protected model also for machines. (165) Such chaos does not reign at the elevated level of information science, where the computability of Finite State Machines and their ability to predict is argued over in general, but rather at the modest level of the engineerƒs empiricism. (165) In other words, information science appears to be confronted with internal information obstacles. Information science must refer to the actual domain of code, even if the theory could generate completely different models (and should). And despite the will and belief of the codeƒs developers, decodings are just as possible as they are rare. Long after the end of the print monopoly and authorship, the phantom of humanity apparently makes sure that mere opinions or even assertions of protection will continue to be recorded, as opposed to actually cracking the codes. A systems program must be created precisely to this end to be used by programmers, to begin with, but in principle for machines as well.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkittler-protected_mode (166) 20131103 0 -8+ progress/2012/12/notes_for_kittler-protected_mode.html Codes subject to same opacity and opacity as everyday languages. (166) A discourse analysis whose elements are obviously not only words but also codes, would, of course, level the sacred distinction between everyday languages and formal languages. In light of the wonderful orthogonality that, for example, Motorolaƒs processor series flaunts since the 68000, that would be heresy. The history of Protected Mode as a half-compatible, half-incompatible extrapolation of good old standards could, however, teach us that codes are subject to the same opacity as everyday languages. . . . However, Intelƒs new generation de-optimized precisely this speed advantage, while still permitting the synonymous commands to survive for compatibility reasons. Thus the code has achieved a redundancy that everyday language already boasted in Fregeƒs wonderful example of evening star and morning star.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkittler-protected_mode (167) 20130123 0 -6+ progress/2012/12/notes_for_kittler-protected_mode.html Opacity of machine languages as in the examples given fit with sourcery and vicissitudes of execution arguments, and go beyond rejection by Ong as artificial because they have a social history that exhibits parallels to characteristic of natural languages like redundancy; confounds desire of Hilbert to formalize everyday language. (167) it becomes a Babylonian tower in which the ruins of towers that have already been demolished remain built-in. Protected Mode as both the enemy and co-existent partner of a Real Mode that has already been superceded technically for some time is computer history on chip. And David Hilbertƒs dreamlike program to clear out the opacity of everyday language once and for all through formalization is undone not only at the clear, axiomatic level of Godel or Turing, but already by the empiricism of the engineers. Codes with compatibility problems begin to grow wild and to adopt the same opacity of everyday languages that have made people their subjects for thousands of years. The wonderful term source code becomes literal truth. (167) Another tower of Babel, on the chip.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkittler-protected_mode (167) 20131001h 0 -2+ progress/2012/12/notes_for_kittler-protected_mode.html Machines may have already taken command; impossible to test ICs independently of the producer. (167) Turingƒs old idea of allowing the machines themselves to roll out their code may well have already secretly come true. Precisely because the complex function of highly integrated circuits (aside from memory-ICs) can no longer, as in the case of a simple, logical connection, be checked by testing all of the possible input signal combinations, tests that are independent of the producer are in order.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkittler-protected_mode (168) 20131001j 0 -2+ progress/2012/12/notes_for_kittler-protected_mode.html Need to study his more recent texts, which may not be translated. (168) Hugo von Hofmannsthalonce ascribed the ability to read what has never been written to the wonderful being called Man. Similar crypto-analyses must become universal and mechanical in the chaos of codes that begins with the world-historical dismissal of everyday language in favor of a universal discrete machine.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkittler-there_is_no_software (147) 20131001 0 -9+ progress/2012/12/notes_for_kittler-there_is_no_software.html The problem in era beyond literacy is that writing is hidden in computer memory cells that are able to read and write autonomously. (147) The bulk of written texts including the paper I am actually reading to you no longer exist in perceivable time and space, but in a computer memoryƒs transistor cells. . . . our writing scene may well be defined by a self-similarity of letters over some six orders of decimal magnitude. . . . It also seems to hide the very act of writing.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkittler-there_is_no_software (153) 20131001j 0 -10+ progress/2012/12/notes_for_kittler-there_is_no_software.html Hasslacher discretization of continuous algorithmic descriptions as real programming versus Turing computational imagination: failure to appreciate materiality of computation is flaw in philosophies of programming Kittler criticizes. (153) [quoting Brosl Hasslacher] We must reduce a continuous algorithmic description to one codable on a device whose fundamental operations are countable, and we do this by various forms of chopping up into pieces, usually called discretization. . . . The compiler then further reduces this model to a binary form determined largely by machine constraints.The outcome is a discrete and synthetic microworld image of the original problem, whose structure is arbitrarily fixed by a differencing scheme and computational architecture chosen at random. . . . This is what we actually do when we compute up a model of the physical world with physical devices.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkittler-there_is_no_software (153) 20131001k 0 -9+ progress/2012/12/notes_for_kittler-there_is_no_software.html From Shannon thesis to transistor to microprocessor, the technology narrative of the schematism of media recommended in GFT. (153) When Claude Shannon, in 1937, proved in what is probably the most consequential M.A. thesis every written that simple telegraph switching relays can implement, by means of their different interconnections, the whole of Boolean algebra, such a physical notation system was established. And when the integrated circuit, developed in the 1970s out of Shockleyƒs transistor, combined on one and the same chip silicon as a controllable resistor with its own oxide as an almost perfect isolator, the programmability of matter could finally take control, just as Turing had predicted. . . . That is to say, millions of basic elements work under almost the same physical conditions, especially as regards the most critical, namely, temperature-dependent degradations, and yet electrically all of them are highly isolated from each other. (154) Thus, the very isolation between digital or discrete elements accounts for a drawback in connectivity that otherwise, according to current force laws as well as to the basics of combinatorial logics, would be bounded only by a maximum equalling the square number of all elements involved.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkittler-there_is_no_software (154-155) 20131001l 0 -9+ progress/2012/12/notes_for_kittler-there_is_no_software.html Maximal connectivity limitation of isolated switching components may be overcome with physical, nonprogrammable systems, changing nature of programming activity from stored program ideology of Turing machines: at this point also there is no software, but still forms of programming or engineering, compare to two directions for the future in conclusion of Code in Software Studies. (154-155) Precisely this maximal connectivity, on the other, physical side, defines nonprogrammable systems, be they waves or beings. . . . Software in the usual sense of an ever-feasible abstraction would not exist any longer. . . . programming it will have little to do any longer with approximated Turing machines.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKkittler-there_is_no_software (155) 20131001m 0 -14+ progress/2012/12/notes_for_kittler-there_is_no_software.html Biochauvanistic future computers based on neural networks complemented with very nearness of existing silicon systems to this truly solid state model. (155) In what I have tried to describe are badly needed machines that . . . certain Dubrovink observerƒs eyes might be tempted to recognize, under evolutionary disguises or not, the familiar face of man. . . . Maybe. At the same time, however, our equally familiar silicon hardware obeys many of the requisites for such highly connected, nonprogrammable systems. . . . To minimize all the noise that it would be impossible to eliminate is the price we pay for structurally programmable machines. The inverse strategy of maximizing noise would not only find the way back from IBM to Shannon, it may well be the only way to enter that body of real numbers originally known as chaos.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKleorke-rebranding_the_platform (259) 20131003b 0 -9+ progress/2013/06/notes_for_leorke-rebranding_the_platform.html Implication the platform level is fundamental, comparable to computing systems and computer architecture, entangling in material and figurative understandings. (259) Nonetheless, the authors taxonomy implies that there is a linear progression across the various levels, with the platform as the base or most fundamental level. . . . In this sense, Bogost and Montfort s approach to platform studies is thus entangled within the intersection between the material and figurative understandings of platforms that Keating and Cambrosio (2003) identify. (260) The methodology established by the series editors in the foreword is, at first glance, refreshingly open in this regard. They avoid proscribing a single theoretical or critical approach, instead listing several common traits that all books will contain. These include a focus on a single platform or a closely related family of platforms ; a rigorous technical analysis of these platforms; and an examination of their wider cultural and social importance (2009a, pp. Vii-viii).
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKleorke-rebranding_the_platform (261-262) 20131003c 0 -10+ progress/2013/06/notes_for_leorke-rebranding_the_platform.html Black box, closed nature of Wii (Gillespie) reduces technical rigor and detail of platform explication, which may support continuing studies of archaic architectures that are open because of their simplicity, at the same time that hacks and mods are part of the gaming experience. (261-262) A focus on technical rigour and the material architecture of computing technologies is a hallmark of Platform Studies and, depending on one s tastes, also its most laborious trademark feature. . . . In contrast to the Atari VCS, which is perhaps much easier for programmers to grasp and pull apart , the Wii is a typically closed system with its technological core concealed beneath its sleek and seemingly simplistic veneer. . . . This is in contrast to old school computer systems like the Atari VCS, for instance, which have given rise to everything from glitch electronica to the development of retro games that deliberately exploit their archaic architecture (see Krapp, 2011). (262) They [Jones and Thiruvathukal] contend that the Wii demonstrates different degrees of openness through its gadgets and peripherals like the Wii Remote and sensor bar, which have been transformed through both gaming and non-gaming hacks and mods.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKleorke-rebranding_the_platform (263) 20131003e 0 -1+ progress/2013/06/notes_for_leorke-rebranding_the_platform.html Amiga study appears to pick up with era following Racing the Beam. (263) As such, the development of the Amiga is examined as both a response the impending threat of the game industry s collapse, as well as a visionary exploration of the emerging capabilities of the personal computer that would eventually become a commonplace, mundane feature of contemporary culture.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKleorke-rebranding_the_platform (264) 20131003f 0 -5+ progress/2013/06/notes_for_leorke-rebranding_the_platform.html Too much technical detail not directly connected to philosophical study of platforms; concern about limits of book form evident in comment about accompanying website. (264) It is replete with technical specifications, programming instructions and detailed deconstructions of various programs and applications, to the extent that the lay reader not familiar with the intricacies of computer programming myself among them might struggle to extract value from every page. (264) This attempt to reach out to enthusiasts of the system is reinforced by the accompanying website for the book (http://amiga.filfre.net) which provides a wealth of technical resources and aids such as images and video clips to accompany the explanations provided in each chapter, as well as programs that can be downloaded and run on an actual Amiga console or an emulator. (264) At times, though, the book is too overeager in drawing links between the Amiga and contemporary digital technologies, without the rigorous historical, discursive analysis that would be required of a scholarly work to make these connections.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKleorke-rebranding_the_platform (267) 20130616 0 -1+ progress/2013/06/notes_for_leorke-rebranding_the_platform.html Extensions of formulaic approach laid out by Montfort and Bogost may include reflection on selection of platform to study itself, investigation of implicit claims and limitations of platform level, and the assumed ontological implications of the tiered model itself. (267) This entails becoming more self-reflexive about what it means to focus on the platform as an object of theoretical analysis.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmalabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain (xii) 20130910 1 -10+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_malabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain.html Jeannerod: decentralized control and event over law distinguish brain plasticity concept over traditional metaphors of a fixed, centralized, wired machine in a theory already self-reflexive of its relation to views of social organization. (xii) The machine learns, differentiates itself, reconstructs itself. Briefly put, it privileges the event over the law. Omnipresent plasticity changes our view of the brain and its functioning. But Malabou goes further, seeking to show that the transition from a wired brain to a plastic brain is really the transition from a brain-machine to a brain-world. According to her, this change in perspective would affect not merely the model of cerebral functioning but also the concept we forge of ourselves and our social organization. . . . Might we have a neo-liberal brain that would impose its model on our socioeconomic organization? Or, inversely, might the global economyƒs upheaval generate a conceptual change what would affect, by contagion, our view of the way the brain functions?
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmalabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain (xiv) 20130910a 0 -2+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_malabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain.html Jeannerod: new view leads to change to social and environmental comportment moreso than brain change itself, although likely room for synaptogenesis as Hayles claims. (xiv) What changes is the organization of society, the outcome of organizational forces and macroscopic interactions over which the brain has little influence. Thus the problem is, rather, that of understanding how an individual brain can respond to the challenges of its social environment.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmalabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain (xiv) 20130910b 0 -5+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_malabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain.html Jeannerod: plasticity is mechanism for adapting, different from flexibility for submitting, so message may be to learn to say no to new capitalistic world order, already hinting opening for floss adoption and critical programming. (xiv) We clearly have no consciousness of the plastic mechanisms forming our personality and guaranteeing its continuity. Yet by trying to become conscious of them we may, Malabou proposes, acquire a new freedom, that of imposing our own organization on the world rather than submitting to the influences of a milieu. Plasticity, in effect, is not flexibility. Let us not forget that plasticity is a mechanism for adapting, while flexibility is a mechanism for submitting. Adapting is not submitting, and, in this sense, plasticity ought not to serve as an alibi for submitting to the new world order being dreamed up by capitalism.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmalabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain (6-7) 20130912d 0 -13+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_malabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain.html Synaptic efficacy tied to individual experience (Jeannerod). (6-7) Synaptic efficacy grows or declines under the impact of strictly individual experience. . . . Marc Jeannerodexplains: If a synapse belongs to a circuit in frequent use, it tends to grow in volume, its permeability increases, and its efficacy increases. Inversely, a little-used synapse tends to become less efficacious. The theory of synaptic efficacy thus allows us to explain the gradual molding of a brain under the influence of individual experience. (7) It is precisely because contrary to what we normally think the brain is not already made that we must ask what we should do with it, what we should do with this plasticity that makes us, precisely in the sense of a work: sculpture, modeling, architecture. (8) Brain plasticity constitutes a possible margin of improvisation with regard to genetic necessity. . . . If neuronal function is an event or should bring about events, this is so precisely because it is itself able to create events, to eventualize the program and thus, in a certain sense, to deprogram it.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmalabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain (18) 20130914c 0 -8+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_malabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain.html Developmental plasticity during which brain forms itself creating spider web arborizations accompanied by neuronal death to solidify the connections. (18) These spiderƒs webs, neuronal connections also called arborizations, are constituted progressively over the course of an individualƒs development. We use the term plasticityprecisely to characterize this neuronal genesis. The brain, in effect, forms itself. (19) In the course of the process of establishing connections, the scultporƒs chisel is the phenomenon called apoptosisor cell death. . . . In the human brain, neuronal death begins at the end of gestation and continues after birth, for at least the first six months of life.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmalabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain (21) 20130914e 0 -4+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_malabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain.html Template formation. (21) Indeed, we see that cerebral morphogenesis results not in the establishment of a rigid and definitively stable structure but rather in the formation of what we might call a template. This is then refined (sculpted) during development and, in a subtler but always powerful way, throughout life. The nervous activity of pre-established circuits thus takes over from apoptotic sculping. Henceforth the environment of the brain qua organ (the modeling of connections) and its external environment (synaptic modulation by influence of the surroundings) play the role of morphogenic factors.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmalabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain (21-22) 20130914f 0 -9+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_malabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain.html Creativity in primitive nervous systems expressing modulational plasticity over lifetime; Hebb plastic synapses. (21-22) In effect, there is a sort of neuronal creativity that depends on nothing but the individualƒs experience, his life, and his interactions with the surroundings. This creativity is not reserved solely for the human brain but is already at work in the most rudimentary nervous system. (22) According to [Holding] Hebb, we must postulate the existence of plastic synapses capable of adapting their transmission efficacy. . . . The synapse is the privileged locus where nerve activity can leave a trace that can displace itself, modify itself, and transform itself through repetition of a past function. (23) Neurons somehow rememberstimulation. Everything happens as if there were no stabilization of memories except on the condition of a potential destabilization of the general landscape of memory.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmalabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain (26) 20130914h 0 -3+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_malabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain.html Unsettle concept of stability, brain as machine. (26) The production of new neurons therefore does not simply serve to replace cells that have died; it participates in modulational plasticity and, in doing so, opens the concept of plasticity slightly more, just far enough to unsettle the concept of stability. (27) [quoting The Curious Partition of New Neurons ] Adult neurogenesis, being the final mechanism of plasticity and one strongly controlled by a subjectƒs personal experience and environmental interactions, very likely constitutes an additional mechanism of individuation with the major difference that it is operational throughout life. (27) The idea of cellular renewal, repair, and resourcefulness as auxiliaries of synaptic plasticity brings to light the power of healing treatment, scarring, compensation, regeneration, and the capacity of the brain to build natural prostheses.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmalabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain (31) 20130914i 0 -2+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_malabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain.html Does brain plasticity model allow contemplation of recognition, non-domination and liberty or biological justification of efficient, adaptable, flexible social organizations? (31) Does brain plasticity, taken as a model, allow us to think a multiplicity of interactions in which the participants exercise transformative effects on one another through the demands of recognition, of non-domination, and of liberty? Or must we claim, on the contrary, that, between determinism and polyvalence, brain plasticity constitutes the biological justification of a type of economic, political, and social organization in which all that matters is the result of action as such: efficacy, adaptability unfailing flexibility?
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmalabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain (34-35) 20130922b 0 -10+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_malabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain.html Inadequacy of programming analogy of cybernetic metaphor based on sequence of symbols; Jeannerod preferring multidimensional map which could also represent software structures. (34-35) The cybernetic metaphor has also had its day. . . . Very simply, the analogy between the cybernetic domain and the cerebral domain rests on the idea that thinking amounts to calculating, and calculating to programming. . . . As Jeannerod says: the activity of the nervous system can be better represented as the outline of a multidimensional map than as a sequence of symbols. The representation of the center collapses into the network.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmalabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain (36) 20130922c 0 -6+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_malabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain.html Deleuze acentered crossing voids between neurons implying fragmentary organization of ensemble of micro-powers more than central committee. (36) Gilles Deleuze, who is one of the rare philosophers to have taken an interest in neuroscientific research since the 1980s, goes so far as to talk of the brain as an acentered system, the effect of a break with the classical image that has been formed of it. . . . Nervous information must cross voids, and something aleatory thus introduces itself between the emission and the reception of a message, constituting the field of action of plasticity. (36) The discovery of a probabilistic or semifortuitous cerebral space, ƒan uncertain systemƒ, according to Deleuze, implies the idea of a multiple, fragmentary organization, an ensemble of micro-powersmore than the form of a central committee.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmalabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain (37) 20130922d 0 -2+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_malabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain.html Dennett casts plasticity as eventlike dimension of mechanical with multiple supple levels of command, not just number-crunchers, rather than rejecting comparison between brain and computer. (37) In effect, [Daniel] Dennettpresents the computer as itself a plastic organization, with multiple and supple levels of command. (38) It is not important here to determine whether such a machine exists, but simply to insist that this conception says out loud that we live deep inside, more precisely, that computers are not ƒnumber-crunching machinesƒ, something we experience daily, and that plasticity perhaps designates nothing but the eventlike dimension of the mechanical.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmalabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain (39) 20130922e 0 -8+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_malabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain.html Cinematographic function of brain configuring the world; plasticity of time inscribed in brain, to which we are initially blind because it is our time and our world. (39) We find here the poetical and aesthetic force that is the fundamental, organizing attribute of plasticity: its power to configure the world. Here again, Deleuze has perfectly analyzed this power by seeing in it the cinematographic function par excellence. (39) The plasticity of time is inscribed in the brain. And we do not see it because it is a question of ourtime. We do not see it because it is a question of ourworld. . . .
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmalabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain (40) 20130922g 0 -5+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_malabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain.html Transition between neuroscientific and management discourse epitomized by Boltanski and Chiapello arguing current capitalism of networks, teams and projects explode bureaucratic prison of centralized authority; compare to Spinuzzi on networks. (40) The questioning of centrality, principal transition point between the neuronal and the political, is also the principle transition point between neuroscientific discourse and the discourse of management, between the functioning of the brain and the functioning of a company. (41) In the nineties, say Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, creativity, reactivity, and flexibility are the new watchwords, and the bureaucratic prison explodes. Or again, the hierarchical principle is demolished and organizations become flexible, innovative, and highly proficient. For this new organization, the networkis the master term: current capitalism obeys the principle of mobile or lean production companies, working as networkswith a multitude of participants, organizing work in the form of teams or projects. (42) Like neuronal cohesion, contemporary corporate economic and social organization is not of a central or centralizing type but rests on a plurality of mobile and atomistic centers, deployed according to a connectionist model.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmalabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain (55-56) 20130923 0 -7+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_malabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain.html Accepting neuronal man and self but questioning continuity as having discontinuous development and function, thus complex continuity. (55-56) The current state of research and observation allows cognitive scientists to conclude that thought, knowledge, desires, and affects all proceed on a neuronal, that is to say, biological, basis, and that the mental images constituting the life of the mind are indeed formed in the brain. . . . In the most general way, it constitutes a new approach to the subject by affirming the existence of a neuronal self. It is the weakest because the certainty of the continuity between the neuronal and the mental can obviously never be a strictly scientific postulate. It necessarily constitutes a philosophical or epistemological position and such positions are not always clearly articulated.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmalabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain (57) 20130923a 0 -2+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_malabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain.html Damasio and LeDoux prominent neurobiologists affirming consciousness is owner of movie-in-the-brain emerging within the movie. (57) Prominent neurobiologists such as Antonio Damasioand Joseph LeDouxnow clearly affirm this point: consciousness is nothing other than how the owner of the movie-in-the-brain emerges within the movie, and, as a result, we need to grasp the essence of a person in the brain. To examine this essence, we will follow the demonstrative order adopted by LeDoux in his book Synaptic Self.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmalabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain (59-60) 20130923d 0 -5+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_malabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain.html Multiple levels including auto-representation of the brain, forming prototypical form of symbolic activity. (59-60) Here is the most interesting and most subtle point of the analysis: through modification of the primitive or primordial representational function that is the work of the proto-self. Indeed, one must suppose that the proto-self presents itself as a coherent collection of neural patterns which represent the state of the organism, moment by moment, at multiple levels of the brain. Thus there actually is, contrary to Bergsonƒs claim, a self-representation of the brain, an auto-representation of cerebral structure that coincides with the auto-representation of the organism. This internal power of representation inherent in neuronal activity constitutes the prototypical form of symbolic activity. (60) From one end of the chain to the other, Damasio explains, one must assume that the brain somehow recounts its own becoming, that it elaborates it in the form of an account.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmalabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain (61) 20130923e 0 -2+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_malabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain.html Mental patterns are translation of neuronal patterns developed as re-representation of nonconscious proto-self in process of being modified. (61) From the proto-self to conscience there thus develops an extensive re-representation of the nonconscious proto-self in the process of being modified. This process corresponds to the translation of neuronal patterns into mental patterns.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmalabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain (62) 20130923f 0 -5+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_malabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain.html Translation from neuronal to mental remains obscure, whether biologically programmed, result of individual experience and history, or both, perhaps due to imbrication of neuroscience with computational methods of translation. (62) Despite the apparent assurance and certitude that govern the discourse of the adherence of the mental to the neuronal, the process of the translation of the givens from one domain to the other remains obscure. (64) We do not truly know what originally makes these transitions possible: Are they biologically programmed? Are they the fruit of experience or of the individual history? Are they the result of both? (64) What remains mysterious (and we cannot be satisfied here by evoking the wisdom of nature ) is therefore the deep structure of transformation, the transition from a universal self, not yet particularized, to the singular self, to that which I am, that which we are.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmalabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain (65) 20130923g 0 -3+ progress/2013/09/notes_for_malabou-what_should_we_do_with_our_brain.html Default to Darwinism, selection toward efficiency, by not interpreting, raising political, economic, social questions again. (65) According to the logic of these Darwinian positions, only those neuronal configurations capable of survival, thus those capable of being the best, the highest performing, would be converted into images. Only the most useful synaptic connections would be modulated or reinforced. There would be at the very heart of the self a selection oriented toward efficiency.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (2) 20121129 0 -2+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html Unexplored territory of engineering level consideration of platforms informed by history of material texts, programming and computing systems. (2) But studies have seldom delved into the code of these programs, and they have almost never investigated the platforms that are the basis of creative computing. Serious and in-depth consideration of circuits, chips, peripherals, and how they are integrated and used is a largely unexplored territory for both critic and creator.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (15) 20131024b 0 -4+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html Much as possible because the VCS machine was simple and did a few things very well. (15) So much was possible on the Atari VCS, and not because it was a powerful computer. It wasnƒt powerful at all. Rather, so much was possible because the machine was so simple. The very few things it could do well drawing a few movable objects on the screen one line at a time while uttering sounds using square waves and noise could be put together in a wide variety of ways to achieve surprising results.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (15-16) 20131024c 0 -10+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html Plan of book focuses on certain game cartridges that exemplify range of possibilities latent in original platform. (15-16) The cartridges that are central to our discussion are as follows: Combat, the cartridge that was originally bundled with the Atari VCS. Adventure, which established the action-adventure genre. Pac-Man, a more direct take on a successful arcade game. Yarsƒ Revenge, Atariƒs best-selling original VCS game. Pitfall!, another innovative original that was developed at Activision, the first third-party videogame company. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. . . shows how a compelling cinematic situation can be translated effectively into a videogame challenge.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (21) 20131024e 0 -2+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html Early use of ROMs in video games with amazing account of sprites still stored in diode matricies rather than memory, which eventually becomes common media converging element. (21) Atariƒs driving game Gran Trak 10was the very first to have a store of ROM, but it did not use a chip to implement this memory. It stored sprite graphics in a matrix of diodes, each of which was placed individually on the printed circuit board.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (23) 20131024f 0 -5+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html Discussion of MOS 6532 RIOT/PIA. (23) The chip on the VCS board that handles most of the input from controllers is a standard one, a MOS Technology 6532. . . . Because of these three functions, the chip is called the RIOT (RAM/Input/Output/Timer); in the Stella Programmerƒs Guide, it is referred to as the Peripheral Interface Adaptor (PIA).
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (25) 20131024h 0 -1+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html Immediate control via joysticks was once an innovation, inspiring direct manipulation; recall Burks, Goldstine and von Neumann account of ringing a bell and flashing a strobe to indicate computation is complete, then going into an atemporal state until reset for the next computation. (25) The is the type of immediate control that helped inspire the direct manipulation concept of computer interfaces in the 1980s.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (33) 20131024n 0 -5+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html Claim that VCS programs exhibit manageable complexity, such as not being compiled from a high level language; assembly closer to machine level, so that VCS ROM is literally a physical copy of the source code, and can be disassembled (if permitted). (33) Compilers for languages like C and Java take higher-level commands and convert them into sets of machine instructions. Assemblers simply reformat processor instructions. For this reason, a VCS ROM is essentially just a copy of its source code, obfuscated by the process of assembly. A disassemblercan be used to convert ROM instructions and data back into readable assembly language code. Code obtained in this manner does not include any natural language information labeling memory locations, or lines, or subroutines, but someone familiar with the platform, given some time, can often usefully reconstruct a programƒs source code using this technique.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (33-34) 20131024p 0 -9+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html Main loop does all other control operations during vertical blanking interval of television electron beam, then executing kernel code that paces the beam drawing the screen. (33-34) The basic flow of Combatfollows the progress of the TVƒs electron beam, busily preparing each line that is to be drawn while the current one is appearing on the screen. During the vertical blanking interval, as the beam moves from the bottom of the screen to the top, the VCS running Combatdoes the computation necessary to process input, deal with game logic, and update the score if necessary. (34) The first routine in Combatƒs main loop checks the position of the VC console switches. . . . The Atari VCS has no operating system to intercept inputs and respond to common ones. (34) Finally, after all of this is done, a routine called the kernel is called to draw the display by setting up the scan lines one at a time. The kernel is the last routine in Combatƒsmain loop.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (37-38) 20131024r 0 -2+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html First artificial intelligence game players as variations on original two-player games. (37-38) From the standpoint of the systemƒs launch in 1977, the really interesting game variations in Video Olympicsmay have been not the four-player ones but the two one-player Robot Pong variants that were offered the first ones on the cartridge. In the austere 2K cartridge, amid the fifty variations in numerous different categories, with reference to other simulated computer game opponents, come to be called artificial intelligence.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (39) 20131024s 0 -2+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html Importance of making mistakes resembling human response to make play more fun, a form of Turing test implicit in videogames. (39) Effective game AI needs to simulate good, intelligent human behavior. But as Relay Moe demonstrates, convincing AI also needs to simulate certain types of unintelligenthuman behavior, in the form of mistakes that make play more fun.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (49) 20131024v 0 -4+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html Persistence of concept of movement from room to room solved by Robinett for Adventure. (49) This movement set the standard for later action-adventure games, including the tile-based games in the Ultimaand The Legend of Zeldaseries. Even though most contemporary action-adventure games use three-dimensional (3D) rendered worlds rather than two-dimensional (2D) top-drawn ones, the concept of movement from room to room, as in a castle or dungeon, persists. [Warren] Robinettƒssolution to contiguous movement through space may seem obvious to us now, but it required a great deal of engineering, given the nature of VCS screen graphics. (51) Adventurerequired the creative adaptation of the machineƒs technical features for new, unforeseen purposes.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (53) 20131024x 0 -4+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html Good point about using existing technical objects in new ways as a form of technological innovation, such as graphics registers for player avatars and castle walls, and how it affects technical and expressive consequences. (53) The repurposing of graphics registers has both technical and expressive consequences. Technical innovations are often understood as the creation of new technology new materials, new chip designs, new algorithms. But technical innovation can also mean using existing technical constraints in new ways, something that produces interesting results when combined with creative goals. Designing the TIAƒs graphics registers to support games like Pongand Tankrepresents an interesting aspect of how platform development happens: reusing those graphics registers for player avatars and castle walls demonstrates a negotiation between the platform and the authorƒs vision of a game.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (59) 20131025 0 -3+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html Easter eggs different than skeumorphs but help connect technical object with human (and perhaps other technical) cultures to which it belongs. (59) The Easter eggis a message, trick, or unusual behavior hidden inside a computer program by its creator. (60) Computer software, produced in business contexts or otherwise, is often impersonal. Easter eggs lay a human touch on such artifacts, reconnecting them with their creators and the craft practice of authorship.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (61) 20131025a 0 -2+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html Roles that today form collaborations for Hayles all devolved to early game programmers. (61) The game programmerƒs job at that time was much more like a combination of what we now call the executive producer, the designer, the programmer, the artist, and the sound designer. (62) The turn away from text and toward graphics started by the VCS Adventurewas partly encouraged by games licensed from films, which began to emerge in numbers in the early 1980s, just as Adventurewas released.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (63) 20131025b 0 -4+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html Lost genre of text-based interactive games and fiction like Zork could be considered examples of technical and expressive possibilities afforded under specific technological media. (63) The graphical turn in video games has been a bittersweet one. The Crowther and Woods Adventure, Zork, and the interactive fiction games that they fostered enjoyed enormous success during the 1980s, but that form was no longer marketable by the beginning of the 1990s. Interactive fiction continues to thrive among communities of writers and players without being the mass-market phenomenon it once was. And despite tremendous advances in the visual fidelity of game hardware and software, the interactive engagement of contemporary adventure games has changed little since the VCS Adventureset the stage for the genre.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (67) 20131025c 0 -5+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html Discussion about how an existing game or other cultural item is represented in a game separate from how different technical platforms represent the same or similar games, such as the doomed VCS Pac-Man and favored tile-based systems. (67) Pac-Man, of course, was already a video game before it was a VCS cartridge. Porting a graphical video game from one computer platform (the arcade board) to another (the Atari VCS) does not demand a change in fundamental representational or functional mode. Both versions are games, rule-based representations of an abstract challenge of hunter and hunted. Where the two versions diverge is in the technical foundations in their platforms. And in the case of this title, those differences were significant enough to doom the VCS rendition of Pac-Man, by some accounts even causing a major crash in the videogame market during 1983.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (70) 20131025e 0 -3+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html Sprite (movable bitmap) became standard for home consoles, although a challenge for VCS programmers. (70) This style of sprite a movable bitmap later became the standard for home console hardware and was used in many systems, including the Intellivision and the NES. (71) Although the arcade board provides a facility for vertical sprite flipping in hardware, the vary idea of such mirroring doesnƒt even make sense on the VCS, as the programmer must manually set up and draw sprites on an individual scan-line basis, not as a bitmap at a Cartesian coordinate. (72) When faced with the rows of aliens in Space Invadersor the platoon of ghosts that chases Pac-Man, VCS programmers needed to discover and use methods of drawing more than two sprites, even though only two one-bye registers were available.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (102) 20131025i 0 -3+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html Assembler code example illustrates apparent obfuscation due to frugality requirements. (102) Assembler programs are composed of elementary instructions, not of higher-order functions. For example, the following assembly language instructions load a value from the top of RAM, add the value 8 to it, and store the result in the TIA register that sets the background color. (103) ROM frugality often required clever rearrangements of assembler code, which sometimes made the resulting source files appear to be puzzles encrypting their content rather than roadmaps elucidating it.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (112-113) 20131025k 0 -4+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html Social reason to limit gameplay in public venues hindered open-ended play Pitfall permitted, which was well suited for the home. (112-113) Even when compared to Activisionƒs previous games, Pitfall! was particularly well suited to the living room or den. In the arcade or the tavern, there is a social reason to limit gameplay, in addition to the financial incentive to increase coin-drop. But the living room invites people to consume media in much longer segments, such as the thirty-minute television show.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (124) 20131025l 0 -3+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html Corporate concerns rather than technical or creative factors determined whether to license a property like Star Wars for video games. (124) The representational power of the machine was slight in comparison to todayƒs consoles with their 3D graphics and full-motion video, but there were manuals and box materials to create the necessary associations. Anyway, a lack of representational power never prevented properties from being licensed for other non-electronic game forms and for various toys. When the question was whether to license a property for use in a video game, the answer always was based on corporate concerns, not technical or creative factors.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (127) 20131025m 0 -5+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html ET ranked worst game of all time, likely due to hurried release for holiday season. (127) E.T.has been ranked, more than once, as the worst video game of all time. (127) A general problem that the makers of licensed games faced was the need to tailor their schedules to the release of other media properties or to the Christmas season, along with the need to maintain qualities of the particular property being used. All of this was added to the usual constraints and pressures provided by the platform and the market.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (129) 20131025n 0 -4+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html Parker Brothers commissioned reverse engineered of VCS trade secrets to develop third-party games. (129) How did this programmer, Rex Bradford, learn to develop VCS games? He explained: Our first job was to reverse-engineer the trade-secret Atari [VCS]. Parker Brothers hired a company to strip off the top of the graphics chip and photograph it. [Two] engineers stared at the circuit diagram, while I wrote a disassembler to examine existing cartridge code.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (134) 20131025p 0 -4+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html Nintendo developer better first-party licensing model for supporting retailers and developers while maintaining control. (134) Nintendo devised a way to support retailers and third-party developers yet also to control them. (134) Nintendoƒs first-party licensing model set the stage for the more homogeneous and anonymous work-for-hire mode of videogame development that remains the norm. It also introduced a culture of soft censorship in video games, with console manufacturers getting the last word on what they would and wouldnƒt allow on their hardware. (135) Atariƒs system has remained influential both as a distant technological ancestor of todayƒs home consoles and as a residual but compelling presence in todayƒs gaming landscape.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (137) 20131025q 0 -10+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html Long run from 1977 through 1992; compare to pinball platforms. (137) The Atari VCS had one of the longest production runs of any microcomputer, and certainly the longest of any dedicated home videogame console. Models were manufactured from 1977 through 1992. (137) Lower-cost electronics contributed to such advances. Realsports Boxinguses a 16K ROM, allowing eight times as much code and data as the original cartridges did. But new conventions for gameplay also began to feed back into VCS game design. . . . The VCS titles from the late 1980s often adapted the conventions of games produced for such newer home consoles [of Nintendo and Sega], also borrowing from contemporary arcade games that were unimaginable ten years earlier. (138) The abstract simplicity of the machine, combined with the stringent constraints that simplicity imposed, made for an extremely flexible system.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKmontfort_bogost-racing_the_beam (142) 20131025r 0 -4+ progress/2012/11/notes_for_montfort_bogost-racing_the_beam.html Besides emulation, homebrew programmers continuing to discover unknown capabilities of the VCS platform, and Bogost uses it for teaching. (142) Although many homebrew programmers are motivated by nostalgia, they are doing more than recreating the glory days of the Atari VCS they are continuing to discover previously unknown capabilities of the platform. (143) Atariƒs venerable system has also been used to help students learn and engage with the history of creative computing. In 2005, the twenty-four-hour Retro Redux event at New York University challenged students in the area to design Atari VCS games. Both of the authors of this book have had students play and analyze games on the system; Ian Bogost has also had them program their own original games in Batari BASIC and assembly.
3 4 1 (+) [-4+]mCQKturkle-life_on_the_screen (36) 20120111 0 -3+ progress/2011/05/notes_for_turkle-life_on_the_screen.html Turkle refers to it as a tale of two aesthetics but they are basic and significantly different epistemological positions. (36) If my transparent Apple II modeled a modernist technological aesthetic, the Macintosh was consistent with a postmodern one. (37) With the introduction of Microsoft Windows in 1985, the modern and postmodern aesthetics of computing became curiously entwined. (41) there is still a tendency to assume that the choice of operating systems is a purely technical decisions.
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