Typewriters versus memes

In January 2013, a picture of a young man sitting on a park bench while typing on a mechanical typewriter went viral on the popular website Reddit. It had been designed in the typical style of an "image macro" or "meme" (Klok 16-19): On top of the photograph, bold white letters in the Impact typeface sarcastically stated that "You’re not a real hipster […] until you take your typewriter to the park".

The meme, which continued to make waves until late in 2013 (Hermlin), emblematizes the rift between digital and post-digital cultures. Imageboard memes are arguably the best example of a contemporary popular mass culture born in the Internet. They differ from older popular forms of visual culture such as comic strips because they are anonymous creations that even gave birth to the Anonymous movement, as described by in (Klok 16-19). Furthermore, they are based on creation by users, disregard of intellectual property, viral dissemination among users and potentially infinite repurposing and variation (through collage or different lettering). As small file size and low resolution images, they exhibit a favor of speed of creation and dissemination over traditional publishing processes with their slower speeds of creation, editing and distribution.

The meme image of the typewriter hipster is a negative self-reflection since it shows the opposite of itself. In a strict technical sense, even a mechanical typewriter is a digital writing system (as explained later in this text) and embodies by virtue of its keyboard the immediate prehistory of personal computer systems, including the one on which the lettering for the image meme had been typed on.

In a colloquial sense however, this machine is "analog" because it does not contain computational electronics. In the year 2013, choosing a mechanical typewriter instead of a mobile computing device is, as the image suggests, no longer a sign of being old-fashioned, but a conscious decision against electronics. It questions the view that computers, as meta-machines, represent obvious technological progress and therefore are the logical upgrade to any older media theory – much in the same way as using a bike today questions the older ideology that the car is a rationally superior means of transportation.

Typewriters are not the only media that have been revived as literally post-digital devices: vinyl records, lately also audio cassettes, analog photography and artists’ printmaking should be named, too. And when looking at the work of contemporary young artists and designers, including art school students, such media are vastly more popular than making, for example, image memes.¹

Post-digital: a term that sucks but is useful

1. Disenchantment with "digital"

Through my student Marc Chia – now Tara Transitory, performing under the moniker One Man Nation -, I was first confronted with the term "post-digital" in 2007 . My first reflex was to dismiss it as moot in an age of cultural, social and economic ruptures driven to major extents by computational digital technology. Today, in the age of ubiquitous mobile devices, drone wars and the gargantuan data operations of Google, the NSA and other global players, it may appear even more questionable than in the year 2007: as either ignorance of our times or Thoreauvian-Luddite withdrawal from them.

More pragmatically, "post-digital" could be understood as a moniker for a contemporary disenchantment with digital information systems and media gadgets, and for a time where fascination for them has become historical (just like the dotcom age ultimately became historical in the 2013 novels of Thomas Pynchon and Dave Eggers). After Edward Snowden’s disclosures of all-pervasive digital surveillance, this disenchantment has grown from a niche “hipster” phenomenon to a mainstream position that will likely impact all cultural and business practices built upon networked electronic devices and Internet services.

2. Revival of "old" media

While Thoreauvian-Luddite withdrawal might appear tempting for many, it is naive. For the arts, it boils down to the 19th century Arts and Crafts movement repeating itself, with its program of handmade production as resistance to industrialization. It is undeniably at work in today’s renaissance of artists’ printmaking, handmade film labs, limited vinyl editions, rebirth of audio cassette, mechanical typewriters, analog cameras and synthesizers. An empirical study our research center in Rotterdam conducted among Bachelor students from most art schools in the Netherlands proved a clear preference for working with non-electronic media among contemporary young artists and designers. About 70% of them would rather make a poster than a website if they had a choice (van Meer, 14). Digital technology experimentation has almost completely transitioned towards engineering schools, and is often considered commercial and mainstream by arts students.

post-what?

think postcolonial, not post-histoire

On closer inspection, the dichotomy between digital big data and neo-analog DIY is however not as clear-cut as it may first seem and give the attribute "post-digital" more significance than being just a sloppy descriptor for a trend in contemporary culture:

This age is clearly not a post-digital age – neither in regards to technological developments, nor in a historico-philosophical (geschichtsphilosophische) perspective.

Regarding the latter, (Cox, xxx) puts down a valid critique of the term "post-digital" as a questionable continuation of other historico-philosophical nouns prefixed with "post", from postmodernity to posthistoire. However, "post-digital" can be more pragmatically and meaningfully defined within popular cultural and colloquial frames of references, both in regard to the prefix "post" and to the notion of "digital". Rather than "postmodernity" and "posthistoire", the reference of the "post" prefix could be post-punk, punk culture continued in ways that were both punk and not; post-communism as it is still the reality in former East block countries, postcolonialism and, to a lesser extent, the post-apocalyptic whose modern iconography has been established by the Mad Max films in the 1980s. They do not suggest that the apocalypse is over, but has transformed from rupture to enduring condition (or from Ereignis to Being).

None these words – post-punk, post-communism, postcolonialism, postapocalyptics – would be done justice if one read them as Hegelian notions. Rather, they describe cultural shifts and ongoing mutations: Postcolonialism does not mean the end of colonialism akin to Hegel’s and Fukuyama’s "end of history", but quite on the contrary its transformation into less clearly visible power structures that are still in place, have left their mark on languages and cultures, and most importantly still govern geopolitics and global production chains. In this sense, the post-digital condition is the post-apocalyptic condition after the computerization and global digital networking of communication, technical infrastructures, markets and geopolitics.

"digital" as sterile high tech

The second half of the word "post-digital" refers to a popular cultural – rather than scientific or media theoretical – definition of "digital", the kind of connotation illustrated by contemporary Google image search results on the word "digital":

"Post-digital" first of all describes any media aesthetics leaving behind those clean high tech and high fidelity connotations. The word was coined by musician Kim Cascone in 2000 in relation to glitch aesthetics in contemporary electronic music (Cascone, 12). In the same year, the Australian sound and media artist Ian Andrews broadened it into a "post-digital aesthetics" that rejects the "idea of digital progress" and "a teleological movement toward ‘perfect’ representation" (Andrews).

In other words, Cascone and Andrews primarily thought of "post-digital" as an antidote to techno-Hegelianism. Their papers were firmly based on the culture of audiovisual production where "digital" had long been synonymous with "better": the launch of the Fairlight sound sampler in 1979, of the digital audio CD in 1982 and the MIDI standard in the same year, software-only digital audio workstations in the early 1990s, real-time programmable software synthesis with Max/MSP in 1997. Such teleologies are still effective in video and TV technology, with the ongoing transitions from SD to HD and 4K, from DVD to BluRay, 2D to 3D, always sold with the same narrative of innovation, improvement, and higher fidelity reproduction. By rejecting this, Cascone and Andrews opposed the paradigm of good technical quality altogether. "Post-digital" was a confusing coinage in Cascone’s paper because the glitch music it covered and advocated actually was digital, even based on specifically digital sound processing artifacts. But just like post-punk as a reaction to punk, Cascone’s notion of the "post-digital" might best be considered a reaction to an age where even tripods are being sold with "digital" stickers attached in order to suggest that they are new, superior technology:

"digital" as low-quality trash

Such post-digital rejections of high tech oddly coincidence with post-digital rejections of digital low quality: the persisting argument that vinyl LP sound better than CDs let alone mp3, that film slides look better than digital photographs let alone smartphone snapshots, that 35mm film projection looks better than digital cinema projection let alone bittorrent video downloads or YouTube, that paper books are richer media than websites and e-books, and that something typed on a mechanical typewriter has more value than a throwaway digital text file let alone E-Mail spam. In fact, the glitch which Cascone advocates as something "post-digital" is exactly the kind of digital trash that "post-digital" vinyl listeners dismiss.

against the universal machine

But no matter whether they reject high fidelity or trash, both post-digital attitudes dismiss the idea of the digital computer as the universal machine – and hence digital computational devices as all-purpose media.

Cascone’s "post-digital" resistance to digital high tech echoed older forms of resistance to formalist, mathematically driven progress narratives in music; particularly, the opposition to serialist composition in 20th century contemporary music which started with John Cage, continued with the early minimal music of La Monte Young and Terry Riley and did not end with improvisation/composition collectives such as AMM and Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra. The serialism of Stockhausen, Boulez and their contemporaries was digital in the most literal sense of the word: It broke down all parameters of musical composition into computable values in order to process them by the means of numerical transformations. In the later times of mass consumer media technology, computation shifted from a means of composition to a means of signal processing, and from audiovisual production to audiovisual reproduction. (Sometimes involving the same companies, such as Philips which founded a studio for contemporary electronic music in the 1950s and co-developed the audio CD in the early 1980s.)

Most serialist music, however, was not electronic but composed with pen and paper and performed by orchestras. This reveals a crucial issue: unlike in its colloquial meaning (which includes its common understanding in the arts and humanities), "digital" does not necessarily involve electronics. In this sense, the technical-scientific notion of "digital" can – paradoxically enough – be applied to devices that would be called "post-digital" in the arts and humanities. By virtue of its differentiated letters, the hipster’s mechanical typewriter is "digital" system" according to information science and analytical philosophy (Goodman, 161), "analog" by virtue of its mechanics for the anonymous creator of the hipster meme and maybe "post-digital" for an art curator.

What is post-digital then?

(The following is an attempt of recapitulating and ordering observations which I had gathered in previous publications.²)

post-digital = post-digitization

Going back to Cascone and Andrews, but also to post-punk, postcolonialism and Mad Max, "post-digital" most simply describes the messy state of media, arts and design after their digitization, or at least after digitization of crucial parts of their communications. Sentiments of disenchantment and skepticism may add to the mix but not necessarily so. Somteimes, "post-digital" can mean the opposite. Contemporary visual art, for example, only slowly begins to accept net artists as regular contemporary artists (and among them, rather those whose work is white cube-compatible like Cory Arcangel’s), but its discourse and networking have profoundly changed through the e-flux mailing list, art blogs and the electronic e-flux journal. These media that have largely superseded paper art periodicals in circulation, power and influence at least for the art system’s in-crowd of artists and curators. Likewise, paper newspapers have become post-digital, or post-digitization, media wherever they shift their own emphasis from news (for which the Internet is faster) to investigative journalism and commentary, like The Guardian in its coverage of the NSA’s PRISM program.

post-digital = anti-"new media"

"Post-digital" thus refers to a state where disruption through digital information technology has already occurred. Which can mean – such as for Cascone – that it is no longer perceived as disruptive. Therefore, "post-digital" is positioned against the notion of "new media". At the same time, as its negative mirror, it exposes (arguably even deconstructs) the latter’s hidden teleology: If "post-digital" evokes critical reactions concerning the historico-philosophy inscribed into the prefix "post", then it also the reveals a previous lack of such criticality towards the older yet no less Hegelian term "new media".

post-digital = hybrids of "old" and "new" media

"Post-digital" describes a perspective on digital information technology that is no longer focused on technical innovation or improvement but rejects innovation narratives. Consequently, it eradicates the distinction between "old" and "new" media, in theory as well as in practice. Kenneth Goldsmith notes that his students "mix oil paint while Photoshopping and scour flea markets for vintage vinyl while listening to their iPods" (Goldsmith, 226). Working at an art school, I observe the same. Young artists and designers choose media for their own particular material aesthetics including artifacts, whether they result from analog material qualities or from digital processing. Lo-fi misbehavior is embraced no matter whether in digital glitch and jitter like in Cascone’s music or in analog grain, dust, scratches or hiss, as a form of practical exploration and research that explores materials through their misbehavior. It is a post-digital hacker attitude of taking systems apart and using them against their design intentions.

post-digital = retro?

Mo doubt, post-digital mimograph printmaking, audio cassette production, mechanical typewriter experimentation and vinyl DJing overlap with hipster retro media trends including digital simulations of analog lo-fi in popular smartphone apps such as Instagram, Hipstamatic and iSupr8. On the other hand, there is a qualitative difference between using superficial and stereotypical ready-made effects and the thorough work and study required for making "vintage" media work again driven by an desire for non-formulaic aesthetics.

Still, such practices can only be meaningfully called post-digital when they not simply revive older media technologies, but functionally repurpose them in (critical) relation to mainstream digital media technologies: zines that become anti- or non-blogs, vinyl as anti-CD, cassette tapes as anti-mp3, analog film as anti-video.

post-digital = "old" media used like "new media"

At the same time, ethics and cultural conventions that became mainstream with Internet communities and Open Source culture become retroactively applied to the making of non- and post-digital media products. A good example are collaborative zine conventions, a thriving subculture documented amongst others on the blog fanzines.tumblr.com. These events, where people gather to collectively make and exchange zines, are the perfect opposite of the zine cultures of the post-punk 1980s and 1990s where most zines were hyper-individualistic product and personality platforms of one maker. If one maps Lev Manovich’s new media taxonomy of "Numerical Representation", "Modularity", "Automation", "Variability" and "Transcoding" (Manovich, The Language of New Media, 27-48) to a contemporary zine fair or mimography community art space, then "modularity", "variability" and – in a more loosely metaphorical sense – "transcoding" would still apply to the contemporary cultures of working with these "old" media. In these cases, "post-digital" usefully describes "new media"-cultural approaches to working with so-called "old media".

DIY vs. corporate instead of "new" versus "old" media

When hacker-style and community-centric ways of working are no longer tied to specific technologies, but can equally be found in computer labs and zine fairs, the classical dichotomy of "old" and "new" media, analog and digital, shifts to a new differentiation between shrink-wrapped versus do-it-yourself culture. No mainstream medium embodies this better than the magazine and web site Make, published by O’Reilly since 2005 and instrumental for the foundation of the contemporary maker movement. Make covers 3D printing, Arduino hardware hacking, FabLab technology, as well as classical DIY and crafts, and hybrids between them.

Conversely, the 1990s/early 2000s equation that the "old" mass media such as newspapers, movies, television and radio are corporate and "new media" such as web sites are DIY, is no longer true ever since user-generated content has been co-opted into corporate social media and mobile apps. The Internet as an self-run alternative space – central to many activist and artists’ online projects from The Thing onwards – is no longer intuitive for anyone born after 1990. For younger generations, the Internet is largely identical to corporate, registration-only services.³

Semiotic shift to the indexical

The Maker movement, whether in FabLabs or on zine fairs, embodies a shift from the purely symbolic, as privileged in digital systems (for which the login is the perfect example), towards the indexical: from code to traces, and from text to context. 1980s post-punk zines, for example, resembled manifestos such as those of the Berlin Dadaists in the 1920s and 1980s Super 8 films made as part of the Cinema of Transgression and other post-punk movements created underground narratives against mainstream cinema. The majority of contemporary zines and experimental Super 8 films, however, tend to shift from content to pure materiality where the medium, such as paper or celluloid, indeed is the message; from semantics to pragmatics, and from metaphysics to ontology.⁴

When ‘post-digital’ is ‘digital’ and vice versa

misunderstandings of "digital" as binary and electronic

From a technological and scientific point of view, the word "digital" is wrongly understood and used by Cascone. That also applies to most of what is commonly labelled "digital art", "digital media" and "digital humanities". If something is "digital", it neither has to be electronic, nor involve binary zeros and ones. It does not even need to be attached to electronic computers or any other kind of computational device.

Conversely, analog does not mean non-computational or pre-computational, since there are also analog computers. (Using water and two measuring cups for computing additions and subtractions – of quantities that can’t be exactly counted – is a simple example for analog computing.) "Digital" simply means that something is divided up into exactly countable units – countable with whatever system one uses, whether zeros and ones, decimal numbers, strokes on a beer mat or the digits of one’s hand. (Which is why "digital" is called "digital"; in French, for example, the word is "numérique".) Therefore, the Western alphabet is a digital system, the movable types of Gutenberg’s printing press constitute a digital system, the keys of a piano are a digital system, Western musical score notation is digital aside from such non-discrete value instructions as adagio, piano, forte, legato, portamento, tremolo and glissando. Floor mosaics made from monochrome tiles are digitally composed images. These examples show, too, that "digital" never exists in any perfect form but is always is being abstracted and idealized from matter that, by nature and the laws of physics, has chaotic properties and often ambiguous states⁵.

misunderstandings of "analog" as non-binary and non-electronic

"Analog" conversely means that something has not been chopped up into discrete, countable units. But it consists of a signal that by itself has no discrete units but is gradually and continuously changing, such as a sound wave, light, a magnetic field such as on an audiotape but also on a computer hard disk, the electrical flows in any circuit including computer chips, a painted color gradient. (Goodman, 160) therefore defines analog as "undifferentiated in the extreme" and "the very antithesis of a notational system".

The fingerboard of a violin is analog, because it is fretless – undivided -, the fingerboard of a guitar is digital, because frets divide it into single notes. What is commonly called "analog" photographic and cine film is actually a hybrid of analog and digital: the particles of the film emulsion are analog, because they are undifferentiated blobs in organic-chaotic order and not reliably countable like pixels -, the single frames of a film strip are digital since they are discrete, chopped up and unambiguously countable.

The only ordering principle for analog signals are their analogy: their physical mimesis of the signals they reproduce. In the case of the photographic emulsion, the distribution of the otherwise chaotic particles mimics the distribution of light rays making up an image the human eye sees; on the audiotape, decreasing and increasing magnetization of the otherwise chaotic iron or chrome particles mimics the rising and falling of the sound wave it reproduces.

Technically, there are no such things as "digital media" and "digital # aesthetics"

This means that media, in the technical sense of storage, transmission, computation and display devices, are always analog: The electricity in a computer chip is analog because its voltage can have arbitrary, undifferentiated values between its minimum and maximum just like a fretless violin string. Only through filtering, one can make a certain range of high voltage correspond to a "zero" and a certain range of low voltage to "one". Hardware defects can make bits flip and turn zeros into ones. The sound waves produced by a sound card and a speaker are analog, etc. (This is what (Kittler, 81-90) refers to, albeit opaquely, when arguing that in computing "there is no software".) An LCD screen is a hybrid digital-analog system because its display has discrete, countable, single pixels, but the light they emit constitutes an analog continuum.

There is hence no such thing as digital media, only digital or digitized information: chopped-up numbers, letters, symbols and whatever other abstracted units as opposed to continuous, wavelike signals such as physical sounds and visuals. Most "digital media" devices are really analog-to-digital-to-analog converters: An mp3 player with a touchscreen interface, for example, takes analog, non-discrete gesture input, translates it into binary control instructions that trigger computational information processing of a digital file, ultimately decoding it into analog electricity that another analog device, the electromagnetic mechanism of a speaker or headphone, turns into analog sound waves.

The same principle applies to almost any so-called digital media device no matter whether a photo or video camera or a military drone. As soon as something becomes perceivable, it takes the form of non-discrete waves. Therefore, anything aesthetic (in the literal sense of aisthesis, perception) is analog by strict technical definition.

digital = analog = post-digital…?

"Digital art" that would bebased on the above rigorous technical definition of "digital" would likely be called "post-digital" or even "retro analog" by art curators and humanities scholars: stone mosaic floors from Internet image memes, for example, mechanical typewriter installations⁶ or countdown loops running in Super 8 or 16mm film projection.

The everyday colloquial meaning of "digital" is metonymical: anything connected to computational electronic devices – even if it is a tripod. This notion has mostly been cultivated by product marketing and advertising. In their own name, the "digital humanities" have simply taken it over, without any questioning. By challenging uncritical notions of digitality, "post-digital" art, design and media (whether or not one should technically call them post-digital) often make up for lacks of scrutiny among "digital media" critics and scholars.

Revisiting the hipster meme

The alleged typewriter hipster later turned out to be a writer who lived from custom-written stories that he offered passengers for sale. The meme picture had been taken from an angle that left out his sign "One-of-a-kind, unique stories while you wait". In an article for the web site The Awl, he recollects how it made him "An Object Of Internet Ridicule" and open hatred.⁷ Knowing the complete story, his decision to take a mechanical typewriter to the park was pragmatically the best: electronic equipment (a laptop with a printer) would have been cumbersome to set up, run on battery power and keep safe from rain and stealing while handwriting would not have been easily readable enough and lack the appearance of a professional writer’s work.

If he had been an art student, even in a media arts program, the typewriter would still have been the right choice for this project. It is a post-digital choice because it didn’t default to a "new media" device for the sake of its contemporariness. It also exemplifies post-digital hybridity of "old" and "new" media since the writer advertises his Twitter account "@rovingtypist" and conversely uses this account to promote his story-writing service. He repurposed the typewriter from a prepress tool to a personalized small press, giving the "old" technology new function relative to "new media" and exploiting qualities in it that make up for the latter’s deficiencies. At the same time, he applies a "new media" sensibility to "old media" use: user-customized products, created in a social environment, with voluntary amounts of payment. Or rather, the notion of community media versus mass media has flipped so that typewriters repesent the former while participatory web sites have turned into the likes of Reddit and replaced yellow press mass media – including mob hatred incited by willful misrepresentation.

Desires for agency

Cascone and Andrews partly contradicted themselves when they coined the notion "post-digital" in the year 2000. On the one hand, they rejected "new media" advocacy, on the other, they heavily relied on it. Cascone’s paper drew on Nicholas Negroponte’s Wired article "Beyond Digital" (Negroponte), Ian Andrews’ paper on Lev Manovich’s "Generation Flash", an article that promoted the very opposite of the analog/digital, retro/contemporary hybridizations associated with the term "post-digital" today (Manovich, Generation Flash). If post-digital cultures are made up of, metaphorically speaking, postcolonial practices in a communications world taken over by the military-industrial complex of only a handful of global players, then it can most simply be described as mental opposition to phenomena like Ray Kurzweil’s and Google’s Singularity University, the Quantified Self movement, sensor-controlled "Smart Cities" and similar dystopian techno utopias.

Nevertheless, Silicon Valley utopias and post-digital subcultures (whether in Detroit, Rotterdam or elsewhere) have more in common than it might seem. Both are driven by fictions of agency.⁸ There’s a fiction of agency over one’s body in the ‘digital’ Quantified Self movement, a fiction of the self-made in the ‘post-digital’ DIY and Maker movements, a fiction of a more intimate working with media in ‘analog’ handmade film labs and mimeograph cooperatives. They stand for two options of agency, over-identification with systems or skepticism towards them. Each of them is, in their own way, symptomatic of system crisis. It is not a crisis of one or the other system but a crisis of the very paradigm of "system" and its legacy from cybernetics. It’s a legacy which (starting with their mere names) neither "digital", nor "post-digital" succeed to leave behind.

Works cited

Andrews, Ian. "Post-digital Aesthetics and the return to Modernism." (2000) Web. December 2013 http://www.ian-andrews.org/texts/postdig.html

Cascone, Kim. "The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music." Computer Music Journal, 24.4 (2000): 12-18. Print.

Cox, Geoff. "Prehistories of the Post-digital: some old problems with post-anything." (2013) Web. December 2013

Cramer, Florian. "Post-Digital Aesthetics." Jeu de Paume le magazine, May 2013. Web. December 2013 http://lemagazine.jeudepaume.org/2013/05/florian-cramer-post-digital-aesthetics/

Cramer, Florian. "Post-Digital Writing." electronic book review, December 2012. Web. December 2013 http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/postal

Eggers, Dave. The Circle. New York: Knopf, 2013. Print.

Goldsmith, Kenneth. Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. New York: Columbia UP, 2011. Print.

Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art, Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hacket, 1976. Print.

Hermlin, C.D.. "I Am An Object Of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything." The Awl, 18 September 2013. Web. December 2013 http://www.theawl.com/2013/09/i-was-a-hated-hipster-meme-and-then-it-got-worse

Kittler, Friedrich. "There Is No Software." Stanford Literature Review 9 (1992): 81-90. Print.

Klok, Timo. "4chan and Imageboards", post.pic. Ed. Research Group Communication in a Digital Age. Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University, 2010: 16-19. Print.

Manovich, Lev. "Generation Flash." (2002). Web. December 2013 http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/generation_flash.doc

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002. Print.

Negroponte, Nicholas. Beyond Digital. Wired 6.12 (1998). Web. December 2013 http://web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/Wired/WIRED6-12.html

Pynchon, Thomas. Bleeding Edge. London: Penguin, 2013. Print.

Van Meer, Aldje. "I would rather design a poster than a website." Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University, 2012-2013. Web. December 2013 http://www.iwouldratherdesignaposterthanawebsite.nl, http://crosslab.wdka.hro.nl/ioi/C010_folder.pdf

(With cordial thanks to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Nishant Shah, Geoff Cox, Søren Pold, Stefan Heidenreich and Andreas Broeckmann for their critical feedback.)

% “Post-digital”, a term that sucks but is useful
% Florian Cramer
% October 2013

(Preliminary disclosure)

When first confronted with the term “post-digital” half a decade ago through my students, I found it – in an age of cultural, social and economic ruptures driven to non-trivial extents by computational digital technology – rather silly. Today, in the age of ubiquitous mobile devices, drone wars and the gargantuan data operations of Google, the NSA and other global players, it may appear even sillier: as either ignorance of our times or Thoreauvian-Luddite withdrawal from them. The latter option is tempting, yet naive. For the arts, they boil down to the history of the 19th century Arts and Crafts movement repeating itself, with its program of handmade production as resistance to industrialization. And indeed, this history is partly repeating itself in today’s renaissance of artists’ printmaking, handmade film labs, limited vinyl editions and what have you. But on closer inspection the dichotomy between digital big data and neo-analog DIY isn’t as clear-cut as it may seem. And this is where the attribute “post-digital” makes sense.

post-what?

From a philosophical standpoint, one can only agree with Geoff Cox and his critique of the term “post-digital” as a questionable continuation of other nouns prefixed with “post”, from postmodernity to posthistoire. I would like to frame it, however, within more pragmatic, popular and colloquial frames of references, both as regards to the prefix “post” and to the notion of “digital”. Rather than “postmodernity” and “posthistoire”, the “post” in “post-digital” could be compared to post-punk (punk culture continued in ways that both were punk and not), post-communism (still the reality in all former East block countries), even postcolonialism and, to a lesser extent, post-apocalyptic (pop cultural, Mad Max style). None these words would be done justice if one identified them as Hegelian historico-philosophical categories. Rather, they describe mutations that are often still ongoing: postcolonialism does just not mean the end of colonialism akin to Hegel’s and Fukuyama’s end of history, but its transformation into less clearly visible power structures that are still in place, have left their mark on languages and cultures, and most importantly still govern geopolitics and global production chains.

Likewise, “post-digital” refers to a popular cultural – rather than media theoretical – notion of “digital”, the kind of connotation nicely illustrated by contemporary Google image search results on the word “digital”:

“Post-digital” first of all means any media aesthetics that leaves behind these clean high tech, high fidelity connotations. The word was coined by musician Kim Cascone in 2000 in relation to glitch aesthetics in contemporary electronic music [1]. In the same year, the Australian sound and media artist Ian Andrews broadened it into a “post-digital aesthetics” that rejects the “idea of digital progress” and “a teleological movement toward ‘perfect’ representation” [2]. Andrews, in other words, thought of “post-digital” as an antidote to techno-Hegelianism.

Both Cascone’s and Andrews’ papers were firmly based on the culture of audiovisual production. In this world, “digital” had been synonymous with “better” for a long time: the launch of the Fairlight sound sampler in 1979, the digital audio CD in 1982, the MIDI standard in the same year, software-only digital audio workstations in the early 1990s, real-time programmable software synthesis with Max/MSP in 1997. Similar teleologies are still at work in video and TV technology, with the ongoing transitions from SD to HD and to 4K, from DVD to BluRay, 2D to 3D, always sold with the same narrative of innovation, improvement, and cleaner reproduction. Cascone and Andrews simply rejected this. “Post-digital” might have been confusingly named because Cascone’s glitch music actually was digital, even based on digital sound processing artifacts. But it should rather be seen as a reaction to an age where even tripods are being sold with “digital” stickers attached in order to suggest that they are new, improved technology.

In this sense, “post-digital” reenacted older forms of resistance to formalist, mathematically driven progress narratives in music – namely the opposition to serialist composition in 20th century contemporary music that started with John Cage, continued with the early minimal music of La Monte Young and Terry Riley and did not end with improvisation/composition collectives such as AMM and Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra. The serialism of Stockhausen, Boulez and their contemporaries was digital in the most literal sense of the word since it broke down all parameters of musical composition into computable values and applied numerical transformations to them. In the later age of mass consumer media technology, computations shifted from composition to signal processing, and from production to reproduction. (Involving sometimes the same companies, such as Philips – which founded a studio for contemporary electronic music in the 1950s and co-developed the audio CD in the early 1980s.)

Most serialist music, however, was not electronic but composed with pen and paper and performed by orchestras. This highlights a crucial point: unlike in the colloquial usage of the word (but also its common understanding in the arts and humanities), “digital” does not have to involve electronics at all. In this sense, the technical-scientific notion of “digital” can – paradoxically enough – be applied to devices that would be called “post-digital” in the arts and humanities.

What is post-digital then?

(I am trying to reiterate and systematize points I had written down in previous publications.)

Going back to Cascone and Andrews, but also to post-punk, postcolonialism and Mad Max, “post-digital” most simply describes the messy state of media, arts and design after their digitization, or at least after the digitization of vital parts of their communication. While contemporary visual art, for example, only slowly begins to accept net artists as regular contemporary artists (and among them, rather those whose work is gallery-compatible like Cory Arcangel’s), its discourse and networking have already profoundly changed through the e-flux mailing list, art blogs and the electronic e-flux journal. These media that have largely superseded paper art periodicals in circulation, power and influence at least for artists and curators. Likewise, paper newspapers have become post-digital, or post-digitization media where they shift their emphasis from news (for which the Internet is faster) to reportage and commentary.

“Post-digital” thus refers to a state where disruption through digital information technology has already occurred. Which can often mean – as for Cascone – that it is no longer perceived as disruptive. In this sense, the term “post-digital” is positioned against the term “new media”. At the same time, as its negative mirror, it exposes (perhaps even deconstructs) the latter’s hidden teleology: If “post-digital” evokes critical reactions concerning the historico-philosophy embedded into the prefix “post”, then it also the reveals the previous lack of such criticality towards the older term “new media” which is no less Hegelian.

Furthermore, “post-digital” describes a perspective on digital information technology that is no longer focused on technical innovation or improvement, even rejecting innovation narratives. Consequently, the distinction between “old” and “new” media collapses in theory as well as in practice. As Kenneth Goldsmith observes, his students “mix oil paint while Photoshopping and scour flea markets for vintage vinyl while listening to their iPods”[3]. Each medium is chosen for its own particular material aesthetics including artifacts. Lo-fi and misbehavior is embraced, just as in Cascone’s digital glitch and jitter music, but just as much in analog grain, dust, scratches or hiss, as a form of practical exploration and research that understands media from their misbehavior. This approach of using technology against its high end promises boils down to practically the same as to what computer hackers do, namely taking systems apart and using them against their design intentions.

Post-digital risograph printmaking, audio cassette production, mechanical typewriter experimentation or vinyl DJing clearly overlap with hipster retro media trends, including the digital simulation of analog lo-fi in popular smartphone apps such as Instagram. Rediscovery and repurposing of these “vintage” media with a hacker spirit, on the other hand, set it apart from this culture.

Non-digital media technologies such as the ones mentioned above become post-digital when they are not simply nostalgically revived, but functionally repurposed in (often critical) relation to digital media technologies: zines that become anti- or non-blogs, vinyl as anti-CD, cassette tapes as anti-mp3, analog film as anti-video.

On the other hand, ethics and conventions that became mainstream with Internet communities and Open Source/peer-to-peer culture become retroactively applied to the making of non- and post-digital media products, such as in collaborative zine making events (which are in extreme opposition to the hyper-individualist zine cultures of the post-punk 1980s and 1990s). If one maps Lev Manovich’s 2001 taxonomy of “new media” as “Numerical Representation”, “Modularity”, “Automation”, “Variability” and “Transcoding” to a contemporary zine fair or risography community art space, then “modularity”, “variability” and – in a more loosely metaphorical sense – “transcoding” would still apply to the contemporary cultures of working with these “old” media. In other words, “post-digital” can usefully describe “new media”-style approaches to working with (so-called) “old media”.

This hacker and community-oriented approach shifts the previous dichotomies of “old” and “new” media, analog and digital to a new difference of shrink-wrapped versus Do-it-yourself. No medium embodies this better than the magazine and web site Make, published by O’Reilly since 2005 and instrumental in the foundation of the contemporary maker movement. Make covers 3D printing, Arduino hardware hacking, FabLab technology, as well as classical DIY and crafts, and hybrids between them.

Conversely, the 1990s/early 2000s equation that analog mass media (such as newspapers and radio) are corporate and “new media” such as web sites are DIY, is no longer true ever since user-generated content has been co-opted into corporate social media and mobile apps. The Internet as an self-run alternative space – central to many activist and artist’s online projects from The Thing onwards – simply is no longer intuitive for anyone born after 1990 and identifying the Internet with corporate, registration-only services.[4]

The Maker movement, whether in FabLabs or on zine fairs, embodies a shift from the purely symbolic, as privileged in digital systems (for which the login is the perfect example), towards the indexical: from code to traces, and from text to context. While 1980s post-punk zines, for example, resembled manifestos (such as those of the Berlin Dadaists in the 1920s) and 1980s Super 8 films (such as the Cinema of Transgression) created underground narratives against mainstream cinema, the majority of contemporary zines and analog films tend to shift from content to pure materiality where the medium, such as paper or celluloid, indeed is the message; from semantics to pragmatics, and from meaning to being.[5]

When ‘post-digital’ is ‘digital’ and vice versa

From a technological and scientific point of view, the word “digital” is wrongly understood and used by Cascone. That also applies to most of what is commonly labelled “digital art”, “digital media” and “digital humanities”. If something is “digital”, it neither has to be electronic, nor involve binary zeros and ones. It does not even need to be attached to electronic computers or any other kind of computational device.

Conversely, analog does not mean non-computational or pre-computational, since there are also analog computers. (Using water and two measuring cups for computing additions and subtractions – of quantities that can’t be exactly counted – is a simple example for analog computing.) “Digital” simply means that something is divided up into exactly countable units – countable with whatever system one uses, whether zeros and ones, decimal numbers, strokes on a beer mat or the digits of one’s hand. (Which is why “digital” is called “digital”; in French, for example, the word is “numérique”.) Therefore, the Western alphabet is a digital system, the movable types of Gutenberg’s printing press constitute a digital system, the keys of a piano are a digital system, Western musical score notation is digital aside from such non-discrete value instructions as adagio, piano, forte, legato, portamento, tremolo and glissando. Floor mosaics made from monochrome tiles are digitally composed images. These examples show, too, that “digital” never exists in any perfect form but is always is being abstracted and idealized from matter that, by nature and the laws of physics, has chaotic properties and often ambiguous states[6].

“Analog” conversely means that something has not been chopped up into discrete, countable units, but consists of an signal that by itself as no discrete units but is gradually and continuously changing, such as a sound wave, light, a magnetic field such as on an audiotape but also on a computer hard disk, the electrical flows in any circuit including computer chips, a painted color gradient. The fingerboard of a violin is analog, because it is fretless – undivided -, the fingerboard of a guitar is digital, because frets divide it into single notes. What is commonly called “analog” photographic and cine film is actually a hybrid of analog and digital: the particles of the film emulsion are analog, because they are in organic-chaotic order and not reliably countable like pixels -, the single frames of a film strip are digital since they’re discrete, chopped up and unambiguously countable.

This means that media, in the technical sense of storage, transmission, computation and display devices, are always analog: The voltage in a computer chip is analog, and only through filtering, one can determine whether high voltage corresponds to a “zero” and low voltage to “one” (which is why worn/out hardware can make bits flip and turn zeros into ones); the sound waves produced by a sound card and a speaker are analog; etc. An LCD screen is a hybrid digital-analog system because its display has discrete, countable, single pixels, but the light they emit is an analog continuum.

There is hence no such thing as digital media,[7] only digital or digitized information: chopped-up numbers, letters, symbols and whatever other abstracted units as opposed to continuous, wave-like signals such as physical sounds and visuals. Most “digital media” devices are really analog-to-digital-to-analog converters. An mp3 player with a touchscreen interface, for example, takes analog, non-discrete gesture input, translates it into binary control instructions that trigger computational information processing of a digital file, ultimately decoding it into analog electricity that another analog device, the electromagnetic mechanism of a speaker or headphone, turns into analog sound waves. The same principle applies to almost any so-called digital media device, whether it’s a photo or video camera, or a military drone. As soon as something is perceivable (and thus aesthetic), it takes the form of non-discrete waves and therefore is analog.

“Digital art” based on the technical definition of “digital” would, however, likely be called “post-digital” or even “retro analog” by art curators and media studies scholars: stone mosaic floors from Internet image memes, for example, installations with mechanical typewriters[8], countdown loops on a Super 8 or 16mm film projector.

The everyday colloquial meaning of “digital” is metonymical: anything connected to computational electronic devices, even if it’s a tripod. It is a notion fostered and solidified last not least by marketing and product advertising. Some eyebrows should thus be raised when the humanities simply take it over, in the concept of “digital humanities” for example, without any question asked. In that sense, “post-digital” art, design and media works – whether or not they actually should be called post-digital – often make up for lacking critical reflection of digitality.

Conclusion (draft of the draft)

In the year 2000, the notions of “post-digital” proposed by Cascone and Andrews were somewhat contradictory in that they simultaneously rejected the rhetoric of “new media” while heavily relying on it. Cascone’s paper drew on a “Wired” column of Nicholas Negroponte, Ian Andrews’ paper on Lev Manovich’s “Generation Flash” which advocated the very opposite of the the analog/digital, retro/contemporary hybridizations that are associated with the term “post-digital” today. If post-digital aesthetics consists, metaphorically speaking, of postcolonial practices in a communications world taken over by a industrial-military complex of a handful of global players, then it is perhaps easiest to think of it as the opposite of (Ray Kurzweil’s and Google’s) Singularity movement, the Quantified Self movement and other forms of techno gnosis.

Nevertheless, it is often driven by structurally similar fictions of agency:[9] the fiction of agency over one’s body in the Quantified Self movement, the fiction of the self-made in the DIY and Maker movements, the fiction of more direct engagement with media in handmade film labs. (Sociologically, both cybergnostic and post-digital cultures might be seen as either over-affirmation of or scepticism towards system complexity, and desires of agency. – to be elaborated)