24 March 2016: Seminar (Aden and David)

Before taking questions from the class, Scott says, “This week, more than many others is driven by a question: What do we mean by the ‘materiality’ of media?”

In one respect this class didn’t follow the model of previous sessions in the sense that we didn’t develop the list of questions first. Rather, we engaged in extended periods of discussion and dialogue through which the questions were formulated, and then we returned to those discussions. Even Scott, at one point in the evening, commented that things didn’t seem to be working all that well; indeed, something seemed a little off at times. The list of questions, as ultimately developed by the group are as follows:

  • Nathaniel: Racial essentialism of the Navajo . . . What is Nakamura trying to get us to do? Is this an excuse to assuage guilt? Whose guilt?
  • Nathaniel: Sterne: intentional lo-fi? Aesthetics of compression? [Why do we like vocoders?]
  • Kelly: Storage/bandwidth: material/networks/Citizenfour: network data to NSA vs. unlocking iPhone?
  • Hassan: Textual criticism in Kirschenbaum. (15). How does this matter? (Books in particular).
  • Diana: Sterne mentions compression is shaped by conditions of finitude. How does this relate to human finitude or limits? There is an interesting question with respect to Kirschenbaum about the relationship of the material and immaterial. Diana asks what the limitations of real life might be, and Nathaniel adds the question of what Sterne would say of Nakamura, and where does labor fit into infrastructure.
  • Scott: What would we have to do to make Starosielski satisfying?

6:25 PM: Let Us Begin:

Scott begins the seminar with an overview of how this week’s reading material is connected to his own research interests. He mentions the modernist tendency to focus on medium specificity, and that in his work he tries to move away from the material facts of medium. The search for specifically digital materiality leads us astray, according to Scott. More than medium specificity, Scott is concerned with embodiment, aesthetics, and the human aspect of texts. Like Scott, Lisa Nakamura is interested in the human aspect behind technology. In her essay, she studies the hidden labor that goes into an object.

6:45 PM: A Touch of Nakamura:

Nathaniel notes the theme of racial exceptionalism in Nakamura’s article, but that he is not sure what Nakamura is trying to say about that. He finds the essentialism to be absurd. Nathaniel mentions Apple’s connection with workers at the FoxConn factory, and that he thinks it was an excuse that Apple used to assuage their guilt with the reasoning, “If they didn’t do that then they’d just be living their shitty third world lives. We’ve swept in and saved them from agrarian life or something.”

We didn’t spend much time on Nakamura, as noted later in our notes, and at this point the discussion transitions to Sterne.

6:52 PM: Finitude and Compression:

Diana references “Kirschenbaum” and finitude–the finitude of infrastructure, noting that compression is shaped by conditions of finitude. Diana says, “I’m wondering if there is a concept of human finitude” that goes along with conditions of finitude. Scott realizes that Diana is referring to Sterne, not Kirschenbaum, and further emphasizes the word limitations. Nathaniel asks, “What would Sterne say about Nakamura”? This question, however, is separate from what Diana was asking. To bring us closer to Sterne, Scott brings up the topics of hyperreality and high frame rate, such that if you increase the frame rate, things start looking really cheap and bad. As an example, Scott says, “The Hobbit looks like a really expensively made soap opera. It’s less compressed, you lose less information, and it’s closer to reality,” and Nathaniel agrees with Scott in that “it looks fucking weird,” and wonders if this is a matter of habituation. Scott mentions that Sterne has a book on MP3s, which clarifies that the stuff the MP3 loses is what you can’t hear and that compression is tuned to human perceptual capacity.

Noah continues this discussion saying that he finds Sterne puzzling, referencing page 35 in particular. Nathaniel mentions the limitations of bandwidth or wi-fi, and says he was also lost by this. Scott says that what Sterne is saying here isn’t that complicated. Scott uses the analogy of sending a message asking “we are having trouble sending the message, but what can we do to the message to solve the problem?” The point here is that if we have a certain capacity we will create the technology to match. Compression is the mediating term that will allow these things to work together. Indeed, what’s great about Sterne is that there are material limitations to representation. As an example, the material of writing is what is left over that’s not captured by meaning. These are some of the same ways of construing issues of Post Structuralism. In Sterne, materiality is internal to the system. Scott contrasts Sterne with Nakamura, and mentions that she is at least talking about people. Scott finds that he cares about other humans.

7:20 PM: Kirschenbaum and Materiality:

Scott directs our attention to Kirschenbaum, specifically page 14-15 asking what he means with respect to materiality? How does he exceed his definition? “Software is about . . . inscription, storage, and transmission.” Noting the difference between inscription and transmission Scott directs the question thus “where do we find people in that?” Hassan says, “this is not a Latour Litany—everything is not on equal footing”. Scott responds by stating that he’s setting up this series of binaries: inscription / transmission and forensic / formal. There’s something about the relationship between the inscription and forensic. To illustrate when the body has had the traces of its labor inscribed on itself, Scott uses the example of carpal tunnel. The body that has carpal tunnel has the labor transcribed on its body. There’s something about the forensic in the way in which inscription exceeds meaning or intention. Turning to CSI as an example—DNA in hair. Forensically—we are constantly leaving tracing at all times. This is not inscription—understood as being adequate to intention. “Conversation, collaboration, caffeine–what is the materiality of people here,” Scott asks. Kirschenbaum is emphasizing work, labor. Software is made by people. It’s not just the people. Kirschenbaum means it in the sense that there is activity. What’s interesting is that the category drops out in favor of the technology in the rest of the book (the category of human labor). He’s interested in the activity of people and borrowing from forensics in that leaving traces is important. Emphasising human activity is the kind of work that he does. Every technical object has buried in it many layers of human activity. One of the points that Nakamura wants us to draw is that an object is an artifact of activity and she wants to show us the layers. For Kirschenbaum human labor is important to software, but he doesn’t really return to it. Diana notes that a lot of this feels mental and not material, and Todd adds that Nakamura is politicizing it. Concluding this portion of the dialogue Scott asks us to imagine the imagination that went behind this sentence (white collar, male engineers, in California).

7:32 PM: Labor:

Scott notes that there are some questions regarding labor in creating objects—we have experience of the labor in the fabrication of objects. That’s the symbol manipulation—how do you take processes of labor and bring them into the materiality of that? How does what we think about labor come under the heading of material?

7:34 PM: Textuality:

Shifting the conversation slightly, Hassan asks about textual criticism and bibliography, and Scott replies that there are literary studies where the study is about the book. Nathan notes that this like the First Folio and Todd adds to this the dynamic of the materiality of books. Reading from page 16 of Kirschenbaum, “textual critics have treated . . . phenomenon,” Todd asks whether he is he talking about the materiality of the box, the hard drive, etc? Nathan suggests “yes,” and that he gets down into the technical details. And, Scott adds that by 2008, you treated the object of study as the meaning while not paying attention to the actual, physical object. There are fields of literary history where the technology becomes an object of study. The lesson he draws is that when we deal with digital objects we need to work not only with their meaning as texts but pay attention to the physical manifestations of their storage, and how this correlates with human experience.

Shifting the discussion to the materiality of code, Todd opines that it could also be something like code written in either C++ vs. Javascript? This is material—somebody is doing this. Scott references the book Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. Written about Atari, this book is about how the technology and economic design decisions really transformed the aesthetics of early media. If you handle graphics in a certain ways and make technical / design decisions as such these decisions affect the final products. There is a field called platform studies in which software projects, and, concomitantly, your technological limitations will impact what you can do. The technological limitations very much matter. The tools you use matter, but it is always an undecidable question—one that you can only study retrospectively: “the reason it looks like this is because we used Javascript and P5, or this . . .”

7:43 PM: The Forensic:

Returning to the idea of the forensic Scott mentions Hitchcock’s Rope and how Scott had set out to see what gay male couples at the time made of this film. Under the notion of the forensic, we assume that every contact leaves a trace. Ultimately, Scott wasn’t able to find enough evidence of gay couples seeing Rope at the time of its initial release, and he abandoned his project. Nathaniel mentions a picture of Beyonce that her publicist wanted her to take down from the web. Nathaniel also mentions the Wayback machine and that when you look at them “shit is broken.” To this, Scott suggests that it’s like reading Kirchner’s code to uncover meaning in his work. This portion of the dialogue ends with Scott reminding us definitely that there are moments when you push way too hard on the history. Yes, forensically everything leaves a trace, but sometimes there isn’t enough of a trace to construct the picture in its entirety.

7:47 PM: Memory:

Diana shifts the conversation toward a sense of conflict inherent with the concept of storage and the way things are stored on the Internet. The idea of the Internet as being a place where things are preserved, and yet so much material is ephemeral. Diana notes that this changes the way we would publish or write something on the Internet. In a moment of self-revealing, Nathaniel notes the lengths that he goes to ensure that he does not lose data that is important to him. Thinking about the passing of time we can use “the wayback machine” to look at past websites that had existed previously, and in so doing we see the gaps: links are broken, data is gone, there are dead links. Diana notes that text isn’t going anywhere, and Nathaniel responds that this is a concept related to storage and that it takes little to store text. Extending this idea of the permanence of text Todd notes that when he Googles himself a question that he posed to a forum in 1997 still comes up.

Continuing this dialogue on textuality, storage, and permanence, Hassan turns our attention to page 17 of Kirschenbaum, and at the idea of digital media in connection to texts. Nathaniel brings up 9/11 and expresses skepticism about how recoverable these hard drives these are, and Todd notes that what we know about this is informed by movies and TV where the forensic expert can decipher the black box. Diana says that in the 9/11 example they’re on hard drives. Noting that Kirschenbaum wants us to experience that there is a layer of materiality that is opaque to us we turn to page 70 in Kirschenbaum. The idea being that as a forensic matter of fact everything you do has this physical trace. At the forensic level, there is this stuff. The formal level organizes our sense of the materiality. It’s more than a metaphor. Facebook is always there. It’s not ephemeral. It’s intentionally designed to be lossy. Try to find that one post that a friend wrote that you really liked in 2012. Everything from Facebook is all stored. But, for whom is it stored? Facebook holds onto it (and I’m guessing that Instagram does too). What can’t you make go away?

8:06 PM: Durability:

Scott shifts the discussion to the question durability: something gets copied so many times it effectively belongs to someone else. For Kirschenbaum, the book wants to highlight the forensic reality. No matter how cloudy the thing is, somewhere there is a trace of the forensic. The cloud is already so many more layers of formal materiality removed from the forensic reality. There is a kind of multiplication. The mediation between these two is what Kirschenbaum wants us to pay attention to. The forensic materiality goes both up and down. Durability becomes part of a system.

According to Scott, there is a very strong anti-phenomenological polemic in a lot of this. For Galloway or Kirschenbaum, human experience doesn’t matter. The forensic question is now attached to things like how am I becoming data for other people in excess of my capacity to understand or know and how then does it become monetized? The forensic is largely about law enforcement in so far as it is about storage. For whom and how? And to what end? The phenomenological experience always drops out.

8:11 PM: Illusion:

Hassan extends our discussion of the forensic by noting a sense of illusion relative to forensic material objects, and he wonders if this speaks to Kirschenbaum’s humanism? Does he really care about perception? Does he care about Aesthetics? To this question, Scott answers with a definitive “No.” Indeed, Kirschenbaum’s project is very scholarly and he wants us to understand and react. Kirschenbaum’s project suggests that those who understand digital technology as surface are mistaken. He wants us to have an account of digital as material and not immateriality. The Language of New Media is a formalist illusion. There is an actual operation below the formal operation. For whom does data not disappear on Facebook. What corresponds to the hard drive that is damaged but for which data can be retrieved? How am I becoming data for other people?

8:21 PM: To What End?

When we ask questions about materiality the phenomenological tends to fades.

The Blogs:

Though some comments were made about Nakamura early in the session, we spent very little time engaging her work in the seminar discussion. One possible reason for this might be that many students engaged this work in their blogs.

Todd took a critical stance towards Nakamura’s piece, and wrote that while “Nakamura’s article is informative as a case study, that women (of color and otherwise) and children have historically been taken advantage of by industry certainly will surprise no one.” He asked if today’s common practice of outsourcing work is any better than the case study that Nakamura makes. His discussion is extended with a parallel drawn between the Navajo and with the Radium Girls, whom were most likely employed for gendered reasons similar to those of the Navajo, though not exploited. Todd wrote, “I guess my main problem with this article is that, while a fine case study, it merely chronicles the history of one group, by a company that doesn’t even exist anymore.”

Building off Todd’s questions, Nathaniel asked if there is another, more recent example of racial essentialism being used to promote a minority group performing technological labor to go along with Nakamura’s example. He found Nakamura’s notion of “the platform” to be more intriguing, and mentions that the labor behind our devices is usually and intentionally hidden from the consumer. According to Nathaniel, “We don’t want to see the labor that goes into the chip and the tech companies have been kind enough to keep all of that covered up for us so that we just think of the laborers are faceless clean room dancers instead of people for which anti-suicide nets have to be set up for when the hours and pay lead them to want to jump off the roof of the plant they work at”.

Kelly, in Tina Turner-esque fashion, asks the question “What’s Technology Got to Do with It?” In part, Kelly is responding to both Todd and Nathaniel by asking whether there is a connection between technology companies (Fairchild in particular) and the exploited labor of Navajo women. Indeed, exploited labor is not something new arising only in the manufacture technology-related commodities, but Kelly can’t shake loose the feeling that the connection between a “digital media/technology company and exploited labor of Navajo women wasn’t happenstance.” Regardless, Kelly points out the importance of creating awareness around worker exploitation while highlighting an oft-ignored aspect of such, namely that of “insourcing.” This topic of insourcing also appears in Todd’s blog, while Joe notes the “interconnectedness of tedious labor to the kinds of creative work so often celebrated.” Concomitantly, Diana questions the conditions that lead to our “unthinkability” and whether or not this unthinkability integral to our technology.

In addition to Nakamura’s essay, Diana and Nathaniel also address Jonathan Sterne’s “Compression: A Loose History,” as does Aden. With respect to Lucas Hildebrand’s formulation of ‘bootleg aesthetics’, mentioned in Sterne’s essay, Aden suggests that the viewing of a bootleg VHS copy of Todd Haynes’ Superstar and the “griminess of the copied and recopied bootleg versions of Superstar created the ‘illicit’ aesthetic that Sterne mentions (as well as relating to the dark subject matter of Superstar).” In recounting the experience of watching a bootleg VHS copy of Superstar, Nathaniel agrees writing, “There really was something that felt cool about seeing this banned video and part of that aesthetic experience absolutely was that the quality was shitty.” Does this make it feel, in a sense, “natural”? Of the aesthetic experience Joe is drawn to the concept of the “aesthetics of lag” (how it was measured in a pre-digitial technology and how it follows one’s experiences beyond the initial moment of lag), while Hassan asks whether we should “spend our energies navigating the aesthetic, social or political dimension of the contemporary condition.”