I sent this reply directly to Myron yesterday instead of to the list…
and already have a really thoughtful personal response… and he
reminded me to send it to the list as I had intended… thanks Myron. I
also found some info on Malakoff Diggins.
http://www.calgoldrush.com/travel/malakoff.html
Brett
Myron Turner wrote:
> As usual, Brett Stalbaum gives us a lot to think about in this essay.
>
> But I'm not sure I am convinced by his argument that speed is the differentiating element in current information technology.
> As he points out human beings have from earliest times sought to abstract data from the material world, and the Sumerian
> accountant is a case in point–accounting is historically one of the most important instances of data abstraction. But the
> issue for the ancient Sumerian, if he had wanted for some reason to communicate his data to others, was not speed alone.
> By showing his tablets to his neighbor, he could very speedily communicate his data, just as he very speedily could tell his
> neighbor what what on his mind by talking face to face with him.
Hi Myron… I do think I do index linguistic networks that transport
data and information at foot speed… but did not very deeply treat
automation and speed. More below but two things here: I owe it to note
debt to Paul Virilio (good reading - and a better source to address
questions than I, and to point out that much communication now is human
to machine or machine… so neighbors don't always matter in the
distribution of material reality. (I'm not celebrating that… btw. That
political issue is the job of database politics to solve - my paper is a
humble attempt at interpreting a range of artistic practices that
include database politics…)
>
> The issue for the ancient Sumerian would be communicating his data and his ideas to increasingly larger numbers of others.
> How would he deal with this? He could gather interested parties into a large group and speak his
ideas to them. Or he could
> get on his horse and using its greater capacity for speed go from farm to farm. In other words, I feel that the issue isn't
> speed but numbers and space. His horse would enable him to carry his data to one neighbor at a time over considerable distances
> (as he understood them) at the speed of a horse. His convocation of interested parties would enable him to communicate his ideas
> as widely as his voice could carry. The problem of numbers is really a problem of space. How much space can you cover in a given time.
>
He might not want to communicate confidential business data to large
number, but if he did, would he do so by going faster to reach those at
greater distances instead of having them come to him? (There is a well
known relationship between distance and speed…)
> If we move ahead into the industrial era, we see that we've had speed for a long time – the telegraph, the telephone.
> But they had the same limits as the ancient Sumerian – limits in how much space could be traversed at one time. These technologies
> could do it faster than the ancient Sumerian's horse, but they were still largely face to face technolgies:
>
> "Hello. That you, Jack? I have 30 bushels of corn. Have to run. Still have to call Sam and Wayne. Bye."
>
> But we've had other technologies which have addressed in different ways the issues of space, numbers and speed: printing,
> the phonograph, photography, radio, tv–each of which could communicate to large numbers of people with various degrees of speed.
> An interesting technology in this context is the teletype which communicated the same data to large numbers of people across a wide
> geography and as fast as the wires could carry the words(and later the pictures).
>
So another difference making difference may be that that speed enables
greater ubiquity and more widespread use and thus greater numbers of
users? I'll sign up with you on that of course… But it occurs to me
that, although this is not a topic I treated, that the issue of who gets
to use these technologies during their initial and arguably most
culturally influential phases is at play. Who gets to use speed (or
Myron's quantity) and for what? Note that the CAE quote in the essay
implies something, to which I will add:
One of the first phone lines in California was used to control the
release of water from damns in the Sierra Nevada to control flumes for
very destructive hydro mining practices, literally changing the
landscape. (Check out Malakov(sp?) Diggings State Park in California.)
The introduction of digital database systems begins in the the 1950's
(roughly contemporary with new random-access storage technologies - the
earliest disk drives…), and Lockheed and IBM developed the first large
hierarchical database system to support supply chain management for the
Apollo moon mission, and Oracle Corporation's first client was
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. So even if quantity of users is the
real issue and not speed, (and I think the case that quantity is enabled
by speed is not really that hard to make, the telephone and books
eventually become ubiquitous right?), the impact of these increasingly
fast (or ubiquitous/quantious) technologies through who is in position
to first adopt them is interesting. Who it is that is in a hurry to be
the first users of "the difference" (whether the difference is speed or
quantity or lethality or marketability) that a new technology brings? In
the essay I deal with the *material and distributive*
effects/possibilities of speed and try to situate a broad range of
practice against it. I identify database politics as part of my
interpretive framework but don't do database politics here…
> I really don't have answers as to what distinguishes digital culture from earlier technogologies.
I do actually address this, although laconically… when I mention
Claude Shannon. He showed that digital information could be measured in
terms of difference - and that you could measure it in automatic ways
(semantically neutral) that allowed data transmission to be better
managed in digital networks, which later allowed a high degree of
automation, which in turn led to greater speed! Interestingly he worked
for the phone company; and it should be no surprise that AT&T was very
interested in the digital transmission of data, and developed UNIX,
which is a very early operating system used in telephone switches. (And
today lives on as Linux/Mac/Solaris/etc…) So in fact, the digital does
allow an increase in speed through more effective control, even if
across "the wire" the electromagnetic carrier wave of older analog phone
systems, and the carrier waves carrying digital data, both travel at the
same speed of light. It is faster to control and manage digital
switching and data compression (because they are discrete) than it is
analog data. This is another reason that speed makes a difference in the
digital.
> It seems to me more than just
> differences of degree–greater speed, greater numbers, more geography.
> My feeling is that it has to do with networking and the
> nature of networks and how networks have been organized.
I'd put networks right up there with disembodiment in that we have made
way too much of them… they are archaic too! Networks existed on
sailing ships as I pointed out, (including digital-to-analog and
analog-to-digital conversions!), but also in archaic economies long
before digital computation. Some archaic networks can be
reconstructed… for example much is known about prehistoric trade
networks in western north America from studying lithics - obsidian in
particular. However, I agree, how a network is designed is of course a
formal influence on how it it used. TCP/IP vs UDP (and their limits) can
be thought of as formal foundations of the net we know of as "inter",
but it is a mistake to look at the Internet as if if the mother of all
networks, or the only network, or that the net in Internet is the
difference making difference. It is just very fast and digital which in
many ways closes distances faster. And the flow and shape of the
material world changes because of it - from where you get to live to the
freshness of your carrot juice. (I hasten to add, we can't forget energy
as the second dimension of matter as Virilio has it… which interacts
with information as the third…) But, there were archaic networks of
Egyptians that carried business records and messages around on
scrolls… it is important to understand the ontology of various
networks - but speed is the difference that makes the Internet…
>
>
> Myron Turner
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> +
> -> post: [email protected]
> -> questions: [email protected]
> -> subscribe/unsubscribe: http://rhizome.org/preferences/subscribe.rhiz
> -> give: http://rhizome.org/support
> +
> Subscribers to Rhizome are subject to the terms set out in the
> Membership Agreement available online at http://rhizome.org/info/29.php
>
–
Brett Stalbaum, Lecturer, PSOE
Coordinator, Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts Major (ICAM)
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO
Department of Visual Arts
9500 GILMAN DR. # 0084
La Jolla CA 92093-0084
http://www.c5corp.com
http://www.paintersflat.net
Info for students, winter quarter 2K6:
-ICAM and Media (computing emphasis) faculty advising:
Tuesday 1-2PM, VAF 206, Contact via email [email protected]
-Vis 40/ICAM 40 (Introduction/Computing in Arts) office hour:
Tuesday 2-3PM, VAF 206, Contact via WebCT
-Vis 141A (Computer Programming/Arts I) office hour:
Tuesday 3-4PM, VAF 206, Contact: via WebCT
- Notes:
Week 7 (Feb 21st) No office hours today
Finals Week (March 21st) Yes.
–
Brett Stalbaum, Lecturer, PSOE
Coordinator, Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts Major (ICAM)
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO
Department of Visual Arts
9500 GILMAN DR. # 0084
La Jolla CA 92093-0084
http://www.c5corp.com
http://www.paintersflat.net
Info for students, winter quarter 2K6:
-ICAM and Media (computing emphasis) faculty advising:
Tuesday 1-2PM, VAF 206, Contact via email [email protected]
-Vis 40/ICAM 40 (Introduction/Computing in Arts) office hour:
Tuesday 2-3PM, VAF 206, Contact via WebCT
-Vis 141A (Computer Programming/Arts I) office hour:
Tuesday 3-4PM, VAF 206, Contact: via WebCT
- Notes:
Week 7 (Feb 21st) No office hours today
Finals Week (March 21st) Yes.
[Fwd: Re: RHIZOME_RAW: Re: An Interpretive Framework for Contemporary Database Practice in the Arts]
-
Type: discussion