rethinking the virtual and the material.
The presentations and conversation about “platform studies” at the 2011 Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science made me rethink the terms we use to conceptualize the digital humanities, and for that matter the digital in general.
I have tended to think about a tension in the digital humanities between the virtual and the material. Roughly speaking we tend to compare the digital to the analog, or even, when just thinking about computers alone, hardware to software.
But papers and talks about platforms, applications, code, circuits, industrial design, hardware, software, hacking, and more made me think about the inadequacy of this binary between the virtual and the material. They are not sufficient anymore to describe the continuum between actual objects and their virtual representations.
Instead, when discussing life in and through the digital medium, we need terms more like the embodied and the imaginative, the solid and the effervescent, the heavy and the light, the obscure and the incandescent, vernacular and official, the administered and the improvised, the controlled and the wild, the commanded and the appropriated, the static and the mobile, the enacted and the dreamed, the meaty and the spiritualized, the corporeal and the corpus, the settled and the flickering.
To wax Whole Earthian for a moment, there’s a philosophical dimension to this naming game—epistemological, phenomenological, even metaphysical—that brings us back to the futuristic dreams of space-age sci-fi fantasists. Only it’s happening (doesn’t it always?) in much more prosaic, banal yet strikingly weird ways. It’s happening every time you log on to your account or swipe across your screen, in the blink of an eye, the nanosecond of a logic gate.
The larger point here: as the cybernetics of both bodily and digital life shift, as we increasingly reorient our bodies, minds, souls, and machines, as code reaches out literally to touch us and, simultaneously, our very selves dissolve and get reconstituted on digital networks, we’ll need to think smartly about the ways in which we talk about interactions between the material and the virtual.
My experience at DHCS 2011 suggests that the concept of the platform provides a promising springboard for these important explorations.
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