Delagrange "When Revision is Redesign"

She goes through her process to revise and publish Wunderkammer.

"This webtext for Inventio describes my response to Kairos' invitation for "re-envisioning," which I took as a provocation, a challenge to literally re-see and reimagine the visual and conceptual design of my argument"

argue by example for publishing scholarship about new media in new media. Are butterflies arranged by species? by size? by color? by geographical habitat? by medicinal property? Each arrangement is part of a different worldview, as is the presence or absence of butterflies in the first place.

My goal (with Wunderkammer), then, was to enact my argument—that the (visual) canon of arrangement, as represented in the Wunderkammer and further demonstrated in the assemblages of Joseph Cornell, is a heuristic for invention and discovery—by combining the visual effect of theWunderkammer as a physical space with the embodied experiences of designing (for me) and exploring (for the viewer).

"My revision/redesign started with the premise that the design experience must contain elements of building a Wunderkammer, and the viewer experience must contain elements of exploring one" ---- This reminds me of my process for the midterm. Lay out all my quotes, pick the best, assign images and colors, and then write the prose to string them all together.

trope: A figurative or metaphorical use of a word or expression

Limitations of using Adobe Flash: need the program, the know-how, the time to learn it, the Internet speed, the memory space, the compatible device and browser to view

best multimedia digital scholarship: Anne Wysocki's (2002) "Bookling Monument," Adrian Miles et al.'s (2003) "Violence of Text,"or Anna Munster's (2001) Wundernet

Importance of motion: "Cognitive research supports the assertion that the brain is less computational than combinatorial, working through homology and affinity in a search for similarities (Stafford, 2001, pp. 47-48, 139-142). It makes sense, then, that new knowledge can be generated by the discovery of meaning in unexpected juxtapositions, and that those juxtapositions will be stimulated by wandering and wondering through a richly furnished imaginative space."

Horse running/arrow and flower bloom and die/circle: "I designed the animation to explore time as a metaphor, and to visualize the conceptual difference between time as an arrow, forever streaming out behind us, and time as a circle, repeating cycles of birth, death, and renewal. But by explaining, I undercut my argument that visual arrangement, juxtaposition, classification, and even serendipity are in themselves generative, epistemologically rich and powerful. And by explaining, I also inhibit the opportunity for new, different, and equally productive interpretations of the images to emerge."
THIS -- let them come up with their own interpretation. do not tell people how to think.

"(Larry Leifer) argued that a key to innovative thinking and problem-solving is maintaining ambiguity for as long as possible. Designers must preserve ambiguity so as not to exclude avenues of thought or experiment that might later prove productive. Learners too must preserve ambiguity, as premature certainty shuts down the process of inquiry and exploration that often leads to more sophisticated, more interesting, more generative knowledge."

"Compositionists too have long believed that the act of writing is a mode of learning; it is the putting down of words on a surface that generates thought."

"First, I wanted to publish on the technological bleeding edge so that the article would be readable by browsers for the longest possible time."

"Techné is a making, and involves knowledge in the hand and knowledge in the head. Knowledge in the hand comes from practice and experience, knowledge in the head from reflection on causes and effects."

Midterm – DTC 356 Spring 2013

I thought it best to create a new blog for this project, as it is broken into a few parts. They are all in order, and flow from one to the next.

Delagrange "Wunderkammer" notes (messy)

Read Susan H. Delagrange, "Wunderkammer, Cornell, and the Visual Canon of Arrangement." Give yourself time to work your way through it: it's a complicated text, and the midterm will ask you to do something similar to the ideas Delagrange discusses. Take notes, and make sure to write down and look up any unfamiliar terms. (What isKairos? Episteme?)

Excerpts (no analysis)(Sorry they're messy)

Productive arts, or techné (Aristotle included medicine, architecture, and rhetoric as examples), occupy a middle ground between theory and practice, one that incorporates both abstract and applied knowledge. Rhetoric as techné has four implications: first, it is heuristic, a process of making, and thinking, and re-making, through which meaning and knowledge are made; second, it is situated, specific to the embodied and material conditions of a particular time and place; third, it is mobile and strategic, adaptable to changing circumstances and new challenges; and fourth, it is ethical, founded in specific beliefs and values (which may or may not be those of the community at large).


dInteractive digital media open up new opportunities to “perform” our pedagogy as a productive, rhetorically rich art, and to compose texts and make meaning that are not possible in traditional print.   

We can engage with these artifacts and the social technologies in which they are embedded through the practice of what we might call "critical wonder": a process through which digital media designers can thoughtfully and imaginatively arrange evidence and articulate links in a critical practice of embodied discovery.

Visual Analogy" expands the concept of arrangement as heuristic (involving or serving as an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experimental and especially trial-and-error methods), because analogy is a trope that lends itself particularly well to the discovery of unexpected affinities in the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate objects (and ideas). 

In "Wunderkammer," I argue that these 16th-century cabinets of wonder are models of visual provocation in which objects were manipulated and arranged in order to discover new meanings in their relationships. "Visual Analogy" expands the concept of arrangement as heuristic, because analogy is a trope that lends itself particularly well to the discovery of unexpected affinities in the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate objects (and ideas). "Joseph Cornell" explores the mobile assem-blages of 20th-century artist and bricoleur Joseph Cornell, whose refined use of repetition and small variation predicts the epistemic possibilities of 21st-century interactive digital media.

Wunderkammer:
"Until the end of the 18th century, wonder was defined as "a form of learning—an inter-mediate, highly particular state akin to a sort of suspension of the mind between ignorance and enlightenment that marks the end of unknowing and the beginning of knowing" (Lugli, 1986, p. 123)" Collections of objects, random, big and small -- art, to inspire wonder ..... "In fact, scale is one of the characteristics by which wonder is measured. Gigantic objects like skeletons of wooly mammoths and miniature accom-plishments like portraits of Napoleon painted on grains of rice are equally evocative of wonder... While associative interpretations of natural and man-made wonders led to significant intellectual projects like Linnaeus’s classification system, the scientific apparati housed in Wunder-kammern served not only as fascinations in themselves, but also as the means to examine and explore other objects... Magnifiers, spectacles, telescopes, and microscopes made previously imperceptible detail visible to the naked eye." Visual synecdoche (a figure of speech in which a term for a part of something is used to refer to the whole of something, or vice-versa... like saying the Internet but meaning the World Wide Web) ... "Like the scientifica in Wunderkammern, digital media are "practical inventions" that we may use to multiply, magnify, mirror and otherwise manipulate images and collections of images..... accidental reflection or refraction:" we might see ourselves in the reflection of parts of a Wunderkammern, which changes our perception of the piece/pieces.... "many people find Freud’s references to dreams and slips of the tongue to be fruitful objects-to-think-with about how the mind works, despite the fact that Freud himself considered them relatively unimportant. The Wunderkammer is an object-to-think-with that constructs an uncanny bridge between the mental and physical"... Interactive digital media-as-Wunderkammmer provide new objects-to-think-with about our slippery, provisional, fragmentary understanding of the world, a framework for exploration and discovery of how its seemingly disparate and disconnected pieces can be joined and made sensible, and thereby help us learn how to act. while we may be attuned to thinking of association and analogy in verbal terms, they are also deeply and fundamentally visual.


Visual Analogies:
The making of knowledge through arrange-ment and visual analogy in a Wunderkammer
is a process of analogical manipulation that is deeply rhetorical. Each arrangement of objects creates new taxonomies (defining groups of biological organisms on the basis of shared characteristics and giving names to those groups). It focuses on affinity rather than on difference, it is more likely to produce rhetorical effects that are collaborative and communal. if two things are similar in some ways, then it is likely that they will be similar in others, an insight that is critical to the formation of community. The role of visual juxtaposition and manipulation is to provide an opportunity for the discovery of affinities, but chance, of course, favors the prepared; we must be looking in order to see. Antistasis (From the Greek, "opposition". "In the stories we tell ourselves, we tell ourselves." Catachresis: juxtaposing things together that are not alike, then with the "aha!" moment that reveals their similarities.  associative habits of mind that can be equally well employed in the construction and manipulation of digital media designed as technologies of wonder and discovery. Computers, software, and the social technologies in which they are embedded are contemporary devices of wonder. One of the enduring critiques of the use of images in academic discourse is that images are inherently manipulative. It seems to be the particularity of bodies of evidence that raises fears about affective and emotional argument. -- anything not logocentric seems "cunning and inappropriate" -- 


Joseph Cornell: 
(1903-1972), the American assembly and collage artist. relying on the serendipitous discovery of artifacts he associated with his particular obsessions for maps, romantic opera, owls, the Medicis, and more. While his themes may have seemed eccentric, the creative juxtaposition of objects within each box “signals a careful rhetor who researches his subject, composes with specific communicative intentions, and endows his text with a discernable coherence” ...(in his pieces,) provide multiple perspectives while never revealing all, insisting that the viewer both accept the ambiguity and continue striving to construct meaning in the gaps. Like many artists, he worked in series, producing variations on the themes of soap bubble toys, Medici Slot Machines, and celestial navigation, a model for us of the visual tropes of repetition and small variation, and the reason we should seek mobility in multimediated spaces. “Cornell’s interpretation of found objects was distinctive because it also encompassed information—fact upon fact upon fact—that he accumulated about people, events, places, and phenomena” (Hartigan). Pieces were meant to be picked up and handled... This shifts the obligation to learn by doing to the viewer, whose responsibility it becomes to make sense of each object and text. 

Midterm Review

 Susan H. Delagrange, "Wunderkammer, Cornell, and the Visual Canon of Arrangement."

Epistemology: study of knowledge, theory of
Techné: middle ground between theory and practice. Making to know, productive arts. Rhetoric is a techné.
Rhetorical Canon: there are 5... invention, memory, style, delivery and arrangement. A was her focus in this piece -- organization (e.g. the 5 paragraph essay as a canon of arrangement). The web juxtaposes things in a way to make you think more about them
Wunderkammer: wonder-cabinet. Collections of man-made, found objects. Joseph Cornell made his own, they usually have a theme. Visual canon or arrangement. Wonder is a type of learning: "an inter-mediate, highly particular state akin to a sort of suspension of the mind between ignorance and enlightenment that marks the end of unknowing and the beginning of knowing

Praxis: practice/doing, as opposed to theory, but with theory in mind (e.g. effective web design... you learn through trial and error, observation what works and doesn't – so when you go to make your own, you keep these things in mind)


MIDTERM PROMPT: Delagrange argues that "[p]roductive arts, or techné. . . occupy a middle ground between theory and practice, one that incorporates both abstract and applied knowledge," and notes that rhetoric can be considered as techné.

Argument is rhetoric. Produce a multi-modal argument about the evolving ways we produce, distribute, use, and/or reproduce information. It should reflect the four implications Delagrange assigns to what Delagrange calls "rhetoric as techné."

4 implications: 
1. heuristics (process of making, remaking, iterative process)
2. situated specific to the embodied and material conditions of a perticular time and place
3. mobile and strategic, adaptable to changing circumstances
4. ethical, founded in specific beliefs and values which may or may not be that of the community


***Ask Nathan to narrate? :)

Alex Galloway "Protocol" notes

Alex Galloway, "Protocol," (chapter 13 of "Rethinking Marxism" 2001)

How does control exist after decentralization?

the move from the modern disciplinary societies to societies of imperial control.

The reason for my essay is this curious “descending into the hidden abode of production.” The hidden abode of production means many things in the age of Empire.
It means descending into the real conditions of Third World chip-making factories
populated by the “destitute, excluded, repressed, exploited—and yet living!” working poor (156), just as it means descending into the boardrooms of dotcom start-ups


At the core of networked computing technologies is the concept of protocol. A
computer protocol is a set of rules that govern networked relations. The protocols
that govern the Internet, for example, are contained in what are called Request For
Comments (or RFC) documents. They are the written definitions of the protocols and
policies of the Internet. The RFCs are managed by the Networking Division of the
University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI). They are
freely available to anyone wishing to build hardware or software that meets their
specifications. The ISI is itself under the directive of the Internet Engineering Task
Force, an international, technocratic community of network scientists, and the Internet
Society, an altruistic but equally technocratic organization that wishes “[t]o assure
the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people
throughout the world” (Internet Society)
Protocol: like rules of driving on a highway. Protocols are highly
formal—that is, they encapsulate information inside a technically defined wrapper
while remaining relatively indifferent to the content of the information.


"It is common for contemporary critics to describe the Internet as an unpredictable
mass of data, rhizomatic and lacking central organization. This position goes roughly
like this: since new communication technologies are based on the elimination of
centralized command and hierarchical control, it follows that we are witnessing a
general disappearance of control as such. This could not be further from the truth.
Empire does much to dispel this myth in the social and political arenas. Whereas
Empire is how political control exists under decentralization, protocol is how technological control exists under decentralization."


The address “www.rhizome.org” is parsed in reverse, starting with the “org.” Thus,
in theory, the root server receives a request from the user and directs the user to another machine that has authority over the “org” domain, which in turn directs the user
to another machine that has authority over the “rhizome” subsection, which in turn
returns the IP address for the specific machine known as “www.” This process of deriving an IP address from a domain name is called resolution.


A common protocol leads to network articulation, while incompatible protocols leads to network disarticulation. For example, two computers running the DNS addressing protocol will be able to communicate effectively with each other about network addresses. Sharing the DNS protocol allows them to be networked. However, the same computers will not be able to communicate with a foreign device running, for example, the NIS addressing protocol or the WINS protocol. Without a shared protocol, there is no network.


For example, a decentralized network is precisely what gives the Internet Protocol its effectivity as a dominant protocol. Or to take another example, the flimsy, cross-platform nature of HTML is precisely what gives it its power as a protocological standard. Like Empire, if protocol dared to centralize, or dared to hierarchize, or dared to essentialize, it would fail.


We turn now to Michel Foucault to derive one final quality of protocol: the special existence of protocol in the “privileged” physical media of bodies...?


But the effects of distributed networks and protocological control on the marxist liberatory project are massive indeed. As Deleuze remarked to Negri several years before Empire: "It’s true that, even before control societies are fully in place, forms of delinquency or resistance (two different things) are also appearing. Computer piracy and viruses, for example, will replace strikes and what the nineteenth century called “sabotage” . . . You ask whether control or communication societies will lead to forms of resistance that might reopen the way for a communism . . . The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control. (1990, 175)

Liliana Bounegru's explanation: "In understanding networks in terms of their protocols, by
drawing on Paul Baran, Galloway demonstrates that, unlike common conceptions, the
distributed network, the network diagram specific to the Internet, does not remove
forms of organization or control, is not anarchic, chaotic, or entirely rhizomatic, but it
creates novel structures of organization and control. Protocol coincides with this new
apparatus of control in the core argument and subtitle of Galloway’s book: “protocol
is how technological control exists after decentralization.”

2.12 Notes

DNS: domain name server. Which IP addresses correspond to domain names. Altering that information would make the Internet unfunctional.
TCP/IP helps the domains interact with each other and share information. Opposite of the telephone system, which had a centralized hub

"Empire has no Rome" (Galloway) means – no central power


Alex Galloway "Protocol" and Jonathan Lethem, "The Ecstasy of Influence":


1. One idea that was already highly familiar to you from other contexts, with a description of what it means or what its implications are, and what those contexts are.

"Protocol is to control societies as the panopticon is to disciplinary societies. Protocol is more democratic than the panopticon, but it is still structured around command and control" (Galloway 87).

Driving at night on an empty street, one would still stop at lights and signs for fear of being watched -- but not so much this paranoia, but that the paranoia has imbedded itself into one's subconscious to the point where the watcher has succeeded. Drivers are aware of the transparency and fear repercussions, so their obedience has become subconscious. They become internalized dispositions -- get people to act in ways in accordance with conventions. Govern our actions in real life (protocol does)

switch 

2. One idea that was new and interesting to you, with a description of what it means, and why it was interesting.

Lethem says on page 61, "That  is to say, most artists are converted  to art by art  itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying  oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses.  Inspiration  could  be called  inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.  Invention,  it  must  be humbly admitted, does not  consist  in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any  artist  knows  these  truths,  no matter  how  deeply  he  or  she  submerges that knowing."

One could compare this to a quote attributed to Einstein, "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." -- Albert Einstein. 

Copyright is suppressing creativity, not fostering it. And those who claim to "own" intellectual property are those guilty of "source hypocrisy" (65) because they in turn got their ideas from others.

3. One idea that you didn't understand or that seemed fundamentally mistaken, confused, or misguided, with an analysis of the specific part of it that seemed most problematic or difficult and why.

"By design, the Internet Protocol cannot be centralized. The RFC documents declare this in black

and white" (Galloway 85).

RFC documents say TCP IP stack cannot live on any one machine... moment of irony? People wrote the "centralized" power proposals -- they put themselves in a point of power by writing it, that it comes from a central place.

Information is Random, Complex and Interesting

Prompt: Read Gleick 324-354 on randomness and information. Note the distinction between interesting and uninteresting numbers. As we start thinking about the mid-term, I'll be looking for interesting essays from you. What might that mean?

Chapter 12 of Gleick's "The Information" titled "The Sense of Randomness" adds to the definition of Information. The main character of the chapter, Gregory Chaitin, is a New Yorker mathematician. His  studies furthered theory about algorithms. While Gleick explained that messages being random, complex and interesting translate to containing more information, I kept thinking about Berry's Paradox (179). It helped me understand the purpose of an algorithm. If a complex idea can be stated in fewer terms (or fewer bits) than an algorithm helps us compute a message.

"But Shannon also considered redundancy within a message: the pattern, the regularity, the order that makes a message comprehensible. The more regularity in a message, the more predictable it is. The more predictable, the more redundant. The more redundant a message is, the less information it contains," Gleick writes on page 329. So it seems that the easier it is to create an algorithm for message, the less information it contains. Those messages which require more complicated algorithms to illustrate become more "interesting." And in this chapter, "interesting" has become another measurer of information.

Later in the chapter, Andrei Nikolaevich Kolmogorov calls this randomness complexity: "the size, in bits, of the shortest algorithm needed to generate it. This is also the amount of information" (337).

The more random a message is, the more interesting it is, and the more information it contains. And "random" and "interesting" are not subjective terms in this discussion: "Ignorance is subjective. It is a quality of the observer. Presumably randomness – if it exists at all – should be a quality of the thing itself" (326). 


On page 331 when pi π is explained to be a random number but not in the subjective sense, we learn that math and science can help us pull meaning out of seemingly random numbers. Gleick states that if a number can be computed or defined, it reflects on its randomness. And since algorithms produce patterns, looking at the size of an algorithm reveals computability. Since an algorithm is measurable, w gauge the size of a message in bits (332). Pi is a random number (its numerals do not repeat in patterns) but since we can compute it, it loses the 'random' tag. Same with the number 1729, or the Hardy-Ramanujan number (339).

It's been difficult reading these sections because I can't put my finger yet on how this translates to information in general. Are we talking about decoding foreign, animal or alien languages? Or just quantifying/commodifying Information? 

John von Neumann said, "Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin" (327). Since now we do have algorithmic ways of producing sets of random numbers (as Gleick states earlier on that page), perhaps what Neumann was getting at was Information. New Information cannot be produced arithmetically – it requires "outside the box algorithm" thinking.

Ultimately, when Professor Edwards collects our midterms, he will be looking for "interesting essays." If he is using the objective term as Gleick and Chaitin do in the chapter, then he will grade with the expectation that we have come up with sentences and thoughts that are not just arithmetically concocted from our readings and discussions (our class "algorithms"). The less formulaic our essays are – with quotes pieced together and commentary inserted that has already been mulled over in class – the more interesting they will be. We must work outside our given algorithm ("given" meaning what has been bestowed upon us – we have to seek out and bring in new things).

However, Gleick later brings up the fact that algorithmic information theory is basically the way scientists operate. "When humans or computers learn from experience, they are using induction: recognizing regularities amid irregular streams of information. From this point of view, the laws of science represent data compression in action. A theoretical physicist acts like a very clever coding algorithm" (345).

"...perfect understanding is meant to remain elusive. If one could find the bottom it would be a bore." This applies to human questions, Gleick says, like art, biology and intelligence (353). 

Charles H. Bennett pulls it all together. He stated that "it has been appreciated that information per se is not a good measure of message value" (353). Information is valuable when it is "neither too cryptic nor too shallow, but somewhere in between" (354). Valuable Information is computable but requires us to keep thinking to expand and contextualize the message.