This question concerns representation, whereas the purpose is to move beyond representation. The ‘result’ couples humans, machines, and physical media. It cannot be described either as binary or non-binary because it is not a representation.
In other words, ‘I’ no longer uses the Turing-complete structures of sequential binary logic to re-present something to itself; the ‘I’ plugs directly into these structures, transforms itself and thereby presents something, namely itself, for the first time. Whether or not ‘Turing-complete’ is even necessary for this has been debated in the other thread: Is Eurorack Turing Complete?
Also debated was the necessity of ‘binary’ abstractions, or whether or not directly interfacing to the hardware can occur at a lower, sub-binary level. The Serge ‘triple comparator’ can synthesize any binary logic function, yet each comparator cell can also be patch-programmed through feedback to function as a memory element (positive feedback) or a linear one (negative feedback). Ghazala’s circuit-bending of (primarily) digital consumer devices by (perhaps inadvertently) introducing similar feedback paths, also subverts Turing abstractions, exposing the specificity of the hardware implementation.
That being said, the questions of ‘the binary’ and ‘representation’ do reassert themselves in a very a particular sense. This sense is not the mere, isolated ‘fact’ of the representation, but the entire circuit comprising humans, hardware, and other physical media, the circuit of the transformed ‘I’.
For instance --is it really necessary to have a ‘direct’ (unmediated) connection to binary or lower-level hardware elements, or are layers of semantic abstraction necessary or at least helpful in mediating this connection? In my ongoing studies with ‘performable logic’ I think not (as to ‘necessity’), but there are legitimate opposing points of view. For instance, Myron Krueger’s early 1970’s experiments in ‘artificial reality’ (e.g. Videoplace) promote limited uses of abstraction. Kreuger argues that his earlier experiential frameworks (e.g. GLOWFLOW with Dan Sandin) failed in part because “the participants could not establish the relation between action and display”. The ‘human-like’, and therefore semantic, video projections of Videoplace helped resolve this issue. Sufficiency is not necessity, however. Indeed, Krueger contextualizes the earlier failure also as a lack of directness ("[c]hanges in the display were indirectly contingent on the actions of participants"). So the necessary part could simply be this ‘directness’ rather than the mediating layer of semantic abstraction. Indeed, as Friedrich Kittler notes in his essay “There Is No Software”, Turing himself often associated directness with lack of abstraction, as he preferred to view and thus think directly in machine code. The one who did the most to advance the computer did so in part by transforming himself into one.
In the final analysis, however, Krueger’s focus is always on the circuit as a whole, and that this circuit has nothing to do with representation or semantic abstraction. In other words, Krueger is very definite that the circuit is the medium: ‘interaction’ or ‘experience’ is the proper domain of the artwork, not whatever images, videos, or sounds result from it. What emerges counts; what merely represents or reproduces previous forms of media does not. Statements such as “The beauty of the visual and aural response is secondary. Response is the medium” are to this effect. Or more directly:
The visual responses should not be judged as separate art works; nor should the sounds be judged as music. The only aesthetic concern should be the quality of the interaction, which may be judged by general criteria: the ability to interest, involve, and move people, to alter perception, and to define a new category of beauty.
That is – altered perception, altered consciousness; the ‘I’ transformed by the circuit. The gnostic, not the epistemic view. Despite Krueger’s use of representation in the circuit, his goal is not representation, but the transformation of the consciousness that re-presents, into that which comes forth and presents itself for the first time.
What then, does it mean to “come forth and presen[t] itself”? To ‘form a circuit’ is not enough. In speaking of the ‘transformed I’ we speak already of an entity – a cyborg.
Such an entity does not merely come forth in the ‘circuit’; it must also maintain itself in this coming-forth. It must thus stand fully in the decision for itself – the decision between the pre-individual and individual. While various frameworks have emerged to describe these ‘circuits’; i.e. intentional arcs, rhizomes, actor-networks – that of second-order cybernetics seems simplest and most illustrative here, as it keeps the focus on individuation. The key element here is autopoiesis – the ability of such an entity to regenerate itself from within itself. Only when the ‘I’ is embedded in a circuit that is itself autopoietic, can we claim this ‘I’ has been transformed.
Also – the issue is not just one circuit, but the medium as a whole, such that medium, message, and messenger are all one. An expanded circuit, involving all of the human practitioners, sequential binary logic elements, and other physical media in aggregate, including channels for communication and the dissemination of works must be considered in the sense of autopoiesis, in the sense of what is truly in and for itself.
That such autopoietic structures in computing as a whole are possible – is evidenced by the degree of inner consistency in the artworks mentioned. The examples I had illustrated in the earlier referenced post (Vera Molnar, Manfred Mohr, Frieder Nake) already provide a strong case for this – there are common structures and transformed ways of thinking which tie these artists and works closely together. Daniel Temkin’s recent Hyperallergic article – “The Hacker Aesthetic of Minimalist Code”, discusses more recent but similar work and echoes Krueger in making a case for computing and de-abstractifying code (e.g. “extreme code minimalism”) – not image, video, sound as its own medium. Such artworks, criticism, and minimal coding frameworks which unify today’s efforts with those of 50-75 years ago enable the medium to regenerate itself, thus provide some basis for the autopoiesis of the medium as a whole.
Of course, the standard bureaucratic dean or academic functionary may object that these artworks and transformed/cyborg thinking that emerges with it are ‘useless’. Such objections entirely miss the point. The question is not what can ‘we’ can do with it, it is what it can do with us. The question of computing in and for itself is a question of transforming this ‘we’. It demands not academic detachment, but the courage to stand in the decision in and for this transformation.
To be sure, the effort is a call to decision – not simply to choose one path while forgetting the other, but to stand in the decision, to acknowledge its necessity.
If the call is against anything, it is not ‘the other side’, so much as the persistence of an ambiguity, in which one side is constantly confused for the other. To stand in the decision means – to overcome this ambiguity, not by effortlessly eliminating one of its terms, but to recognize the ambiguity itself as the site of a struggle or decision, and to recognize how art has contributed to the working-out of this struggle.
Acknowledgement for now is key. What follows is the happening of history, beyond this ‘end of history’. The ‘result’ of the decision is not expressed here, but is brought forth in what comes.
The ambiguity is essentially that between two ‘senses’ of computing – two senses of the human/hardware/physical circuit and its emergent figure – the cyborg – thus described. This ambiguity governs no less all senses of cybernetics indicated above, on the basis of which the ‘in and for itself’ is interpreted as autopoeisis.
The key statement of the ambiguity is that by Donna Haraway [Cyborg manifesto --1984]:
From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war (Sofia 1984). From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.
Moreover, it’s not simply that these perspectives coexist – they are locked in a struggle in which the second undermines the very conditions of the possibility of the first. The senses of this undermining are clear in the rest of the manifesto.
But if we search within our own experience, we can find that this ambiguity expresses itself in many other ways.
This ambiguity is felt on the one hand in the sense that the postwar anthropotechnics of mystic union and self-transcendence; i.e. computing, electronic music, and modern psychedelics were all developed first as military technologies. Adjacent phenomena such as UFOlogy and desert heterotopias in the specifically ‘postwar’ sense also come from here – from the military-industrial complex. Friedrich Kittler in the conclusion of his essay “Rock Music: A Misuse of Military Equipment” points this out re: Hendrix:
Fittingly, ‘And the Gods Made Love’ is the title of the first track on Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland. But the masters of the world no longer have a voice or ears, as they did for Nietzsche. All one hears is tape hiss, jet noise, and gunshots. Shortwave – between the transmitters, which is to say intercepted from the military-industrial complex – sounds similar. Perhaps, under the conditions of a world war, love must come from white noise.
It is felt again in the ambiguous sense of ‘Californian Ideology’ [https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology], in which the 1984-1995 period of temporary autonomous zones, raves, and other areas of techn[o]cculture which characterized the earliest uses of the Internet gave way first to the .com bubble, surveillance capitalism, and total mobilization in the direction of the plaftorm-Singularity.
It is felt in the difference between Krueger’s early-70’s transformative vision of ‘artificial reality’, as a medium unto itself, and Kevin Kelly’s mirrorworld consisting in the universal reproducibility of existing media. [https://www.wired.com/story/mirrorworld-ar-next-big-tech-platform/]. Yet both parade interchangeably under the names ‘virtual reality’ or ‘augmented reality’.
It is felt in the twin phenomena of McMindfulness and the medicalization of psychedelics. Again, gnostic self-transformation gives way to the epistemic self-mobilization of the ‘I’: the manufacture of docile, well-disciplined, clear-thinking, accurately-representing and above all ‘productive’ workers, who are to implement unquestioningly the regime[s] mentioned above. [https://www.huffpost.com/entry/beyond-mcmindfulness_b_3519289] [https://harvardpolitics.com/covers/psychedelics-in-the-age-after-aquarius/] Far less questioned is whether the fundamental relation between self and world is even one of ‘production’ (in the sense of the key political question being control over ‘means of production’) – or rather one of cultivation – of bringing forth poietically that which produces itself autopoietically – and being thereby transformed. And the ‘political’ question thus being – the polis as the site of the event of transformation.
The ambiguity is felt in the word ‘cybernetics’ itself [Greek kubernes: steering, control]. Feedback, via the LQR theorem, is what achieves ‘optimal control’: drive a system to a pre-specified state using a minimum-energy input. Maximum production at minimum cost – do not open oneself to the system, do not allow the system to transform oneself, but simply force it into place, where this ‘place’ is already present, is re-presented. And yet, as we learn from ‘chaos theory’, feedback subverts any attempt at ‘control’. The toggle between control and subversion of control can be as simple as flipping a switch: changing positive feedback into negative. The ‘butterfly effect’: the smallest change in initial conditions yields an arbitrarily large change in the final result. Feedback subverts systems themselves, rendering them non-representable, transforming them into what they are not – even a simple binary circuit (comparator) becomes a linear element when the output is fed back to the negative terminal.
Such are among the many senses of this ambiguity. The ambiguity was indeed recognized long before 1984, in the works of artists such as Gustav Metzger, Hermann Nitsch, and Mark Pauline. That is – this work doesn’t simply ‘choose’ one side or the other, it’s not ‘naive Futurism’ – rather, it forces one to confront the ambiguity as ambiguity and thus, be able to stand in the decision regarding the cyborg. Metzger’s 1959-61 manifestos on auto-destructive/auto-creative art are already in a sense founding expressions of this ambiguity and this decision. [http://radicalart.info/destruction/metzger.html]. Perhaps a direct line can be drawn between his expositions at the London ICA and the beginnings of so-called ‘industrial’ culture which appeared there a decade later.
The intent therefore is not to exclude any given possibility, but to lay bare the fundamental ambiguity of the cyborg, the ‘in and for itself’ – and to take a stand on this ambiguity, to stand in the decision forced by it. What is ‘bad’ is not one side or the other, but the absence of decision; that is, when one side presents itself as the other. Also, when the ambiguity is simply allowed to conceal itself, ‘we’ may find that its decision has already been made for ‘us’, without ‘our’ being able to truly take it over.
Such is perhaps the real meaning of our lack of future horizon, or the ‘slow cancellation of the future’ remarked by Mark Fisher and others. When ‘we’ are alienated from ‘our’ own decision regarding the horizon in and through which the ‘we’ comes to be, when it seems that this decision has already been made for ‘us’, it only then appears as if there is no future and history has come to an end.
[sorry for lack of complete info re: references, I will add these later…]
