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The slime of spime
Dec. 18th, 2004 11:23 amThanks to Orlac for telling me about a fascinating video of a lecture Bruce Sterling gave on December 13th at the Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich. As he boasts at the beginning of the lecture, Sterling is not just a sci-fi writer. He was recently appointed Provocateur in Residence ('that's my official title') at the Arts Center College of Design, California.
The Munich lecture is called 'Shaping Things To Come'. It's quite long, around an hour plus Q&A, but I promise it will change the way you think about objects forever. Sterling talks about six technical trends which are converging to change the way we think about objects: 'six sides of a black box, inside which is the Christmas surprise'. These trends are:
1. Barcodes and interactive chips (RFID, or radio frequency identity, chips) which can label objects with unique identities.
2. Local and global space-time positioning technologies like GPS tracking systems.
3. Powerful search engines.
4. 3D Virtual models and computer rendering.
5. Rapid prototyping of objects.
6. Recycling, design for disassembly, a new kind of death for objects.
Sterling introduces his concept of the spime: an archive of data about the space-time co-ordinates of objects. 'In the future there will be millions of small histories for billions of small objects.' This is the central metaphor of his way of looking at objects, and I think you could say that a spime (the narrative accumulated by technologies 1-6, as well as others that Sterling doesn't talk about, like cell phones, peer-to-peer and bluetooth) is like a novel; it's an inventory, a narrative of all the events which happen to an object, and it also produces the object. If the object is the protagonist, the hero, of this 'novel', it follows that, as in literature, the novel itself is real, even although its fictional hero is an invention.
So, according to Sterling, the object is the hero of a sort of novel made up of all the tracking information about it. This 'novel' is the data trace of the object's trajectory through various situations. The data is more valuable than the object itself, says Sterling. And of course he would say that; the hero of a novel is fiction, but the novel itself is real. The character exists in a fictional world, but the novel exists in the real world. So a novel is more important and more real than the fictional protagonist which it 'produces'. In the beginning is the word. 'The objects themselves are just a hard copy.'
This immediately sets off my built-in 'Platonism detector', which triggers a small but noisy siren in a chip built into my neck. I think this is misguided because incarnation changes everything. Can a description 'create' a human face? Is a map 'more important' than the territory it outlines?
And what about the problem of interpretation? No matter how 'objective' the data created by an object, it requires interpretation by humans. Selection, editing, construing, parsing, concluding... these are interpretative activities. When an archeologist raises this point in the Q&A session, Sterling scoffs 'I see Jacques Derrida has not lived in vain'. But it's a valid point. Which interpretation of the data produced by objects will we choose as 'more important than the object itself'? Who gets to choose that interpretation?
Of course, as someone who lives by creating 'data traces' of various sorts, I appreciate their importance. I hope my words and my music, or digital representations thereof, survive my body. And I find myself approving Sterling's semi-Marxist statement that objects are merely an incarnation of social relations, which are more important than objects. Meanwhile, the Existentialist in me is not amused. 'Existence precedes essence,' he reminds me; Sterling seems to be saying the opposite. I think my main objection, though, is that I believe that, whether we're talking about the Christian story or just someone making an object, incarnation changes everything. There is something about having sensual evidence of something tangible that goes way beyond plans, blueprints, data traces. I won't get all shinto-animistic on you and say that there's a spirit living inside every object, and that although I have the power to create objects, I don't have any power over the spirits that will inhabit them. But I will tell you that as a musician I need to hear a note before I commit it to a composition. I need to hear and feel what Eno calls 'the vertical colour of sound'. There's no notation system for that, just as there's no notation system for perfume. Experience goes beyond specification... even when specification entirely determines experience. The particular is so much more interesting than the general, and so much better embodied. Christ is a more interesting character than God because he is all wrapped up with contingencies, because he is incarnated. Error and particularity and embodiment and surprise and even death are crucial to the human story just as the cross is crucial to Christ's story. The experience of embodiment exceeds the specifications of embodiment.
Gamer buys $26,500 virtual land, the BBC reported yesterday. I have no doubt that we're heading into more and more belief in the reality and value of disembodied worlds. Once the virtual world of money maps to the virtual world of... virtual worlds, there's no stopping this rush to disembodiment. But that doesn't mean it's sane or sensible. Count me with the counter-revolution. I think I'm going to have to get more and more interested in the real world, and my real body, if only to counterbalance this new Platonism with which, of course, I have more than a sneaking sympathy.
The Munich lecture is called 'Shaping Things To Come'. It's quite long, around an hour plus Q&A, but I promise it will change the way you think about objects forever. Sterling talks about six technical trends which are converging to change the way we think about objects: 'six sides of a black box, inside which is the Christmas surprise'. These trends are:
1. Barcodes and interactive chips (RFID, or radio frequency identity, chips) which can label objects with unique identities.
2. Local and global space-time positioning technologies like GPS tracking systems.
3. Powerful search engines.
4. 3D Virtual models and computer rendering.
5. Rapid prototyping of objects.
6. Recycling, design for disassembly, a new kind of death for objects.
Sterling introduces his concept of the spime: an archive of data about the space-time co-ordinates of objects. 'In the future there will be millions of small histories for billions of small objects.' This is the central metaphor of his way of looking at objects, and I think you could say that a spime (the narrative accumulated by technologies 1-6, as well as others that Sterling doesn't talk about, like cell phones, peer-to-peer and bluetooth) is like a novel; it's an inventory, a narrative of all the events which happen to an object, and it also produces the object. If the object is the protagonist, the hero, of this 'novel', it follows that, as in literature, the novel itself is real, even although its fictional hero is an invention.
So, according to Sterling, the object is the hero of a sort of novel made up of all the tracking information about it. This 'novel' is the data trace of the object's trajectory through various situations. The data is more valuable than the object itself, says Sterling. And of course he would say that; the hero of a novel is fiction, but the novel itself is real. The character exists in a fictional world, but the novel exists in the real world. So a novel is more important and more real than the fictional protagonist which it 'produces'. In the beginning is the word. 'The objects themselves are just a hard copy.'
This immediately sets off my built-in 'Platonism detector', which triggers a small but noisy siren in a chip built into my neck. I think this is misguided because incarnation changes everything. Can a description 'create' a human face? Is a map 'more important' than the territory it outlines?
And what about the problem of interpretation? No matter how 'objective' the data created by an object, it requires interpretation by humans. Selection, editing, construing, parsing, concluding... these are interpretative activities. When an archeologist raises this point in the Q&A session, Sterling scoffs 'I see Jacques Derrida has not lived in vain'. But it's a valid point. Which interpretation of the data produced by objects will we choose as 'more important than the object itself'? Who gets to choose that interpretation?
Of course, as someone who lives by creating 'data traces' of various sorts, I appreciate their importance. I hope my words and my music, or digital representations thereof, survive my body. And I find myself approving Sterling's semi-Marxist statement that objects are merely an incarnation of social relations, which are more important than objects. Meanwhile, the Existentialist in me is not amused. 'Existence precedes essence,' he reminds me; Sterling seems to be saying the opposite. I think my main objection, though, is that I believe that, whether we're talking about the Christian story or just someone making an object, incarnation changes everything. There is something about having sensual evidence of something tangible that goes way beyond plans, blueprints, data traces. I won't get all shinto-animistic on you and say that there's a spirit living inside every object, and that although I have the power to create objects, I don't have any power over the spirits that will inhabit them. But I will tell you that as a musician I need to hear a note before I commit it to a composition. I need to hear and feel what Eno calls 'the vertical colour of sound'. There's no notation system for that, just as there's no notation system for perfume. Experience goes beyond specification... even when specification entirely determines experience. The particular is so much more interesting than the general, and so much better embodied. Christ is a more interesting character than God because he is all wrapped up with contingencies, because he is incarnated. Error and particularity and embodiment and surprise and even death are crucial to the human story just as the cross is crucial to Christ's story. The experience of embodiment exceeds the specifications of embodiment.
Gamer buys $26,500 virtual land, the BBC reported yesterday. I have no doubt that we're heading into more and more belief in the reality and value of disembodied worlds. Once the virtual world of money maps to the virtual world of... virtual worlds, there's no stopping this rush to disembodiment. But that doesn't mean it's sane or sensible. Count me with the counter-revolution. I think I'm going to have to get more and more interested in the real world, and my real body, if only to counterbalance this new Platonism with which, of course, I have more than a sneaking sympathy.