Digital Dead Remains: Exploring material and in-material legacies.
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Digital Dead Remains: Exploring material and in-material legacies.
- 1. Sellina Ellis Gray Designer PhD Candidate HighWire, Lancaster University María Alejandra Luján Escalante Artist Cultural Researcher PhD Candidate The Creative Exchange, Lancaster University
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Editor's Notes
- Barad joins together theories of New Materialism by cutting through techno-determinism and post-constructivism thoughts, moving from a human centred perspective to focus on a more post-humanist view.Agential Realism proposes a physical and cultural way to understand the relationship of matter and meaning. The postulate is to understand reality as phenomenaShe explains the relationship in between our beings and the material that surrounds us, not just as a way to understand reality but also to position ourselves in it and attempt of study it
- Barad (2007) encompasses multidisciplinary postulates in the synergy between physics, cultural studies, sociology, continental philosophy, philosophy of science and techno-feminism. Barad takes inspiration from physicist Niels Bohr, one of the founders of Quantum Physics, to establish the bases of what is contemporarily known as New Materialism. Barad and Agential Realism became relevant for our study as they provide a straightforward approach to tackling the paradox of the materiality and in-materiality of remains in the context of digital spaces and their intricate relation with our physical place.Materiality does not exclusively refer to the tangible and physical as stable and fixed surface, but as the intra-active set of relationships of material with us; how we make sense of things, their connotations, meanings and practices all entangled in-matter
- Materiality, then, is defined not just as the solid and/or concrete but extended to refer to the complex, dynamic, unstable set of relationships that as wholeness refer to the process in which subjectivity and discursive practices become actualised into concrete matterWe can recognise that Agential Realism encapsulates complex philosophical notionsBy embarking upon a study of materiality and in-materiality of remains using Barad’s theories, we can establish a sort of epistemological jump, especially when we accept that it is a framework which at first glance proposes seemingly counterintuitive arguments. In this sense the main contributions, at least for our purposes, are in both theoretical and methodological terms.
- Agential Realism has to do with theories of being and theories of knowledge; in this sense it is both ontological and epistemological. The postulate is to understand reality as phenomenaBarad takes from post-structuralism and feminist studies and revisits the work of Niels Bohr in quantum physics and the philosophy of scientific knowledge, to draw parallels. CONCEPT AND DISCOURSE Agential Realism revisits some Bohr’s theories about the relationship of practices of human knowledge with the nature of physical objects, in which concept, practices of observation and apparatus conceive matter as a non static, relative and quantum physical object.AGENCY AND PERFORMATIVITY In the intersection of this poststructuralist thought with Bohr’s theories of Physics, performativity is related with the agency of the apparatus– the agency of the matter - a participative role in the processes of production of bodies and matter;Baradadds that performativity incorporates into the descriptions of reality, ‘matter, doing and actions’Understanding performativity as a “material-discursive practice”that is not exclusively human but embedded in thingsDiscourse for Barad is not synonymous with language, but involves its material in the tangible that surrounds us, performativity in practice takes the power of language into the creation of reality.Entanglements, liquid boundaries and spectrums of mixed tonesIf we agree that the material is not limited to its surface but extended to its agency, that it is also entangled with our agency and with ourselves, constituting a wholeness.we are not going to be able to distinguish clearly the beginning or the end of the experience, technology and practices. We rather locate them within a spectrum.
- Methodology is responsive to the ontological and epistemological problem of nonexistent boundaries, dichotomies and binary differentiations. These are boundaries that allow us to study a subject, a matter of a practice by itself, which is artificially produced rather than arising from the actual division of binary relationsLooking to gain knowledge, we isolate our object from reality and from ourselves, in order to observe and reflect it. Instability of the boundaries (Haraway, 1992) is, according to Barad the deeply connected way in which everything is entangled with everything else, meaning that any act of observation makes a "cut" between what is included and excluded in what is being considered. Nothing is inherently separate from anything else, but separations are temporarily enacted so that one can examine something long enough to gain knowledge about it. This view of knowledge provides a framework for thinking about the ways that culture and habits of thought can make some things visible and other things easier to ignore or to never see.
- Reflection aims to perfect a language (mathematical, pictorial, spoken written, coding, etc.) that most closely translates the phenomenon for the purposes of understanding.However, in the process of “selecting” and “reproducing” it into a legible discourse, we leave some aspects behind; the unknown which is itself unknown.We are curating according to our subjectivity, knowledge, gender, historical and sociological conditions, but there will always be a gap between the form of representation and what is represented Representations, when understood as meaning and content, are more attainable to us than the things they are representing. The tendency is to assume that the representation is the whole phenomenon, but the representation includes certain aspects of the observation and it is not the phenomenon in it.Reflection and observation is about sameness, and mirroring.
- By contrast, diffraction as a method is about patterns of difference and resonance. It is about bridging the gap.Diffraction advocates sustaining the work of critical practice and approaching topics that contain various disciplines. It is a method that aims to include what is left behind, looking at versions of the same phenomena and localising patterns and differences. It is a methodology that uses the physical phenomenon of diffraction as a metaphor to understand phenomena, and has to do with patterns, interactions and interferences;with the multiple, the unstable stories. It is not interested in reproducing the “true story”, the scientifically provable, the ultimate version, the most adjustable theory or the absolute, god-like answer to the question.Diffraction works by localising existing patterns of representing phenomena, seeing each of them not as a category but as a continuum,
- Diffraction works by localising existing patterns of representing phenomena, seeing each of them not as a category but as a continuum,conscientiously dissolving the gap between the observer and the observed also dissolving dichotomies like nature – culture.Diffraction is at the same time an analytical tool, and the phenomenon itself, and we are studying ourselves as part of it; the knowledge obtained from it is simultaneously part of us and part of the phenomena, and as such requires some form of action and practice.The diffraction method as analytical tool is also appropriate for our research as its aim is not to represent and explain certain phenomena as truthfully as possible, but is about making a difference; it has practical outcomes. In our role of practice-based researchers, our aim is not to just describe the phenomena of online remains to the highest degree of accuracy possible, but rather to bring together interpretation,We then identified some conceptual spectrums or gradients that we considered useful for the analysis The research data was gathered through multi-sited ethnography between 2011 and 2013. This involved monitoring several websites, social media platforms and systematically gathering a range of audio/visual recordings, written texts and field notes across multiple research spaces used for bereavement practice online.Referring to the diffraction metaphor, it is like throwing two stones in the same pond and observing the shape of the waves in the water, to find out what shape the stone and the pond have, the power of each stone, the speed, and so on.Following this simile, features, material and in-material characteristics, practices and meaning of each of the examples will be travelling within the conceptual spectrum.
- The promise of the virtual has been broken. Technology, evidently, is not heading to a de-materialisation of our earthly practices around death into the cyberspace or virtual world, rather we are enhancing our experience and the materiality of practices goes in and out the digital realm crossing blurred or liquid boundaries. In this sense, we can observe the decaying of code lines, the caducity of software and the constant aging of digital places. In the same way, these time patterns are left on the digital, and can produce tangible consequences. Matter and in-matter features are manifesting on both sides of the screen and dissolving it as the ultimate frontier of the digital.We are standing then, within a space that is digital-physical and has unique and novel characteristics;a space that is continually in the making, in struggle with our practices online and on earth.
- The promise of the virtual has been broken. Technology, evidently, is not heading to a de-materialisation of our earthly practices around death into the cyberspace or virtual world, rather we are enhancing our experience and the materiality of practices goes in and out the digital realm crossing blurred or liquid boundaries. In this sense, we can observe the decaying of code lines, the caducity of software and the constant aging of digital places. In the same way, these time patterns are left on the digital, and can produce tangible consequences. Matter and in-matter features are manifesting on both sides of the screen and dissolving it as the ultimate frontier of the digital.We are standing then, within a space that is digital-physical and has unique and novel characteristics;a space that is continually in the making, in struggle with our practices online and on earth.
- Firstly the decay of aging, as seen by memorials which are beginning to look stylistically old and visually outdated. The old backend of the system is finding itself slowly weathering away, with bytes falling apart, pictures disappearing from servers, Java-based applications glitching or no longer working, forum software being retired and broken links causing 404 error messages.
- This process of decay is not limited to the source code and technological infrastructure, as witnessed by the social networking site Bebo. As a space which once overtook Myspace for popularity, it entered a long period of decline and was eventually declared bankrupt. If you currently visit Bebo you will see much of it has been placed into a ‘maintenance’ state.
- The promise of the virtual has been broken. Technology, evidently, is not heading to a de-materialisation of our earthly practices around death into the cyberspace or virtual world, rather we are enhancing our experience and the materiality of practices goes in and out the digital realm crossing blurred or liquid boundaries. In this sense, we can observe the decaying of code lines, the caducity of software and the constant aging of digital places. In the same way, these time patterns are left on the digital, and can produce tangible consequences. Matter and in-matter features are manifesting on both sides of the screen and dissolving it as the ultimate frontier of the digital.We are standing then, within a space that is digital-physical and has unique and novel characteristics;a space that is continually in the making, in struggle with our practices online and on earth.
- The promise of the virtual has been broken. Technology, evidently, is not heading to a de-materialisation of our earthly practices around death into the cyberspace or virtual world, rather we are enhancing our experience and the materiality of practices goes in and out the digital realm crossing blurred or liquid boundaries. In this sense, we can observe the decaying of code lines, the caducity of software and the constant aging of digital places. In the same way, these time patterns are left on the digital, and can produce tangible consequences. Matter and in-matter features are manifesting on both sides of the screen and dissolving it as the ultimate frontier of the digital.We are standing then, within a space that is digital-physical and has unique and novel characteristics;a space that is continually in the making, in struggle with our practices online and on earth.