Data Materialization, Experimental Art, and "Carpentry"

(reposted from TRACE blogspot)

In this post, I hope to think through how TEMPL (or whatever our lab will be called) might go about using computers and objects in order to practice media ecology by making. In order to do this, I will draw on, but also distinguish my position from, Ian Bogost's Alien Phenomenology.

First, a word about "data materialization." This term arose as a few of us outside of class met to discuss what the lab would "do." Since we were interested in both the screen and software, hardware, and the e-waste, we decided that to argue for data "visualization" would be too limiting. Aaron, who will go into more detail on this idea at a later date, mentioned a 3-d printing of an ecology of relations. Each iteration was different and revealed different things about the data ecology. From this idea, we came up with the idea of "materialization" to refer not only to the physical object, but also to nod toward the move toward re-materializing information. As N. Katherine Hayles points out in How We Became Posthuman, information has seemed to have "lost its body." However, information is always in-formed by its material existence. "Materialization" then does not just refer to 3-d printed objects,but also to the 'materialization' of data in a program, game, or academic essays. 

In Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost laments that "philosophy" is only enacted in written form: "writing, always writing" (Bogost 88). He argues that since academics are not even good writers and that our writing typically takes the form of nit-picky critique, perhaps "a metaphysician ought to be someone who practices ontology" (91). Bogost shifts back and forth between the idea of academic scholarship as written scholarship and "philosophy," confusing the two. Instead of philosophical treatises, Bogost calls for, following Graham Harman, "carpentry."

"Carpentry" is an interesting metaphor for many reasons. For one, it allows Bogost to make problematic claims concerning "materiality." While he admits that "written matter is subject to material constraints," he argues that with few exceptions "philosophical works generally do not perpetrate their philosophical positions through their form as books" (93). "Carpentry," however, "must contend with the material resistance of his or her chosen form, making the object itself become the philosophy" (93). This position denies the materiality and inhuman resistance of language. In an unfortunate reduction of language, Bogost writes: "Language is one tool we can use to describe this relationship, but it is only one tool" (100). Thus, language, unlike objects, is an instrumental tool deployed by humans to philosophize. In addition, the form of a book (and the genre of that book and its audience) does indeed place material constraints on the author and contributes just as much as any other medium to philosophy. Regard, for instance, Hegel's extensive reflection on "the preface" and Derrida's subsequent reading of it. 

Bogost justifies carpentry as a metaphor in a questionable manner: "it extends the ordinary sense of woodcraft to any material whatsoever--to do carpentry is to make anything, but to make it in earnest, with one's hands, like a cabinet maker" (93). "Carpentry" then reinforces this notion that it is the sovereign human subject, with his non-prosthetic hand, crafting a raw material rather than the kind of non-human turn Bogost and OOO seems to be want to reach. 

Harman rarely mentions contemporary technology, preferring objects like hammers, but Bogost at least tries to address computer technology. Bogost asks how computers, cameras, and other objects "see" the world. While we can obviously can never no exactly how a thing experience the world, Bogost suggests that we create interfaces with human beings to try and grasp how the material technology changes the way an object sees the world. He writes, 

"The experience of things can be characterized only by tracing the exhaust of their effects on the surrounding world and speculating about the coupling between black noise and the experiences internal to an object" (100). 

Ignoring Harman's language of "black noise" here, I think that the idea that we trace the "exhaust of their effects" is an interesting way to try and track and then create an interface between humans and other objects. I am actually in favor of this as I think it reflects the ecological imperative of "tracing" the marks left by non-human beings. 

However, Bogost's second point -- that we should for "experiences internal to the object" -- I think shows the baggage of subjective-phenomenology. Bogost writes, 

However appealing and familiar the usual means of doing philosophy might be, another possible method involves a more hands-on approach, manipulating or vivsecting the objects to be analyzed, mad-scientist like, in the hopes of discovering their secrets (103)

This notion of "secret" or "core" or "withdrawness" in objects is the reinscription of a metaphysical "inside" of an object that recalls Kant's "in-itself." Everything we do to an object or every attempt to represent the object is a "caricature" of it's withdrawn essence.

For Bogost and for Harman, objects are withdrawn into themselves that any access an object has to any other is "metaphorical." While I agree with Bogost that we should create artistic projects as interfaces with technologies and other non-human artifacts, I think that his emphasis on the internal workings of technologies short-changes the ecologies of these artifacts.

But although these projects are informed by philosophy, I would hesitate to say that they enact philosophy in the same way. These projects are art performed with philosophy in mind. We want to find a way to artistically present data. Instead of thinking how a particular technology perceives, it may be useful to make things that shows how different ecologies perceive data differently.

In contrast, Bogost seems to want to induce "wonder" at these artworks and thus produce wonder at the technologies they seek to metaphorically represent to human beings. It seems to me that rather than taking the pieces apart to understand, the goal would be to enchant and mystify the technologies, creating "allure."

For example, after embedding his teaching of the Atari system in a media archaeological context, Bogost writes:

But what's lost in this rhetorical process? The 6502 microprocessor and TIA graphics chip are ontologically de-emphasized, allowed only a relational role as thing in a larger network; the evolution of computing, low-level systems programming, pedagogies of the practice of fundamentals, professional skill development regimens, and so forth. Yet the 6502 is just as wondrous as the cake and the quark. Not for what it does but for what it is. (128)

I would argue, however, that our laboratory and other artistic practices of data materialization should be precisely to think about what it does rather than what it "is." How can represent and materialize the different functions of a given technology or data set. Ecologies are less concerned with something "is" and more concerned with what something does --and more importantly -- what it can do.

Bogost's conception of philosophy as art (or art as philosophy -- "carpentry") is nothing more in some sense than an anthropomorphization and subject-ifying objects with a focus on perception rather than function and the impact of the traces. Tracing the "exhaust" must be taken in its environmental context as something that effects the atmosphere, exhaust which disappears from view but which haunts the environment in its impact. We cannot simply gaze in wonder.

It is only if artistic practices take into account both the internal and external functions/effects of objects and material in complex ecologies of interpenetrating discursive and non-discursive realms that art will not become a commodity/object fetishism. Our artistic production should not strive to invoke wonder, but to irritate our perception so much that we are moved to engagement and inquiry. If art evokes wonder and awe, such awe and wonder should not lead to a contemplation of the being of an object, but orient us toward response.

Technological Determinism, Control, and Education: Neil Postman and Bernard Stiegler

Upon re-reading Neil Postman's Technopology: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, I found many parallels to calls from Bernard Stiegler. I am still unsure whether this should trouble me. Stiegler's detailed philosophical reading of Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida is surely not for nought. However, it may be worthwhile to look at the difference between Postman and Stiegler.

The issue here is one of control. The question concerning technology either revolves around technology's "good" or "badness" or "neutrality," or, alternately, our ability to control it. I would like to argue here that Stiegler's "politics of memory" does not imply that we can control technology or that we can slow the process down (such as Virilio, who Stiegler uses generously in TT2), but that we can engage with it. Postman, in contrast, seems to suggest that we can control technology, even though he offers many examples of how technology's effects cannot be controlled or sometimes even predicted.

For Postman, the question of any new technology, is to ask what it may undo rather than what it can do (Postman 5). This already sets up his narrative as one characterized by nostalgia, as Sid Dobrin pointed out to me yesterday. Still, Postman recognizes, as does Stiegler that technology is never "neutral" because there is no technology "in itself." Instead, technology always enters into a particular situation and as such is pharmacological.

Postman misses this pharmacological aspect of technology; instead, he frames it as if technology has a telos: "once a technology is admitted; it plays out its hand; it does what it is designed to do" (Postman 7). He seems to see the technology as entering society as if from an alien force. That is, at one point, for Postman, technologies did not "attack" "the dignity and integrity of the culture into which they were introduced" (23). Postman seems unaware that (at least this is Stiegler's argument) that technics came first, and constituted the very possibility of culture in the first place. But once again, it is hard to disagree with statements such as the following:

embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another. (Postman 13). 

Both Postman and Stiegler are concerned with how technologies alter education. Postman's main concern seems to be the television, a technology important to Stiegler as well ("Telecracy against Democracy"), but also the computer. Postman's views of the possibilities inherent in the computer are dated, as he argues that computers carry a banner of "private learning," "individual problem-solving." In his defense, Postman's book is pre-social network. Thus, later in this book, he characterizes computers as mainly calculating devices in the service of "Technopoly."

For Postman, the ideal time to live was not what he calls "tool using cultures" nor our contemporary moment, but what he calls a "technocracy," which emerged in the 19th century with the industrial revolution: Following Marx, he acknowledges alienation and poor work conditions, but he seems to think that back then we were more conscious of  them as evil things that must be eradicated. This is why one can call his orientation rather nostalgic compared to Stiegler (although Stiegler might be nostalgic for something else: the family? I need to read Taking Care). Postman writes,

And though it is true that technocratic capitalism created slums and alienation, it is also true that such conditions were perceived as an evil that could and should be eradicated [. . .] The nineteenth century saw the extension of public education, laid the foundation for the modern labor union, and led to the rapid diffusion of literacy. (44)

Technocracy also gave us "political and religious freedom," the idea of "progress." Postman thus concludes that "technocracy will not overwhelm us" (44-45). Technocracy does not render religion, for instance, totally ineffectual: "there still existed holy men and the concept of sin" (45).

This seems about as far away from Stiegler as one can possibly get. However, Stiegler too uses the word "spirit" as a positive term. The difference, one might argue, is that for Stiegler "spirit" must also be tied to a Freudian libidinal economy and the concept of mass affect. We get the sense that Stiegler does not long for a time when religion told us what to do; rather, much like Greg Ulmer, aesthetics and art -- various compositions -- should become an integrative paradigm. More on this later.

Returning to Postman, he sees an insidious transition between his beloved technocracy and Technopoloy. Technopology is "totalitarian technocracy" (48). Postman defines Technopoly's "thought world" via Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management:

The beliefs that the primary, if not the only goal of human labor and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that inf act human jdugment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts.(51)

 From here, Postman laments the proliferation of information without any guiding structure (for instance, the schools). I do not think that Stiegler necessarily would disagree with this diagnosis. Indeed, this is not a far cry from Stiegler's claim in Decadence of Industrial Democracies:

the reduction of trust (and of time, that is, of belief in the future) to pure calculation, which would be capable of therefore eliminating anything incalculable, is what radically destroys all trust, because it destroys all possibility of believing: all the possibility of believing in the indetermination of the future, of the future as indeterminate and in this indetermination as chance, an opening to the future as to its improbability, that is, to the future as irreducibly singular. (45) 

Ironically, for all of his laments against calculability, if we are to believe Postman, the goal is to try and predict the future (to calculate it) and we do this by paying attention to the "telos" of technology. Ignoring Derrida's important argument that the condition for the possibility of the incalculable is also calculation, the machinic, repetition, etc. Postman condemns calculation tout-court, seeing in the concept of calculation "numerical measurement." This is the type of calculation, indeed, that Derrida or Deleuze (or maybe Stiegler) might call a "bad repetition." The repetition that does not repeat in a singular way.

Still, its notable that the gist of both thinkers map onto one another. Stiegler, like Postman, even points back toward religion as the force that once maintained those "consistencies" (infinitized tendencies that do not strictly exist -- for more on this, see Stiegler's new book, What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology).

Postman increasingly fears the autonomy of technology and technique. He seems to believe that technology can once again be subject to our control. The problem, he argues, is that we have surrendered that control to "management" and to an autonomy of techniques that have become naturalized in the belief that these technical solutions can solve our problems for us. Once again, I do not think that Stiegler is in disagreement. However, his major point is not that "we" as human beings should take back control from the autonomous machines, but that we must participate in the constitution of culture through technical objects. Without this political-cultural-economic participation, the consumer remains alienated. Furthermore, Stiegler knows there is no unified "we" as a starting point, but, following Simondon, that it is through this participation that "we" emerges.

Postman uses stronger language: "And so it is necessary to understand where our techniques come from and what they are good for; we must make them visible so that they may be restored to our sovereignty" (143). The "our" he is referring to, I think, is citizens as opposed to so called "experts."

Who are these experts? Scientists. Yes, indeed, apropos of recent debates between Stephone Pinker and Leon Wielselter, Postman is concerned with what he calls "scientism." Scientism is characterized by three principles:

1.) Methods of the natural sciences can be applied to the study of human behavior

2.) Social science generates specific principles which can be used to organize humanity on a rational and humane basis.

3.) The third idea is that faith in science can serve as a comprehensive belief system that gives meaning to life, as well as a sense of well-being, morality, and even immortality

(Postman 147)

Scientism, in other words, is the belief that "science" can guide our moral and ethical belief in humanity. Scientism, as Postman suggests and as Nietzsche taught us long ago, is Science as God.

As I've pointed out before, "science" itself is an abstraction. Postman is less concerned with "science" and more with "social sciences" such as psychology and sociology - precisely the kind of "science" practiced by Pinker and co. The problem with Postman's analysis is not that he reveals the quite obvious humanities point about social science (social science tells morality narratives too), but that he seems to think that the "hard" sciences are an autonomous realm of discovery, a la Galileo (science teaches us how the heavens go, not how to go to heaven). But this refuses to acknowledge that the hard sciences, too, are now "technosciences" (and have always been technoscience). Postman writes, "unlike science, social research never discovers anything" (157). To this I say, science does not merely "discover" anything. In Technics and Time 3, Stiegler writes,

Contrary to the ideal of pure, classical scientific constativity, the essence of technology, is in fact always performative. Far from describing what is i.e., the real, technoscientific invention (whose adoption is called  'invention' insofar as it brings to light a novelty that transforms being) is the inscription of a possible that always remains excessive to being, which means to the description of the reality of being. (203-204)

That is, even the narratives and inventions of science are always an instantiation of the possible rather than a discovery of the real. This also should tell us that even though Postman may be correct that the moral directives we discover in "social science" research can also be discerned and invented by the humanities, that the humanities does not have some sort of monopoly on meaning -- just that we don't do all the bullshit that gets us to such obvious conclusions (that make the conclusions more "factual" or "scientific").

What Stiegler is really calling for is for politics. Hard science, natural science -- neither is isolated from politics, as Bruno Latour shows so convincingly throughout his entire career.

The Great Symbol Drain and The Loving Resistance Fighter: What is to be done?

Postman argues that our symbols are being drained of their meaning, mostly through their overuse and abuse. In a forthcoming article on M.T. Anderson's Feed, the genesis of which can be found here, I argue that this society is so cut off from history that marketing has re-appropriated narratives and symbols almost to no effect. How could the society even understand the reference made to the bible in one of the advertisements if all of their information comes from a constant feed of new information rather than knowledge (a distinction made by Stiegler in his important article "Anamnesis and Hypomnesis"). Furthermore, Stiegler's forthcoming book, Technics and Time 4 is subtitled "Symbols and diabols." It does seem like both Stiegler and Postman are both concerned with the "draining" of the power of certain symbols -- a metaphor that recalls the sapping of the vital bodily fluid, the potency, of any given symbol. My guess is that Stiegler's analysis will be more rigorous than Postman's and at least attempt to take into account Derrida's essays on metaphor. Whereas Postman wishes these symbols still retained their potency, Stiegler's question is which symbols should be selected.

Postman laments advertising and marketing, rather than reading marketing theory in order to gain insight into marketing's function. In this way, he does not practice what he preaches: he does not inquire into the production of marketing ideology, simply asserting that it destroyed our most powerful guiding symbols. Rather than using advertising as a way to make new symbols (as I think Greg Ulmer is arguing for), he decries its irrationality and dishonesty. Although he mentions that marketing is linked to "depth psychology," the intricate history between Freud's nephew, Ed Bernays, and the advertising industry is in no way noted. For that history, we have to turn to Adam Curtis's documentary, Century of the Self.

Where Stiegler speaks of our collection of tertiary retentions, our collective memory inscribed in technical objects, Postman refers to a rather conservative notion of "tradition." He appeals to tradition, against advertising, claiming that advertising has no right to adopt traditional symbols. At his most polemic, he uses an unfortunate metaphor in our contemporary times: "The constraints are so few that we may call this a form of cultural rape, sanctioned by an ideology that gives boundless supremacy to technological progress and is indifferent to the unraveling of tradition" (170). Postman is adamant that we must maintain a distinction between the sacred and profane -- a distinction whose implications for politics has been analyzed throughout the work of Giorgio Agamben.

Furthermore, Postman relies on the concept of "narrative" in a way that completely ignores the postmodern critique of a meta-narrative. Stiegler's "politics of memory" is hardly meant to suggest a unified narrative of history and understanding. Yes, it is an attempt at escaping cultural relativism that emerged from poor readings of postmodern philosophy, but Postman seems unconcerned with idiomatic difference.

We can sense Postman's impending conservatism when he mentions E.D. Hirsch and Alan Bloom. Postman critiques Hirsch's inane idea of "cultural literacy" of an "educated person," but reads Bloom in a favorable light! Postman also writes that we need a "national" (read: American) narrative rather than a transnational narrative. This is again in contrast to Stiegler, who argues for a transnational intellectual community which would be based on criteria. It is this latter aspect (criteria) that something like "facebook" does not allow us to do. Facebook does not allow the users to constantly interrogate and adjust the criteria of their organization. Instead, the changes in facebook are imposed from without. How many of us have said at one point or another, "Oh, look what Zuckerberg did to my facebook? A timeline? Oh, that's cute. A newsfeed? Oh shit, this is gonna suck." Facebook has evolved, but not through the participation and recommendations of its users who are barred from knowing the reasons for the interfaces transformations.

Despite Postman's more blatant conservatism and rhetoric -- and the lack of nuance in his argument-- both Postman and Stiegler arrive at similar educational imperatives. This begins with both arguing that central to our future is the future of our educational institutions. Both ask: What are our educational institutions for?

In an interview with Marcel O'Gorman, Stiegler says,

It's very important to study how maps are created. This is not taught in school, because we only teach the end results. We don't teach the process of the production of knowledge. It's a mistake. [. . .] We believe its necessary to revist the history of the construction of occidental knowledge, integrating these new technologies not just as a means of transmitting knowledge, as both objects to be explored and instruments for exploration. (470)

In Technopoly, Postman explains that we should hold

to the idea that to become educated means to become aware of the origins and growth of knowledge and knowledge systems; to be familiar with the intellectual and creative processes by which the best that has been thought and said has been produced; to learn how to participate, even if as a listener. (188)

But the problem, and the crucial difference, between Postman and Stiegler is that the former believes "the structure of the subject-matter curriculum that exists in most schools at present is entirely usable" (188). For Postman, its a question of making these subjects coherent, "a sense of purpose, meaning, and interconnectedness" of what they learn. This course of action, I think, describes the ideal of something like my own public liberal arts institution's goal. For Postman it's about understanding the past; for Stiegler, its a question of constantly (re)making the past and present in preparation for the indeterminate future.

Stiegler is making new institutions whereas Postman wants reform. Postman also clearly prefers "classical" art to our mere entertainment. He writes, "the schools must make available the products of classical art forms precisely because they are not so available and because they demand a different order of sensibility and response" (197).

This is suspicious and indicates Postman's implicit iconoclasm. Against "images," he presents us with "ideas" and classical art that demand a different sensibility. These artworks, however, do not demand a different sensibility "in themselves," but because they were from a different time period. I am not against teaching art from the past; however, art history and education cannot simply be, as Jack Stenner says referring to one of his students, "pictures of jesus." Its not the art of the past, but the art of the present --including the mass media -- that may be useful to bring students into the importance of symbols and what makes life worth living. This is Greg Ulmer's project and, I would like to believe, Stiegler is following suit.

But aside from the many problems with Postman's analysis, I generally agree with him that our education should be more focused on the humanities and that "technopoly" has sacrificed some of what makes our life meaning for the sake of efficiency and meaningless calculation and information. However, whereas Postman makes this an almost moral crusade, I prefer to frame the problem in terms of an intergenerational "politics of memory" and the processes of collective individuation via Stiegler and Simondon. Postman's "we" is an ideal we, a static we that does not attend to tendencies and desire.

For Stiegler, we may not be able to predict and control technologies, to weild it as sovereign subjects, but we can respond to it and hopefully invent not only new ways of "using" it, but inventing new technologies that can herald a new apparatus. Ulmer calls our current apparatus: electracy.

Inter-Faces

In his book, Natural Born Cyborgs, Andy Clark argues that 'human-centered technologies' have the capacity to enhance and add to our various social and embodied relations rather than replace them. Rather than technologies trying to re-create, imitate, or simulate (poorly) other relations, Clark sees them as supplemental to them. This can be illustrated by his distinction between VR and AR (augmented reality):

But instead of trying, as with standard Virtual Reality approaches, to re-create a simulacrum of the real physical world entirely inside some computer generated realm, the goal of Augmented Reality is to add digital information to the everyday scene. (52)

Clark's book was written in 2003, before the Iphone was released (2007) and the "app" revolution had taken place. This book accurately predicts the shift from an isolated individual tapping away at her life vicariously through the keyboard to the mobile technologies that enhance our surrounding world and social relations, such as the Iphone and its companion technologies.

Another way in which I personally see the shift from technologies that try to "replace" social relations to enhancing them is various social network services--facebook and twitter. As an academic, I use FB and twitter, mostly, to share links to my blogs, other blogs, sites that relate to my and others' work rather than using it as a primary interface for personal 1-to-1 interaction. That is, I post and I post and I post and then I cannot wait to discuss "what was on facebook" face-to-face at a bar with my friends. FB has actually enhanced my ability to share media with others, which in turn, helps enrich our conversations at the bar or at the office. "hey, did you read my blogpost about such and such?" "Oh hey, Kyle, did you see my response to your blogpost?" Furthermore, such technologies force us to incorporate writing into our lives as it never has before! I guarantee that my students "write" their interactions more than I ever did when I was in college. Thus, we talk about writing and write about talking--the line blurs and the fiction of an authentic "presence" drifts slowly away--at least ideally.

In other words, I think Clark's emphasis on the hybrid, embodied, and supplemental/addition approach to these technologies is spot on. This relates to our discussion Wednesday about the video in which technology uses the "hand" but does not use it to its fullest potential. Perhaps rather than focusing on what the technology allows us to do we should focus on how it does it. This leads us to the question of interface. I think that we should really think about "Tangible User Interfaces in which familiar physical objects, instruments, surfaces, and spaces are used to mediate our exchanges with digital information systems" (51). Clark gives 2 great examples.

The first is Yo Yo Ma's electronic cello:

It is an interface that has been tuned and adapted over centuries of use, and to which the human cellist has devoted a lifetime of study. Why throw all that way in favor of a few buttons and a mouse? If synthesized music can sometimes sound cold and lifeless, might that have more to do with the use of such stale interfaces rather than the potential of the digital medium itself? (51)

Let's stay with the musical instrument example for a minute here, particularly given my own attachment to the interface of my guitar. In What Things Do, Verbeek speaks of the piano as a powerful interface:

A piano, however, is never entirely ready-to-hand, but neither is it exclusively present-at-hand--its machinery is not completely in the background, but not entirely in the foreground either. (194)

In Clark's language, then, the piano is not entirely transparent: "Transparent technologies are tools that become so well fitted to, and integrated with, our own lives and projects that they are primarily invisible-in-use" (28). Musical instruments, I think, will never become 'transparent' because not everyone plays a musical instrument. Even when playing, musical instruments never go away or move out of sight. I feel the strings pressing on my fingers, creating the calluses earned by too much playing, ripping my skin off, penetrating my outer layer. I work with my guitar in the same way that people might work "with" Augmented reality.

Now I want to think about the video game Rock Band. My problem with Rock Band is not that somehow it loses the "authenticity" of playing a "real" instrument. I will make two points: the way it changes the 'goal' of music or playing an instrument and the poor interface of the guitar and bass compared to the powerful interface of the drums and vocals.

In Rock band, the goal is to "get through the song" without failing and to hit the notes perfectly in order to get the highest score. The instruments are a means for interacting with the directions on the screen. The notes you 'play' on the instruments are pre-recorded--whether you hit the instrument harder or softer, does not matter--you will sound like Kansas when you play "Carry on my Wayward Son." Each performance (with the exception of the vocals-more on this later) is an iteration of a pre-recording. That said, it is true that each performance will have various "mistakes" that sound like clicks or chinks in the system when you mess up, but if you play it 'perfectly' it is like re-enacting a recording--'triggering' a recording rather than creating a recording. Furthermore, the point is not the performance itself, but the 'points' you earn. In order to bring it into writing theory--you are a machine reading a text--a script that has one way of playing--this is not a "writerly" text as Roland Barthes might say. Indeed, part of the joy of "covers" for a musician is the ability to make the song "their own" through their particular quirks. In other words, Rock Band is not an enhancement of music, but an attempt at simulation.

Interface wise, I prefer playing the drums or the vocals. Why? Because the drums involve the whole body in the same way that analog drums involve the body. With the exception of the vibration that occurs from hitting a brass cymbal too hard or on the right spot, you get similar bodily responses from the electronic drum kit. True, the drums are all just different colored circles, but they correspond to a certain extent where the analog drums might be. And still, it must be pointed out, the sounds possible on the drum set are fixed--no subtlety of touch is taken into account (compare an actually "electronic" drum set that you might find in a music store). Still, a drummer who has played on analog drums is better than a drummer who has never played drums.

Because I am not much of a drummer, but a vocalist, I prefer vocals. Why? Because the interface is pretty much the same as any microphone--and though you could simply try and hit the little lines that indicate you have the "pitch" right and still sound like utter shit--I prefer to sing my heart out, as if I were engaging in Karaoke. The interface here does not change much and the goal, at least for me, is performance.

Finally, we get to the "guitar" and "bass," which, by the way, can be played on the same 'instrument' because they have the same set up. The guitar, rather than strings, is replaced with 5 buttons at the end of the neck and the strings that you would strum is replaced by a little flap of plastic. I personally cannot stand these things. No respect for the flow of notes creating by muscle memory, dexterity, and delicate or heavy plucking or strumming. To me, this interface is a poor substitute for the guitar. Playing becomes a matter of pushing buttons--the opposite of Yo Yo Ma's electronic cello.

What I am trying to point out is that the musical equivalent of Augmented Reality has been here for a long time--I am speaking, of course, about FX pedals. Rock Band makes you feel like you are working "Through" the interface rather than with it--and thus, if your controller broke you probably wouldn't give a shit.

In contrast, if my guitar broke--and some of my guitars have--it is devastating. It is not completely "non-usable"--and indeed I still to this day haven't thrown out my 'broken' guitars, but it saddens you to know that you cannot work "with" it anymore--you have to give it up or at least put it away for awhile. You care about these instruments that bear the traces of your skin and, in the case of my old Fender Strat, my blood that streamed from my finger when I used to not use a pick.

Thus, I would like to make the argument that we should find a way to care for our interfaces in ways that do not make us think of technologies/instruments as mere instruments. This, I think, is the project of Eternally Yours, as Verbeek explains it. I don't think that it is the "'memories" of my guitar that make it such a powerful interface and tool for making music--rather, it is the material traces of skin--the indentations on the wood, the pick scratches, the feel of the familiar.

The same thing might be said for my tobacco pipe. Cigarettes disappear and end up on the ground, but the tobacco pipe bears the traces of former smokes. Furthermore, it does not "disappear" into a means for getting nicotine--it puts a constant weight on my teeth, lips, and hand. If I don't treat it right by consistently drawing the smoking and blowing out, the tobacco goes out, and I have to relight and retamp. I have to empty the ashes. The tobacco pipe creates a ritual, a form of being and a connection to an object that, again, is about material interf(t)races of a certain kind.

This is how we get past this idea that these new technologies will makes us "treat human beings like software agents" (179). If we can cultivate care for non-living entities and also make sure that they demand something back. This is the key. We cannot simply allow all technologies to adapt directly to our needs and desires--they need to also demand care and maintenance and, hopefully, we can make such demands visible and tangible.


All of this said, it is worthwhile to note the positive aspect of Rock Band--that it is a great way to spend a drunken evening with some friends.