*Yeah, it moves. It moves till it shakes all over, but it'll move more freely and effectively when it isn't mired up to the axles in Arthur C. Clarke Boomer-era noosphere sauce.
*What a delightful essay this is. As a words in a row literary type, it's really pleasing to me to get at these issues paragraph by paragraph – as opposed to being mentally pulverized by a spastic flow of world-altering imagery from object-oriented metaphysical Tumblrs.
*Not that there's anything wrong with that! Oh heaven forfend!
http://metalab.harvard.edu/2012/04/but-it-moves-the-new-aesthetic-emergent-virtual-taste/
(...)
"This insistence that machines don’t care and won’t care about what we see, or about what seeing certain things does to us as organisms, is a deep—and I think deeply productive—problem for the New Aesthetic. There’s a yearning, a beseeching in our relation to machines, and I can’t help thinking we’ll find ourselves spurned, or cuckolded, or worse in the end. Learning to see through machines is not the same thing as learning to see as machines. (((Yeah – because one is both possible and desirable, while the other is design-fiction cosplay.)))
"Networks manifest an aloof, alien kind of omniscience—increasingly ubiquitous and radically, irredeemably insensible in crucial ways. This is off-the-charts otherness, a hyperotherness… and from some quarters there is a yearning, a gnostic peering after some event horizon, a dreamt-of ubiquity or singularity, beyond which machines and human consciousness interpenetrate, some Michelangelesque digital touch-point—all of which Sterling would say is just so much eschatology in the vein of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. (((That is indeed what I would say, and it's cheering me all up to have it so effectively summarized.)))
"We’re not in fact empathizing with machines; we’re empathizing with screens. And when you consider what’s really going on in the machine, the screen behavior is epiphenomenal. (((Well, we're applying a beguiling literary metaphor to screen behavior, which isn't quite so blatantly silly as "empathizing with screens"... Okay, let's just admit it, they're both delusional and we need to knock that off!)))
"BERG’s QR clock comes to mind; check this out if you haven’t seen it. It’s a clock only readable by a machine, its display taking the form of cycling QR codes. BERG developed it with the idea that incorporating a QR readout into a clock with a standard numerical display would afford a way to authenticate photos of physical spaces, the way we hold up newspapers in ransom photos.
"It’s a funny affordance to design for, however, when the machines are already metering time on scales and according to schemes that utterly elude our senses. What do computers care about clocks or faces? We teach machines to indicate them, to prick up their ears in their presence, because that’s what we need.
"Our imaginary just manages to graze the edges of what might be called the experience of machines (((Yeah, you might call it that – but then you're right back in the noosphere saucepit! Our beloved machines have got all kinds of aw3some sensor-vernacular, reactive behavior, but you can't mystify their "experience" from some cagier verbal angle without putting your best-man bowtie on Super Mario.))) — and it’s on that borderland which the New Aesthetic emerges, traveling a differently-ordered sovereignty, in which we’re feral interlopers. (((
