Adam Nash

The Implications of the Digital for Ontology This essay discusses what we and many others have termed 'digital ontology' (here-after DO). We begin by posing the following linked questions: What is DO? Does DO 'exist' at all? If so, how does DO differ from 'traditional ontology,' or, at least, from 'non-digital' or 'pre-digital' ontology? What does the adjective 'digital' signify here? How does it differ from adjectives that may seem quasi-synonymous with it, such as 'data' or 'information'? Why should we speak about ontology or perhaps even ontolo-gies (plural) at all, let alone digital ontologies? Should we not rather speak-as many have and do-of something like 'digital physics'? And how would we go about answering these questions if we did not avail ourselves of what seems to be a fundamental feature of ontological questioning, that is, a search for a method? Yet what if it is precisely the search for a method that the 'digital' undermines or over-turns? Indeed, does the digital also overturn the concept of 'ontology' itself? Could it be that DO is a paradoxical, nonsensical, or contradictory phenomenon that resists its own consistent formalization?

We reuptake these difficult questions here in order to offer some background, arguments and provisional answers, and do so in a sequence of regulated steps. First, we stage some of the new issues raised by digital technologies, precisely by bringing out the problems that digital technology itself poses for research into digital technology. This staging is done by way of what has only very recently become-in the last two decades-one of the most commonplace of everyday acts: a browser search on the internet for a phrase. Although the very many complexities of such searching are by now well-studied and well-known, we briefly rehearse some of these here in order to draw out a few of their consequences for research. Second, in doing so, we identify, situate and explicate several major strands of thinking regarding DO today, with respect to three modalities in particular: the an-thropological, the analytic, and the physical, represented here respectively by the recent work of Tom Boellstoerff, Luciano Floridi, and Edward Fredkin/Stephen Wolfram and others. We will show that each of these modalities comes to be caught in something like a contradiction, which derives from their uncertain self-positioning between epistemological and ontological concerns. Precisely because they begin with the new propositions concerning knowledge that seem to be generated by digital tech- nologies, they end attempting to know by constructing doctrines of being out of their own contingent epistemological closures. Here, the conceptual restrictions derive from a commitment to a covert dialectic of the limited/unlimited/delimited, whereby what we know becomes either a limit to our knowledge of the being of the other (e.g., being as the other of knowledge), thereby alternatively refusing or projecting an emp- ty vision of being onto the other side of this knowledge or they project this knowledge in an unlimited fashion directly onto ‘being itself’ (e.g., the universe is itself a digital computer). This apparent divergence derives from their systematic solidarity with each other regarding the priority of epistemic questions.

Third, following this summary, analysis and critique of these key contempo- rary positions regarding DO, we return to some of the most influential 20th century thinkers of the relation between technology and ontology, including Martin Heideg- ger, Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler and Alain Badiou. This return enables us to establish certain requisites for any ontology that avoid the difficulties that beset Boell- stoerff et al., even if, in turn, we will disagree with these thinkers regarding the proper method and sense of a contemporary ontology. Our disagreement will hinge on cer- tain new pragmatic and conceptual phenomena exposed by digital technologies that have no real precedent in any metaphysical or logical tradition, whether mathematical or naturalist, materialist or idealist.

Here, the evidence is provided by three essentially contemporary problems, simultaneously conceptual and technical. The first of these is the so-called ‘P v. NP problem,’ formalized in 1972, an as-yet unsolved dilemma which poses whether cer- tain computational problems whose solution can be rapidly checked in polynomial time can also be solved in polynomial time. The second concerns the claims made by non-classical (‘paraconsistent’) logics developed in the wake of operational difficul- ties that emerged first in post-WWII computing, which don’t uphold an absolute ex- clusion of contradiction, in contrast to classical logic which depends upon the Law of Non-Contradiction. Third is the operational necessity that all data be simultaneously modular and modulated, that is, at once created as elemental ‘bits,’ yet bits that are essentially mutable. We will treat these aporias as opening onto ontological questions.

So, fourth, taking up the challenge of these aporias — that is, impasses of knowledge that do not thereby necessarily designate immutable limits to our thinking of being— we suggest that it is in this epistemological rift opened by digital technol- ogy that the new lineaments of a properly DO can be discerned. In conclusion, then, and on this basis, we briefly present a new theory of DO, which doesn’t treat contra- dictions as explosive or entailing only trivialities. Rather, we maintain that: ontology is always onto-technology, that is, digital; onto-technology is always a-temporal, im- personal, and in-consistent; its contemporary character is discerned through the new impasses that have been revealed to us by binary computation; these impasses deliver a new sense of being that also immediately and irremediably affects the grounds of knowing and action too. For reasons that will hopefully become apparent in the course of this presentation, we will name this paraconsistent DO ir-re-mediable.

In this essay, we attempt to describe and theorise some salient elements in the transformation of the structure of public address at once incarnated and effected by the ongoing enthusiasm for big screens in urban spaces. Our key conclusion is that contemporary big screen art at once tends to work to expose, exploit and exceed these forces, from the point of conception, through the process of creation, to the finality of circulation. At the same time, the regulatory processes that organise the uses of big screens are tantamount to the inculcation of certain controls on creativity, seeking to capture and canalise aesthetic affects for governmental and corporate ends by, above all, a kind of fiscal moralisation of technology. Economic and ethical concerns are here so tightly interwoven with administrative and marketing constraints that the art itself cannot avoid particular kinds of conformism without being abruptly censored or never appearing at all, thereby succumbing to new kinds of prepublication censorship. Notably, the actuality of such censorship entails a kind of de facto return to non-democratic forms of government. Under these conditions, there is a new necessity for artists to anticipate possible consequences of adverse privatised publicity in order to continue to work at all. Draft chapter for "Ambient Screens and Transnational Public Spaces" edited by Nikos Papastergiadis, 2016.

Virtual and augmented environments are often dependent on human intervention for change to occur. However there are times when it would be advantageous for appropriate human-like activity to still occur when there are no humans present. In this paper, we describe the installation art piece Recognition, which uses the movement of human participants to effect change, and the movement of a performing agent when there are no humans present. The agent's Artificial Neural Network has learnt appropriate movements from a dancer and is able to generate suitable movement for the main avatar in the absence of human participants. when there were no pedestrians around from which to gather movement information, however there was still a lot of vehicular traffic passing the gallery, which was located on a major road. Rather than have a still screen at these times, a software agent was trained to move using the movement of a dancer, and this agent's movement was used by the projected avatar to animate itself. The use of learned human movement allowed the software agent to quickly acquire the capability to stand in for a human when needed. The projected forms also used pictures of the dancer's iris as a texture for its body, giving the installation a uniquely organic signature. Borrowing appropriate material from a human to quickly generate capacity for the agent was one of the features of Recognition.

The main promise behind the idea of self-quantification is to trans·
form our lives through the continuous collection of numerical evidence about the body and its activity. Although this process may help boost self-knowledge, everyday life also involves a complex network of relations with other bod1es that exert a significant, sometimes determining, influence on our behaviour. To address this concern, we suggest that self-quantification data can be modulated as perturbations to other human and non-human bodies that, in turn, may directly affect the everyday practices of the self. By coupling quantified bodies. we transform existing practices by disrupting the elements that realise, perform and reproduce existing practices. In order to explore and further understand the affective potential of this idea. we designed a system that creates unfamiliar, digitally enabled couplings between two quantified bodies: a human and a plant. In particular, in this design experiment we modulate walking activ1ty data into perturbations to a quantified plant. How does this coupling transform the way we look at self-quantification? Are we bringing forth a new space of responsibility and ethical concern? What if the plant dies because someone did not walk enough? In this article we discuss the implications of creating such a coupling keeping a critical distance to current forms ofself-quantification, which are often focused on change through prescriptive solutions rather than through the fostering of self determined growth. With this work we aim to expand the current understanding of the affective possibilities of self-quantification in the context of social change.

In the contemporary era, everything is digital and the digital is everything. Everything is digitized to data, then modulated between storage and display in an endless network of protocol-based negotiation that both severs any link to the data’s semantic source and creates an ever-growing excess of data weirdly related to, but ontologically distinct from, its originating data source. Since the very ‘concept of medium’ means that there are media, plural, i.e., differentiated media, and since the digital converges all media into a single state (that is to say, digital data), then by definition the concept of media disappears. Instead of media, there are simulations of media. This is the ‘event’ that needs to be thought through. In this paper, we construct an ontology appropriate to the era of digital networks and draw out several consequences for the relationship between humans and digital networks.