post-digital

What does it mean to be post? In a time of countless movements of post-[x], the value of the prefix itself becomes of interest: what does it do to a concept to reposition it by turning it into a ‘posterity’?

I will unpack this question through an inquiry into the concept of ‘post-digital’, scrutinizing and seeking to overcome the problems of rigid periodization that the prefix ‘post’ might imply. Such an inquiry is arguably also central to the ongoing exploration of posthumanist tendencies in literary and aesthetic fields. Indeed, posthumanism and the (post-)digital are – historically and continuously – closely connected (cf. Haraway; cf. Hayles). As Laura Shackelford argues, the post-digital’s “practice-based experimentation continues to pursue … posthumanist inquiries and immanent engagements with technicity” (349).

But what can the concept of post-digital contribute to the study of posthumanism? A noticeably large proportion of inquiry into the post-digital has revolved around discussions of the troublesome notion of being ‘post’ – discussions which, in my view, are relevant across multiple ‘posterities’. The post-digital is, in Florian Cramer’s formulation, “the messy state of media, arts and design after their digitization” (17, original emphasis). However, while the post-digital “is afterdigital,” it still “remains profoundly computational” (Berry 45, original emphasis). The troublesome question of being ‘post’ points towards a more general “problem of simply declaring something as being ‘post’ something else” (Cox 161). And as Eric Snodgrass points out, the promise of being ‘post’ can readily become a ‘blue flower’, or conceptual red herring, promising but not delivering a romanticist departure from that which is conceptually undesirable – be it the perpetual innovation imperative of the ‘digital’ ethos or the severe micro- and macroscopic oppression inherent to Humanism’s universal Man.

Faced with the problem of periodization, I want to suggest a seemingly paradoxical juxtaposition of the notions of ‘contemporary’ and ‘posterity’ in order to investigate how a status of being ‘post’ can decidedly play out in a contemporary setting, and potentially enact social transformation. Part of this conceptual endeavor is a drive to move beyond rigid periodization and binary oppositions of ‘before’ vs. ‘after’ or ‘digital’ vs. ‘analog’ – or ‘human’ vs. ‘nonhuman’ for that matter. Building on Geoff Cox’s critique of temporality in the post-digital, David Berry’s notion of the post-digital constellation, and Eric Snodgrass’ conceptualization of the post-digital as anamorphosis, I will develop the conceptual stance of contemporary posterity as a way of looking at (and acting within) our contemporary situation by/while looking ‘backwards’, through a positioning of one’s theoretical glance in a (conceptual) posterity, or a moment of what Snodgrass describes as “looking-in-the-(rear-view)-mirror” (30).

If these two posterities share characteristics, posthumanism would be to Humanism what the post-digital is to the colloquial notion of ‘the digital’. What this means in more exact terms is something I will be looking forward to discussing in Bergen. My hope is that a concept of contemporary posterity can help articulate the transformative potential of posthumanism and the post-digital alike – beyond rigid periodizations.

In this paper we deal with the necessity of a post-digital text layout rethinking. Such layout differs from a layout of a printed text, because a post-digital medium is based on different principles from a traditional codex book. Arrangement of a layout in case of printed text, also in case of (post)digital text, is often based on the grid model. The alternative arrangement was specified as experimental forms. To go back in history, the grid model comes from cognitive preferences of a western reader and conforms to the principles that we follow in Gestalt psychology. These are the aesthetic references of typographical analysis of Modern movement, which was based on the golden rule principle and its application in the rectangular grid. The idea of grid followed Cartesian measurement of a codex page. According to Design Dictionary (2008) layout is often based on a design grid. Also Ellen Lupton (2010), and other authors described the model of a grid layout as a complex system applicable for every kind of media, so for the (post)digital media as well. In contraposition to the grid model we use arguments based on post-digital text and post-digital media analysis. A post-digital media enabled a shift from digital based on binary code machine functions to new conceptual models based on interdisciplinary relations between art, design, computing, philosophy and science that avoid binarism, determinism, and reductionism (Pepperell and Punt, 2000). In the way of how the reading of a post-digital text is performed, its perception has changed. It is connected with a possibility to interact with a text which leads to rethinking of reader/author of a text. This first argument leads to rethinking the grid as the model of a “universal layout”. The second argumentation is based on a process model of the post-digital text. It was caused by existence of the materiality of a post-digital text with the layer of programming code and a layer of a visible text via the interface. The code as an algorithm is a tool of programming with different levels of variable relations of a text/author/user. In a non-finite re-order it is possible to realise continuum changes and evolution of a system of a post-digital text layout. The solution of how it is possible is based on the philosophical concept of Rhizome described by Deleuze and Guattari (1980). Rhizome as a concept is a model which shows how to change the view of fixed relations of a closed system to flexible relations of an open complex system. The solution is not in finding a new kind of form, but a process as such. The process is not in a fixed definition of Cartesian geometry co-ordinates, but a flexible abstraction of algebraic algorithm with dynamic relationship between text and (post)digital media. This paper serves as a viable confirmation of a possibility to apply such thinking paradigm into typography.

We are living in an interface culture: wherever we are, we find touch screens, microphones, sensors, cameras; and we are constantly reminded of interfaces through their sounds. Whether mobile, networked or embedded in architecture or artefacts, the number of interfaces constantly increases to meet the desires of technologies, users and markets.

Usually, an interface is understood as a technological artefact optimized for seamless interaction and functionality. However, the interface also draws upon cultural and artistic traditions, and plays an important role in our culture as art, entertainment, communication, work and businesses. It is a cultural form with which we understand, act, sense and create our world. In other words, it does not only mediate between man and computer, but also between culture and technological materiality (data, algorithms, and networks). With this, the mediation affects the way cultural activities are perceived and performed.

But, have we now reached the end of cultural computing? In Apple’s 1984 advertisement video for the first Macintosh computer, an interface for conformity, absorbing the worker in a totalitarian state, was replaced by an interface for individual expression and do-it-yourself culture. Three decades later, the table is turning. According to a leaked NSA presentation it is now Apple who is Big Brother, and enthusiastic iPhone customers who are the zombies living in a surveillance state (Rosenbach et al 2013). The imagined free world of cultural computing has turned into a business of “controlled consumption” (Striphas 2010; Andersen and Pold 2014). To prevent piracy, software and hardware providers such as Apple, Amazon and Google have introduced a new cultural business model that involves a licensing system for cultural software and content. In short, cultural production becomes consumption – a matter of uploading content into the cloud, and selecting pre-configured filters. Although configurations are intrinsic to an interface culture, this has been taken to another level, and has turned into a ‘war on general purpose computing,’ as described by Cory Doctorow: the locking down of software into hardware turns the computer into an IT “appliance” (2011). Simultaneously, cultural consumption becomes production of data of what is read, looked at, listened to, etc., valuable in marketing as well as national defence. In this way, interface culture has been subsumed under a strictly monopolizing business model. The computer, which was originally developed as a military technology but redefined as emancipatory and revolutionary by Apple and others, is now back again where it began: as a military intelligence technology.

The above indicates that our interface culture has become ‘post-digital’: the digital expression holds less fascination, and digital culture is no longer the domain of DIY culture per se (see e.g., Cascone 2010, Cramer 2014, Cox 2014). Following this, and building on prior work on interface criticism (e.g., Andersen & Pold 2011), we propose six characteristics of the interface that we believe are important to address to critically reflect contemporary interface culture.

(Source: Author's introduction to the article)

There is also another chapter on the posthumanism in the collection: Glitch Poetics: The Posthumanities of Error by Nathan Jones.

It is too easy to fall into prognostications of electronic literature as the end of literature or as a new beginning. (...) Such views imply too much teleology, and see electronic literature purely as the unfolding of the possibilities of the apparatus. The rhetorical logic at work is literalization, i.e. taking literary works as the sum of their technical features. (Rui Torres & Sandy Baldwyn, eds. 2014. PO.EX: Essays from Portugal on Cyberliterature and Intermedia. Morgantown, WV: Center for Literary Computing: xv-xvi).

Our panel title, adapted from Manuel António Pina’s poetry book (1), serves to interrogate our notions of literary art today, when we consider its current production and distribution through various media (printed codex, programmable media, digital platforms, Internet, social networks). The ironical paradox contained in the phrase “it is just a little bit late” seems to suggest the idea that not much has changed despite the so-called “big changes” (in the case of Pina, it is relevant to know that his work was published in 1974, the year of the Portuguese revolution). Taking his ironical premise into the field of literature, it is legitimate to ask ourselves how literary art has changed across these media incarnations, how meaningful is “the electronic” for a definition of literature, what changes are actually significant, and how they impact on notions of author, work, reader and literary experience. The papers in this panel offer three perspectives on the end(s) of electronic literature and may be described as attempts to de-literalize its technical apparatus.

(1) Manuel António Pina (1943-2012). The title of his poetry book is “Ainda não é o fim nem o princípio do mundo calma é apenas um pouco tarde” [“It’s not yet the beginning or the end of the world remain calm it’s just a little bit late”]. This book was originally published in 1974.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)