Analogue In A Digital World Quotes

You are an analog girl, living in a digital world.

The student of media soon comes to expect the New Media of any period whatever to be classed as 'pseudo' by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be.

Driving to pick up his son, Bennie alternated between the Sleepers and the Dead Kennedys, San Francisco bands he'd grown up with. He listened for muddiness, the sense of actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual room. Nowadays the quality (if it existed at all) was usually an effect of analogue signaling rather than bona fide tape - everything was an effect in the bloodless constructions Bennie and his peers were churning out. He worked tirelessly, feverishly, to get things right, stay on top, make songs that people would love and buy and download as ring tones (and steal, of course) - above all, to satisfy the multinational crude-oil extractors he'd sold his label to five years ago. But Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust!

[...]Telecomputer Man is assigned to an apparatus, just as the apparatus is assigned to him, by virtue of an involution of each into the other, a refraction of each by the other. The machine does what the human wants it to do, but by the same token the human puts into execution only what the machine has been programmed to do. The operator is working with virtuality: only apparently is the aim to obtain information or to communicate; the real purpose is to explore all the possibilities of a program, rather as a gambler seeks to exhaust the permutations in a game of chance. Consider the way the camera is used now. Its possibilities are no longer those of a subject who ' 'reflects' the world according to his personal vision; rather, they are the possibilities of the lens, as exploited by the object. The camera is thus a machine that vitiates all will, erases all intentionality and leaves nothing but the pure reflex needed to take pictures. Looking itself disappears without trace, replaced by a lens now in collusion with the object - and hence with an inversion of vision. The magic lies precisely in the subject's retroversion to a camera obscura - the reduction of his vision to the impersonal vision of a mechanical device. In a mirror, it is the subject who gives free rein to the realm of the imaginary. In the camera lens, and on-screen in general, it is the object, potentially, that unburdens itself - to the benefit of all media and telecommunications techniques. This is why images of anything are now a possibility. This is why everything is translatable into computer terms, commutable into digital form, just as each individual is commutable into his own particular genetic code. (The whole object, in fact, is to exhaust all the virtualities of such analogues of the genetic code: this is one of artificial intelligence's most fundamental aspects.) What this means on a more concrete level is that there is no longer any such thing as an act or event which is not refracted into a technical image or onto a screen, any such thing as an action which does not in some sense want to be photographed, filmed or tape-recorded, does not desire to be stored in memory so as to become reproducible for all eternity. No such thing as an action which does not aspire to self-transcendence into a virtual eternity - not, now, the durable eternity that follows death, but rather the ephemeral eternity of ever-ramifying artificial memory. The compulsion of the virtual is the compulsion to exist in potentia on all screens, to be embedded in all programs, and it acquires a magical force: the Siren call of the black box.

From Resident: We grew up in an analogue world and changed it to a digital world...This isn't a digital world. Computers make everything wrong or right, black or white, off or on at some level. Life is shades of grey.

And that's the challenge for all of us - to create warmth in a digital world. Not many people can do it. You see a lot of stuff that looks great but simply doesn't turn you on. It's like making a song on a synthesizer. To make a drum machine sound good is really difficult - you might as well play real drums. We're still analogue beings. Our brains and eyes are analogue.

Or think of Goodman's own example: the shift from the analogue to the digital should be regarded as a veritable worldmaking. In this process, continuities are deleted. We are now in the domain of pure mechanizability: discrete inputs, discrete states, and discrete outputs. This shift realized by deletion is a radical one. The very distinction between human and machine collapses. The human world will be revealed as nothing but a special qualitative kind of integration of computational algorithms. As an alternative to this digital world, we can imagine a computational world where continuity, and above all the realtime interaction between the system or the abstract machine and its environment, is restored (supplemented). This is a new computational world in which the system and the environment interact without any pre-given limitations. The interaction is computation itself in a truly concurrent sense, to use the idiom of today's theoretical computer science. The prospects of such a paradigm of computation for remodelling the very notion of spirit or geist as a multi-agent system (interacting computational processes) is beyond our acquired practical reason, if not truly theoretically and practically unbound.

analogue computers are stupidly named; they should be named continuous computers.” For real-world questions—especially ambiguous ones—analog computing can be faster, more accurate, and more robust, not only at computing the answers, but also at asking the questions and communicating the results.