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From
software to hardware and back again, Soft\Hard: Versions of
the Pseudomorph, asks the question, "What becomes of old
or outdated technology or science once the era that produced them
has transformed into a host of cultural rituals and traditions foreign
to its old nature?" Since technology changes so quickly, one
is inclined to assert another question dealing with the need to
attempt a stabilization of rapid technological development, while
maintaining the benefits of increased efficiency.
By applying Spengler's and Mumford's notion of the pseudomorph, derived from
rock formation to describe shared qualities and histories of technological transition,
we can provide a sigh of relief that ranges from solving the problem with increased
theoretical framing of knowledge to increased focus on theory derived from the
intuitive and even spontaneous processes of technological invention, qualifying
and stratifying inventions whether they were successful or not, into qualitative
practices.
Therefore, I have transposed the contemporary notion of the expert machine running
software---back onto so-called "old technology". In doing this, I hope
to trigger an appreciation of the technology, science, and culture of the respective
periods of these devices, in qualitative fashion, that non-naively situates technological
change independently of the notion of progress.
Instead, the focus is on devices linked to agents' practices. The viewer will
note that I have also provided a macroscopic view of the signals involved in
technological invention. If technology both fails and succeeds, the components
of complex situations can be built from the discreet states of success and failure,
corresponding 1s and 0s--an analogue to the binary code upon which our computers
are built. Each failure or success in intensifications of technology can be further
encoded, making the timeline of technological invention into data that computers
can process, as well as packing numerical symbols--the decimal or binary code
that indexes a cross section of the timeline--with qualitative explanations.
With this project in mind, I hope you will find yourself asking the same central
question that is ever more important as technology continues to change so rapidly,
while just as rapidly the denigration of past technological cultures is swelling
to an intensity formerly ascribed, only, to the idea of progress. |
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