1.1 From Digital Humanities to Speculative Computing - UCLA ...

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1.2 Speculative computing: basic principles and essential distinctions With speculative computing, we moved beyond what was seeming to be the instrumental, well-formed, and almost standardized business of digital humanities. We used the computer to create aesthetic provocations – visual, verbal, textual results that were surprising and unpredictable. Most importantly, we inscribed subjectivity, the basic point of view system from which any and every interpretative and expressive representation is created, into the design of digital environments. To do this, we designed projects that showed position and inflection, point of view as a place within a system, and subjectivity as the marked specificity of individual voice and expression. We wanted to show interpretation, expose its workings. We wanted to force questions of textuality and graphicality to the fore. To do this, we (a smaller core of SpecLab participants) created a series of experimental projects that ranged in their degree of development from proof-of- concept to working platforms for use. But we also created a theoretical and methodological framework. Our readings and conversations led us to develop a specialized vocabulary borrowed from disciplines that bring issues of interpretation into a new intellectual framework. Most important among these for my development was the influence of radical constructivism in the work of Ernst von Glasersfeld, and the concepts from second generation systems theorist Heinz von Foerster. xxxiii From these two sources, and work of biologists/cognitive scientists Francesco Varela and Umberto Maturana, a reformulation of knowledge as experience allowed us to shed the old binarism in which subjectivity is conceived in opposition to objectivity. xxxiv In such a reformulation, 1.1 History / 3/2008 / 43
knowledge is always interpretation, and thus located in a perceiving entity whose own position, attitudes, and awareness are all constituted in a codependent relation with its environment. That system is always in flux, and thus has the complex heterogeneous character of a cultural field shot through with forces that are always ideological and historical. Because we are all always simultaneously subjects of history and in history, our cognitive processes are shaped by the continuous encounter with the phenomenal and virtual world such that we constitute that world across a series of shifting models and experiences. These are familiar concepts within cognitive studies and constructivist theories of knowledge, as well as within with critical theory (though implementing these ideas within knowledge production environments poses new challenges). Alan MacEachren’s synthesis of an information-processing model of visual perception (which sounds far more mechanistic than it is, since it incorporates the constructivist approach touched on above, provided another methodological touchstones. xxxv Integrating these precepts into the design, or at the very least, the conception of the design of digital environments meant to expose models of interpretation was a challenge that may still have eluded our technical grasp, but it motivated the projects at SpecLab from the beginning. In addition to the basic tenets of co-dependent emergence and constructivist approaches to knowledge we incorporated the ideas of probability from quantum theory and various tenets of the turn of the 19 th century poet Alfred Jarry’s ‘pataphysics. xxxvi Our sources for creating a probablistic rather than a mechanistic concept of text came from the work of Heisenberg and Schroedinger, largely through McGann’s influence. xxxvii In this move, a text became defined as an n-dimensional field of potentialities, into which a 1.1 History / 3/2008 / 44
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