Compression, Encryption Index: Cultural and Aesthetic Transformations in Digital Circulation
Lead Research Organisation:
Goldsmiths University of London
Department Name: Media and Communications
Abstract
My thesis seeks to clarify the cultural and aesthetic functions of three ubiquitous digital technologies: compression, encryption and indexing.
Digital technologies have been integral to cultural production and circulation since at least the 1990s, and yet they remain obscured to many who consume or even study culture. This is thanks in part to technical complexity and exclusionary jargon, but also, I argue, because their effects have only recently begun to solidify. A fundamental element of digital media is its interoperability: in the shared textual basis of code, digital forms lose the unique relationships they once held to the technologies of their production and circulation. Previously, when "the digital" was dominated by facsimile reproductions of pre-digital forms, it was easy to imagine this as an abstraction, a rupture between material base and form. Gradually, though, the digital's material base has begun to assert itself through emergent syntheses and forms, new textualities and economic logics.
These new forms and logics are of immediate concern to anyone looking to make or understand art and culture in its contemporary circulation. Since digital technologies are applied across forms, they represent a challenge to established disciplinary distinctions (literary studies, film studies, etc.) and their aesthetics must be read through a similar diversity of forms. Their reformations have been continuous, so my analysis joins discrete protocols and platforms to form its more general account. Compression, encryption and indexing are not meant to form an exhaustive or totalizing account of digital circulation. Rather, they offer routes into its ubiquitous and often poorly understood processes.
Compression is the process of reducing size (of code, text or an object). I argue that since the 1990s data compression has caused significant reductions in circulation time and has functioned as a technical pre-requisite of media abundance and perceived cultural acceleration (what Marx called the "annihilation of space through time"). Working from communication theory to applied methods of compression, I will trace the links between their processes and wider economic compressions.
Like compression, encryption involves the basic rewriting of data: making it illegible to any non-authorised user. If compression seeks to maximise cultural production and circulation, encryption seeks to channel and obscure its dataflows. I will argue that it has allowed new forms of securitised circulation, where access and use are both codified by proprietary logics. This has had a radical impact on the commodity status of cultural objects, which are no longer sold discretely but treated like a utility, with ownership inscribed at the basic level of data. At the same time, encryption is central to resistive practices and illicit forms of circulation, such as shadow libraries.
Search engines are now a primary point of web access. But before they can offer results, they must consolidate an index. Technically, indexing is the process of integrating and organising items. It forms a dual process: a crawler-bot parses text and translates it into criteria, which are then used to organise a results page. Both processes warrant attention. Crawlers identify, integrate and abstract items into records. The pursuit of universal records leads crawlers (human and machine) to integrate anything they can into indexes. Reproduced as a results page, indexes (especially Google) operate their own system of aesthetics, whose value judgements curate digital space.
Digital technologies have been integral to cultural production and circulation since at least the 1990s, and yet they remain obscured to many who consume or even study culture. This is thanks in part to technical complexity and exclusionary jargon, but also, I argue, because their effects have only recently begun to solidify. A fundamental element of digital media is its interoperability: in the shared textual basis of code, digital forms lose the unique relationships they once held to the technologies of their production and circulation. Previously, when "the digital" was dominated by facsimile reproductions of pre-digital forms, it was easy to imagine this as an abstraction, a rupture between material base and form. Gradually, though, the digital's material base has begun to assert itself through emergent syntheses and forms, new textualities and economic logics.
These new forms and logics are of immediate concern to anyone looking to make or understand art and culture in its contemporary circulation. Since digital technologies are applied across forms, they represent a challenge to established disciplinary distinctions (literary studies, film studies, etc.) and their aesthetics must be read through a similar diversity of forms. Their reformations have been continuous, so my analysis joins discrete protocols and platforms to form its more general account. Compression, encryption and indexing are not meant to form an exhaustive or totalizing account of digital circulation. Rather, they offer routes into its ubiquitous and often poorly understood processes.
Compression is the process of reducing size (of code, text or an object). I argue that since the 1990s data compression has caused significant reductions in circulation time and has functioned as a technical pre-requisite of media abundance and perceived cultural acceleration (what Marx called the "annihilation of space through time"). Working from communication theory to applied methods of compression, I will trace the links between their processes and wider economic compressions.
Like compression, encryption involves the basic rewriting of data: making it illegible to any non-authorised user. If compression seeks to maximise cultural production and circulation, encryption seeks to channel and obscure its dataflows. I will argue that it has allowed new forms of securitised circulation, where access and use are both codified by proprietary logics. This has had a radical impact on the commodity status of cultural objects, which are no longer sold discretely but treated like a utility, with ownership inscribed at the basic level of data. At the same time, encryption is central to resistive practices and illicit forms of circulation, such as shadow libraries.
Search engines are now a primary point of web access. But before they can offer results, they must consolidate an index. Technically, indexing is the process of integrating and organising items. It forms a dual process: a crawler-bot parses text and translates it into criteria, which are then used to organise a results page. Both processes warrant attention. Crawlers identify, integrate and abstract items into records. The pursuit of universal records leads crawlers (human and machine) to integrate anything they can into indexes. Reproduced as a results page, indexes (especially Google) operate their own system of aesthetics, whose value judgements curate digital space.
People |
ORCID iD |
| Matthew Fuller (Primary Supervisor) | |
| Liam Mullally (Student) |