What is digital studies?
by Alex Galloway

What is digital studies? Is it a new theoretical field emerging out of
the intersection of poststructuralism and media studies? Is it the next
stage of conceptual art? Or is it simply rehashed film theory, that
ground-breaking field whose object is the analysis of the interplay of
images?

On the production side of things, the work represented here in DIGITAL
STUDIES is rooted in the conceptual art of the sixties and seventies. It
was then that artistic production dramatically moved into the world of
the art object, the ideas of interactivity, of performance and immersion,
of identity, of virtuality, of technology. For example, Erwin Redl's
piece, "Truth is a moving target," and Knut Mork's "Solve et Coagula"
both approach the concept of the living, interactive language poem. Media
recombination is the theme in Ted Warnell's "Poem by Nari," while more
direct code sampling is the focus of La Société Anonyme's
"Why keep talking about art?"

Let's build a myth. Let's build a concept of the network <a
href="http://www.altx.com/dscgi/pingpingpingping.pl"
target="_window">ping</a>. The ping is electricity talking, it is a net
desire. It is tele-identification. The ping frisks the homogeneity of
computer networks to find the specificity of an object, the machine. The
ping tracks and reports. The ping has no body. It is nothing but a
techno-reflex. By the late-twentieth century, a mythic time, a time for
us, the ping signifies structure and code and identity and space.

Tempting as it may be to follow the lead of film critics like Christian
Metz and Andre Bazin and claim that, like cinema before it, the whole of
digital media is essentially a *language*, digital media seems to require
a different kind of semiotics, that is, a non-linguistic semiotics, a
theory of media that doesn't rely on the text as its primary metaphor.
Let's claim that digital technology is unique to itself, with a different
set of theoretical questions, and a different set of object relations.

To this goal, the following are notes for a few concepts most relevant
to current work being done by artists and theorists in the field of
digital studies:

html conceptualism

Html is flat. We dream that it is dynamic, that it is heterogenious, that
it is revolutionary. Html is an instruction list for the compilation of
contents, a scripting language for scripts. It is not a metaphor for
something else.

object

As opposed to the sign, our species of textual unit is the object. The
object represents a unit of content, an infoid, a digi-narrative. It is
not simply a digital commodity nor a digital sign. The digital object is
any content-unit or content-description: midi data, text, vrml world,
image, texture, movement, behavior, transformation. These objects are
always derived from a pre-existing copy (loaded) using various kinds of
mediative machinery. They are displayed using various kinds of virtuation
apparatuses (displays, virtual reality hardware and other interfaces).
And finally, objects are always erased. Thus, objects only exist upon
use. They are assembled from scratch each time. Platform independent,
digital objects are contingent upon the standardization of data formats.
They exist at the level of the script, not the machine. Unlike the
commodity and the sign, the object is radically independent from context.
Objects are inheritable, extendable, pro-creative. They are always
already *children*. Objects are
not archived, they are autosaved. Objects are not read, they are scanned.

protocol

Protocol is the chivalry of the object. It is a universal description
language for objects, a language that regulates flow, directs netspace,
codes relationships and connects life forms. In the same way that
computer fonts regulate the representation of text, or html designates
the arrangement of objects in a browser, protocol may be defined as a set
of instructions for the compilation and interaction of objects. Protocol
is always a second-order process; it governs the architecture of the
representation of texts. Protocol can therefore be seen as a very special
kind of object. By definition, protocol facilitates similar interfacing
of dissimilar objects. Because of this the digital network is hegemonic
by nature, that is, digital networks are structured on a negotiated
dominance of certain textual forms over other forms. Protocol is this
hegemony.

code

In the media arts, successful art making commonly relies on a certain
configuration of the artistic apparatus, either a masking or a revealing.
Here the apparatus is code.

artificial life and the body

Digi-bodies are revalorizing themselves. What used to stand for
identity--external objects like an ID card or key, or social relations
like a handshake or an inter-personal relationship, or an intangible,
like a password that is memorized or digitized--now is being replaced by
biometrics (identity checks through eye scans, blood tests,
fingerprinting, etc.), a reinvestment in the measurement and
authentication of the physical body. Authenticity (identity) is once
again *in* the body, in sequences and samples and scans.

flat space

Netspace is pre-organized. In this space there is no discourse, there is
no ideology. It's just flat. Things organize, regulate and produce
themselves. They are always agreed upon through a type of unconscious
negotiation. There is no evil demon. But there are rules that let us
browse information, and there are rules that prohibit us from recombining
it in certain ways. In fact, we *agree* not to recombining it in certain
ways.

interactivity

Interactivity is potentially an interesting category.

identity

I think there is work to be done on collaborative filtering in the
context of ideology and identity. Surely this is a type of group
interpellation. The technology of collaborative filtering, also called
suggestive filtering and included in the growing field of intelligent
agents, allows one to predict characteristics (particulary our so-called
desires) based on survey data. Identity in this context is formulated on
certain hegemonic (negotiated, but never actively negotiated) patterns.
In this massive algorithmic collaboration the user is always suggested to
be like someone else, who, in order for this to work, is already like the
user. As Matt Silvia of <a href="http://www.firefly.com">Firefly</a>
describes: "a user's ratings are compared to a database full of other
member's ratings. A search is done for the users that rated selections
the same way as this user, and then the filter will use the other ratings
of this group to build a profile of that person's tastes." This type of
suggestive identification, req
uiring a critical mass of identity data, crosses vast distances of
information to versify (to make similar) objects.

fetish

Digi-world fetishizes in two ways: the reduction of visual relations to
objects (between frames, objects, texts), and the reduction of social
relations represented in the digi-world into an object, the site. This
could help explain why the digi makes us so satisfied, so hot.

a cinematic web

The interface is primary for digital studies. In film you look through
the interface into the representation (even if the filmic apparatus is
foregrounded in so-called avant-garde cinema). Thus, interface is the
category between the tv set and the rest of the apparatus. Digital
studies should have less interest in montage (montage reduces an action
to its dramatic or symbolic meaning rather that showing the "whole" of
the action, i.e. rather than being some kind of "depth of focus"). The
user always extracts the objects (values) upon use, as each web site is
build from scratch on the user's machine at every hit. So instead of
montage, there is protocol. If cinema is about the representation of
reality, then digital media is about browsing texts (objects). The idea
of netspace (diagesis) is a conflicted term: it is the world of the
narrative of the site, but it exercises such limited control over that
space since the traditional anchors--beginning, end, plot, character--are
so hard to control with precision. In
the cinematic web digi-objects all have equal being in the frame. The
user is a component object as e enters the frame via the controller
(commonly a mouse or keyboard). Is the digital object always in close-up?
Or is it always a distant object or a distanciation of collected objects?

Welcome to DIGITAL STUDIES. This is the future of theory.

Thanks are due to Mark Amerika whose prolific style and forward-looking
exuberance helped bring this e-xhibition to the virtual community. I am
particularly excited with the artists and cultural producers represented
in this show and look forward to a healthy debate in the weeks and months
to come.