notes on digital in-formation
Graduate thesis research at the Cooper Union; Instructed by Anna Bokov and Anthony Vidler.
Abstract
If critical architectural theory of the 1970s engaged the cultural debates on machine productivity and the rise of consumerism, then its 21st century parallel would be rendered in digital contexts.
Concepts like “Fourth Industrial Revolution” signal a paradigm shift; similar to the previous industrial revolutions, the core of digital technology is efficiency by machine, computed and optimized; in order to possess the great capacity of comprehension we desire, the algorithm must identify patterns from a great pool of samples, then produce and assess variations; in efforts to resolve in an optimal outcome. Behind the complex human-machine communication embeds a message that urges us to examine its medium and structure, and how it manifest in shaping the world.
Through sensing, collecting, and processing information on a planetary scale, our understandings of human behavior, urban functionality, and global energy exchange have been shaped by data collected by digital apparatuses. Every aspect of life embodies datafication.
This series of annotated montage of thoughts aims to capture moments where datafication manifests.
These transformations can be physical or philosophical; at a personal, urban, or global scale.
[0001]
Abstractions explain nothing, they themselves have to be explained: there are no such things as universals, there’s nothing transcendent, no Unity, subject (or object), Reason; there are only processes, sometimes unifying, subjectifying, rationalizing, but just processes all the same.
— Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972–1990. 1995
FRICTION. The desire to understand the environment on a planetary scale motivates science to advance; yet the sublime vastness and the abstract process inevitably create degrees of alienation to human sensorium. If climate change anxiety stems from the bodily experience of strange weathers, then climate change policy is founded on very different grounds. While data only attempts to capture conditions within its limited scope, the structure of a data model always pays particular attention, and it’s never neutral.
Data favors the quantifiable, to which human conditions do not translate; data favors seamlessness, while translation always involves friction.
BELIEF (ATTENTION). The election of Trump in 2016 was a brutal awakening for data believers. Contrary to almost all major forecasts, Trump’s victory undermines the reliance on data analysis to accurately predict outcomes. The lesson here is perhaps to re-examine the ambiguity within human nature that data fails to capture.
Whether it’s political, economic, or meteorological, the rudimentary principle of forecasting through data involves algorithmic calculations following a defined model, which is based on patterns from previous data. Data abstracts empirical human conditions and translate them into arithmetic or non-arithmetic components for calculation; and the magnitude of data necessitates the shift from human computers to machines.
There will always be dynamic factors that are unprecedented, hence unforeseeable; and these conditions call for attention: yet attention involves the matter of belief.
Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.
— Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace.
BLIND SPOT (DISTRACTION).
There would always be mistakes, however, because models are, by their very nature, simplifications. No model can include all of the real world’s complexity or the nuance of human communication. Inevitably, some important information gets left out. I might have neglected to inform my model that junk-food rules are relaxed on birthdays, or that raw carrots are more popular than the cooked variety. Sometimes these blind spots don’t matter. When we ask Google Maps for directions, it models the world as a series of roads, tunnels, and bridges. It ignores the buildings, because they aren’t relevant to the task. When avionics software guides an airplane, it models the wind, the speed of the plane, and the landing strip below, but not the streets, tunnels, buildings, and people… A model’s blind spots reflect the judgments and priorities of its creators.
— Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction. 2016
RICHARDSON’S WEATHER FORECASTING FACTORY. In 1922, English mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson published Weather Prediction by Numerical Process, in which he “devised a method of solving the mathematical equations that describe atmospheric flow”. Richardson began with an experiment to calculate for a retrospective forecast. Starting by gathering atmospheric variables at a 6-hour interval, Richardson proceeded to derive a series of equations that would correctly produce outputs inherent to the data collected. His method employed a “finite-difference grid”, dividing the area into cells along latitude/longitude lines, and specifying the dynamical variables at the center of each cell. The grid also extended from ground to aerial, up to about 12 km, with a total of 5 layers.
While Richardson’s model was based on a grid, the actual locations of data collection did not conform to it; once again revealing the data friction.Due to the vast amount of data, Richardson developed methods to simplify calculations into a series of arithmetical operations. The result was that they arrived at the retrospective six-hour forecast after six weeks of calculation. The burden of labor led Richardson to envision what he called the “forecast-factory”.
[0010]
“BLOW-UP” EFFECT. In the 1962 movie Blow-Up by Antonioni, a photographer takes a picture at the park on his film camera; later at his studio, he processes the photo and notices a suspicious object in shadow as he blows up a detail in the image; suspecting it to be a murder weapon, the photographer goes on to investigate a possible murder mystery; later, a series of absurd events unravel. The premise of this film brings attention to the power of image, down to its very unit of a grain, or nowadays with digital technology, a pixel.
Today, this “Blow-Up” effect persists, even intensifies in the prevailing visual culture. To see, to photograph, or to “blow-up”, are all acts that carry deliberate messages; whether it is to see further, to see more, or to see more clearly. Behind the visual deliverance of an image, there is a process of blowing up, crafting, and presenting; which may reveal some reasons or misreasons in our society.
It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera… they are made with the eye, heart and head.
— Henri Cartier-Bresson
THRESHOLD OF DETECTABILITY. In The Conflict Shoreline: Colonialism as Climate Change in the Negev Desert, Sheikh and Weizman elaborate on the concept “threshold of detectability” by investigating land conditions in an area of conflict, employing and examining different methods of sensing and extracting information.
A series of 1945 aerial film photography was presented as part of the evidence for agricultural cultivation in al-‘Araqib. With a resolution of 35 lp/mm (“line-pairs a millimeter”), the size of one grain would correspond to 214 mm (8.43 in) on the ground. The objective was to demonstrate the presence of agricultural activity, which was challenging because any traceable structures built are represented by less than a few grains on the film, hence falling below what Weizman refers to as the “threshold of detectability”, where “the object and the grain match”. Weizman also calls attention to the fact that “the image has a distinct materi- al topography”, they are rather a relation between the surface of the film and the terrain, “mediated by the climate between them”.
A detail enlarged from the original 9-inch negative shows a scene area of roughly 530 ft by 380 ft; the inquiry focuses the black dot at the center. The subject is then verified to be a well by a photo taken at ground level by Sheikh in 2014. The case was presented as evidence of human settlement.
From the surface of film to the surface of terrain, the investigation examines the friction between representation and abstraction, further complicating the relations between resolution, detectability and fidelity.
ZOOM IN, ZOOM OUT. The first frame in Powers of Ten was anchored at a tangible scale of a human; it then increases and decreases incrementally by the powers of 10 into both the microscopic and macroscopic realms. Perception of scale shifts exponentially with scale, revealing, quite literally the POWER of translation between space and scale by numerical orders.
The film is an exploration in representation and visualization of an abstract idea; the film itself is a method of ideation. The format of film as moving images allows them to create the seemingly smooth transition between frames, conceptually similar to the operations of zooming in and out in modern computer graphics.
The process of stitching the frames involves extensive manipulations of graphic information; as the scale shifts into alien territories, the spaces are no longer captured with optical apparatuses, but instead represented by invention. The exponential transitions are also compressed or expanded into equal intervals; a process of visual crafting that involves filtering and inventing information.
References
Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations, 1972-1990. Columbia University Press.
Bratton, Benjamin H. 2019. The Terraforming. Strelka.
Bratton, Benjamin H. 2016. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. MIT Press.
O’Neil, Cathy. 2016. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. Penguin UK.
Weizman, Eyal. 2015. The Conflict Shoreline: Colonization as Climate Change in the Negev Desert. Steidl.
Arendt, Hannah. 2019. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press.
Kurgan, Laura. 2022. Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics. Princeton University Press.
Cosgrove, Denis. Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination. JHU Press, 2003.
Marchessault, Janine. Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias, Ecologies. MIT Press, 2017.
Edwards, Paul N. A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. MIT Press, 2013.
Hall, Edward T. The Hidden Dimension. National Geographic Books, 1990.
Steenson, Molly Wright. Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape. MIT Press, 2022.
Superstudio. 1972-1973. “Vita, Educazione, Cerimonia, Amore, Morte: cinque storie del Superstudio.”
Casabella 367-381.
Jingqi Kay Liu 