Media Structures
will have to confront Galloway 2012 critique of formalism --> failure of formalism -- trying to define medium with reference to a specific 'language' or set of essential formal qualities, which then, following the metaphysical logic, manifest in the world a number of instances or effects" (19) -- object-thinking begets the problems of formalism
to read:
Kirschenbaum, "Editing the Interface" -- updating edition / impression / state / etc. for digital objects
Kittler: there is no software (http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=74)
John Durham Peters, Information: toward a critical history
(Infrastructure)
Platform
bookroll
codex
- Flusser, "Book," Does Writing Have a Future?
palm-leaf books
khipu:
- Urton, Gary. Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records. Austin: University of Texas Press, Austin, 2003.
- Gary Urton, Inka history in knots : reading khipus as primary sources (2017)
- Galen Brokaw, A History of the Khipu (2010)
Format
Tenen 2017, “Form, Formula, Format”
- distinction between print and digital books: print static, “we have no trouble operating a several hundred years old book”, digital changes on a monthly/daily basis (114)
- this word operating shows up often in these distinctions — Ernst also makes it about manuscripts — but this seems wrong; depends on an entirely materialist concept of “operation”
- “Whatever one designates as core content is enveloped within a multiplicity of standards, references, models, and formats, which in aggregate define the medium — the physical preconditions — of laminate text.” (123)
- is the difference not that such protocols exist but that they’re materially instantiated in networks of control? (Galloway) — by ignoring cultural codes of print, we strip away history from the investigation and set up a false binary, missing the actual difference (materialization of control)
- so in some ways the different is not the dematerialization of text so much as a much stricter materialization of protocol
Substrate
parchment
- Holsinger, "From Pig to Parchment"
hand-made European paper
amate paper
Inscription
Code
David Berry, "Contribution toward a grammar of code": http://thirteen.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-086-a-contribution-towards-a-grammar-of-code/
Rita Raley, "Code.surface | Code.depth": http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2006/01/Raley/index.htm
Mark Marino, "Critical Code Studies": http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/codology
N. Katherine Hayles, "Print is Flat, Code is Deep"