Tracking the telepathic sublime as a phenomenon
in a digital humanities archiveIsabel PedersenUniversity of Ontario Institute of Technologyisabel.pedersen@uoit.ca
Isabel Pedersen, PhD, Associate Professor, Faculty of Social Science and
Humanities, University of Ontario Institute of Technology
Quinn DuPontUniversity of Washingtonqdupont@uw.edu
Quinn DuPont, PhD, Center For Digital Cultures, Fellow, Leuphana
University
Alliance of Digital Humanities OrganizationsAssociation for Computers and the Humanities000344011422 December 2017article
This is the source
DHQ classification scheme; full list available at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/taxonomy.xmlKeywords supplied by author; no controlled vocabularydigital humanities archivingarchival practicewearable technologyrhetorictechnoculturedigital futuresCreated file
This paper discusses a digital humanities collection called
Contemporary Telepathics housed within a larger archive, The Fabric of Digital Life. We argue that through a
variety of multimedia representations, the rhetoric of contemporary telepathic
devices invokes sublime predictive visions that become instantiated in popular
media, news organizations, and disclosures of technology advancement. We discuss
the theoretical grounds for a collection of technological forecasts, at a time
when they are largely considered ephemera. We also discuss how tracking the
telepathic sublime as a dynamically evolving popular
communication phenomenon requires a unique, humanities-based metadata scheme and
archival practice.
Authors discuss the theoretical grounds for a collection of technological
forecasts.
This paper explores a phenomenon that we term the telepathic sublime and
it proposes a way to classify and display it through an archived digital collection.
As digital participants, people are assailed with predictions of how we will
work, live or be in the future. For
instance, self-driving cars are proposed as technical feats, but the excitement lies
in neo-futurist speculations that everyday lives will transform due to their use. In
this vein, we are concerned with how the rhetoric surrounding contemporary
telepathic devices evinces predictive visions that filter into popular media, news
organizations, popular film, and public opinion through a variety of multimedia
representations. We emphasize that it is characterized by descriptions that point to
the sublime. We argue that tracking the telepathic sublime as a
dynamically evolving rhetorical phenomenon requires a unique, humanities-based
metadata scheme and archival practice. We use the term tracking
to highlight the ways in which the archive follows discourse through the lifecycle
of invention. In characterizing and tracking the telepathic sublime, we argue that
technologic advancement ought not to be separated from the euphoria associated with
it. The contribution we make in this article and the associated archive is to
explore the notion of telepathic sublime: name it as a concept, digitally collect,
co-locate and track it, display it aesthetically, and reveal how it influences
scientific advancements and attitudes over time.
Surrogates of the telepathic sublime are collected, co-located, and archived for
study within the
Contemporary Telepathics (1999 to
2016) collection, The collection is available at the following URL: http://fabricofdigitallife.com/index.php/Browse/objects/facet/collection_facet/id/7/view/images/key/e7ea7a9363bf62768d1a37a4a0c78efa.
a set of contemporary digital artifacts housed within a larger digital humanities
archive called the Fabric of Digital Life at www.fabricofdigitallife.com
(referred to as Fabric). Fabric tracks the emergence of present day personal digital
technologies, inventions, and predictions (or forecasts) of
futuristic innovations, most of which are popularized visions of the future.
Where available, references to rhetorical depictions of telepathic devices will
include URLs to the Fabric of Digital Life archive,
rather than the original artifact. It focuses on platforms of
human-computer interaction, mobile, wearable, and implanted technology as they
undergo the processes of emergence in society.
We define telepathy (from telepathics) as direct
communication of thoughts from one person’s mind to another person’s mind without
using words, signals, gestures, or other traditional forms of communication. We use
the Contemporary Telepathics collection to cluster related digital technologies that
appear to work telepathically. Digital telepathy is
defined as direct communication of thoughts from one person’s mind to a computer (or
computer-like device) or another person through a digital medium rather than
traditional (linguistic) media. A related concept is digital
telekinesis, defined as movement of digital or material objects by the
mind, and augmented by a computing device.
Archiving the telepathic sublime
In 2000, researchers at Duke University affixed monkeys with experimental head
caps to measure the brain’s raw electrical activity to see
if action potential could be sent along a wire to a nearby
box . Called a Harvey box
after its inventor Harvey Wiggins, the container amplified signals to
distinguish between the monkey’s myriad thoughts. More than just a mind reading
device, researchers hoped to use the signals to remotely control a robotic arm
six hundred miles away. The inventors recount their own amazement with the
experiment: We will always remember our sense of awe as we
eavesdropped on the processes by which the primate brain generates a
thought. They hoped to create a device for telekinesis.
The article discussing the experiment in telekinesis appeared in a 2008
Scientific American Reports magazine under the cover
headline Your Future with Robots, which also
included articles by futurists like Bill Gates, Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil.
The discussion of the experiment within a broader thematic of the technological
future fulfilled two purposes. First, it recounted a feat of technology in the
creation of a brain-machine interface to serve as a historical record of the
advancement. Second, it also expressed the speculative potential for the future
of the technology as a forecast meant to garner excitement in its readership.
This latter point, about the speculative potential and predictions of telepathic
technologies, has a surprisingly long history. For example, Giambattista della
Porta (1535-1615) claimed to harness subtle forms of magnetism through various
contraptions to express all the sentiments of your mind to a friend who is distant. Where della Porta drew on the field of cryptography for his
technological explanations, William Benjamin Carpenter (1813-1885) later argued
that a nerve-force could extend from a distance, so as
to bring the Brain of one person into direct dynamical communication with
that of another, drawing on the new technology of telegraphy . Today, this kind of technological solutioneering
is likely to arise in popular news broadcasts, research articles, start-up
company concept videos, films, social media exchange, and military documents.
Indeed, Dan Kaplan argues in a recent Techcrunch
article called Digital Telepathy Is The Future Of The Human
Species that the prospect of digital telepathy will eventually stop
being a prospect we can only attempt to imagine and start being a
reality that some of us live. Fascination with the invention of digital telepathy and similar
technology continues with the same enthusiasm and grandeur as it did in the
past.
The Contemporary Telepathics collection we discuss here deliberately archives
this aspect of prediction, forecast, and possibility by foregrounding
representations that celebrate imagination as means and motivator
for innovation, through texts that are usually considered ephemera. By using the
word telepathics, rather than telepathy, we draw on
the polyvalent meanings bound up in the word. Telepathic means
relating to the characteristic of telepathy (e.g., mind-reading technology), but
it also means a person who has the ability to read minds (e.g., she is a
telepathic). As discussed below, the
Fabric archive is devoted to personal technology, so,
appropriately, the word telepathic implies identity or selfhood
within the larger ontological space of the archive’s themes.
The metaphor behind the archive’s name, Fabric of Digital Life, references a
famous prediction made in 1991 by Mark Weiser, Chief Scientist at Xerox PARC: The most profound technologies are those that
disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday
life until they are indistinguishable from it [emphasis added]. As a slogan, the fabric of everyday life offers a way to reflect
on Weiser’s bold claim. Weiser’s dream of technological disappearance is itself
indebted to previous socio-technical scholars: he cites Martin Heidegger and
Hans Georg Gadamer directly. However, the design of
Fabric is also inspired by the writings of media, rhetoric, and
communications scholars Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, and
Kenneth Burke, which underpin our analysis of the telepathic sublime. The Fabric archive reflects the writings of these scholars
to frame and contemplate how media shape attitudes, innovations, technologies,
and culture.
The
Fabric archive sits in relation to other similar
examples of experimental technology innovation archives. For example, Engineering at Home (http://engineeringathome.org/)
is an archived collection of hacked, reworked, and rewired
rehabilitation engineering technology. The manifesto at
Engineering at Home states, We want to
recover a nuanced understanding of engineering’s history of invention that
includes craft, assembly, and appropriation–right alongside advances in
material sciences and innovative technique.Fabric also seeks to reveal advancements and
technological appropriations. It archives the cultural valorization of so-called
high tech innovation in order to contextualize it as a humanities phenomenon.
Fabric authorizes this approach in order to
disclose dominant industry values and the popular journalism that circulates
around innovation — which also oftentimes informs and misinforms — thereby driving
it forward.
The
Fabric archive, and the Contemporary Telepathics
collection in particular, have been designed in dialogue with current digital
humanities work on digital futures studies, and those that reflect on what
the digital has come to signify. Mauro Carassai and
Elisabet Takehana, in introducing a Digital Humanities
Quarterly special issue devoted to the Futures
of Digital Studies, foreground the notion of the
digital as a digital condition: As a condition, rather than as a technological
prosthesis, the digital seems to function more and more as a true
reality principle…. In these essays we see, more generally, an explicit
awareness that life, subjects, culture, art, and technological
production might mirror their digital technologies.
Or, consider Jentry Sayer’s more recent analysis, in which he points out that that a majority of the 2012 [Digital Humanities]
Debates volume is anchored in discussions about the future. Accepting Carassai, Takehana, and Sayer’s propositions concerning the
digital and its futures, we again point to Kaplan’s speculations concerning
digital telepathy. Echoing a certain strain of Digital Humanities analysis,
Kaplan argues that digital telepathy will stop being the stuff of imagination
and will start being a reality that some of us live.
We see one function of our archived collections as a counterpart or complement to
the argument that the digital condition ought to be viewed as a lived reality.
For example, Brian Greenspan argues that locative media, and their implied
futures, operationalize the spatial tension between
conventionally sedentary modes of literary engagement and new modalities
of mobility, a tension that is constitutive of our present
mediality. He concludes that locative narratives will encourage more embodied, dynamic, collective and multiply
contextualized applications. Similarly, critical interrogations of Digital Humanities that highlight
race, sex, globalization, and other embodied or lived experiences help recognize
the lived reality of the digital . For our purposes, the archived collections
contained within
Fabric offer a means to chart how
future imaginings unfold, overlap, conceal, inform, and celebrate the digital,
contributing to the cultural horizon of digital futures. Fabric offers collections as tools for co-locating, displaying, and
indexing cultural representations in novel ways to reflect this kind of
scholarship. In short, Fabric contributes to the
tracking of such a shift and its unfolding.
In designing the archive we also considered the ways that networked technologies
enable new discourses. For example, John Unsworth lists a series of
scholarly primitives, including what he calls
networked digital systems of scholarship . Unsworth argues that a discoverable, annotated,
and curated archive drawn from a selection of representative artifacts (across
myriad discourses) is a basis for the tool-building enterprise in humanities
computing. Similarly, the
Fabric archive demonstrates ways
that technology can form new critical discourses, as a networked
model of scholarship that expands, contests, and enables new
kinds of readers, collaborators, and participants .
Finally, the goals for
Fabric are influenced by
Johanna Drucker’s SpecLab, where Drucker and her
collaborators pushed the bounds of artistic, critical, and practical forms of
scholarship. Drucker distinguished her goals with SpecLab from the digital humanities more generally in describing
SpecLab as moving beyond the instrumental, well-formed, and increasingly
standardized business of digital humanities. Instead, she argued that SpecLab used
digital metatexts to create
aesthesis. According to Drucker, digital metatext is
not merely a commentary on a set of texts (as might be envisioned within a
traditional digital humanities project). Instead,
digital metatexts contain features and functions that enable analysis, search,
selection, and display, which (alongside their metadata schemes) are capable of
structuring and grouping elements . Through
these discursive instruments, metatexts bring the object of their inquiry
into being while developing a sense of aesthesis — the partial, situated,
and subjective knowledges that are as ideological... as epistemological. The goal of SpecLab, therefore, is to
challenge the authority of… systematic rationality by questioning
its founding assumptions, particularly its totalizing concepts of
knowledge. Likewise, our Contemporary Telepathics collection lays bare a phenomenon
unfolding in public discourse. We make the telepathic sublime salient by
bringing the object of inquiry into being through the
metadata scheme and the public display of the work.
The remainder of this article is organized in two parts. First, we discuss how
future visions of technology are rhetorically formulated by drawing on existing
theoretical statements. Second, we contextualize how the Contemporary
Telepathics collection reifies rhetorical figures that instantiate the
telepathic sublime through new kinds of classificatory practices and structures
in the archive.
Technological forecasting and the digital sublime
Many of the artifacts in the Contemporary Telepathics collection promise,
predict, or forecast a time when it will be normal to move objects with only a
mind or to make choices just by thinking of them (e.g.,
Turn on the lights, Play some Mozart on my
sound system, Call the police). These
forecasts usually involve hyped speculation about the future. Moreover, many of
the innovations are discussed as if they will emerge and be
adopted, even though many will not. Nonetheless, the cultural work (and
ephemera) that they instigate is significant. Fabric deliberately preserves and tracks this kind of rhetoric.
Many writers have looked at the rhetorical strategies associated with forecasting
the future, the technological sublime, and technocultural myths. According to
Daniel Bell, in
The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A
Venture in Social Forecasting (1976), forecasting is a critical part
of the post-industrial society. Forecasts typically involve
concrete facts and constraints about the world, but they are often framed
axiomatically, and in some cases are buttressed by statistical extrapolations.
For example, engineers often forecast industrial design in aluminum with
predictive assessments. Statements concerning maximum compositional strength of
aluminum will dictate design decisions and visions about how something will end
up looking — that is, how thin and light the end result can be. The compositional
strength of aluminum is therefore a constraint, which is then coordinated with
axioms of design (how it will look), alongside existing scientific
and market knowledge and sometimes mathematical modelling. Taken together, these
aspects become a form of predictive and persuasive reasoning. Once the
predictive and persuasive reasoning stabilizes, the forecast will often take the
rhetorical form of scientific fact.
Carolyn Miller (1994), identifies the rhetoric of forecasting in technological
discourse, grounding her claims on the term Kairos. Miller defines the phenomenon of
‘technological forecasting’ as a unique discourse in which the characterization and construction of
moments in the present are crucial to the projection of the
future. Kairos, then, is an active rhetorical process whereby forecasts leverage
the inventor or rhetor’s will, as acts of opportunism. A rhetor will look for the particular opportunity in a given moment,
to find — or construct — an opening in the here and now, in order to achieve
something there and then.
Consider, also, the rhetoric of forecasting taken up by Isabel Pedersen (2013),
who argues in the context of the recent emergence of personal digital devices
that the desire for human digital enhancement is driven by hype and predictive
discourses, which frame future inventions as assumed inevitabilities. Pedersen
uses Kenneth Burke’s Terms for Order as a model to explain how predictive
discourses require rhetorics of inevitability. She makes the point that such
predictive discourses are grounded on a rhetorical construction of imminence–an
ultimate order–which makes them appear logical,
necessary, and unretractable . Pedersen
describes the imminence of the rhetoric of technological forecasting as
such: [They] exhibit a progression across the rhetorical triad
in the language that informs them. They signal fantastical thoughts and
ambitions, which generate rhetorical What if?
momentum. However, to counter utopian visions, all of these technologies
undergo emergence through scientists who both leverage fantasy and
dismiss it while justifying the technology, often under the guise of
dehumanizing language. Most powerfully, though, the technology often
mysteriously appears as inevitable, as utterly imminent. In this formulation, utopic claims about inventions are utilized by
scientists, and then grounded by the assumption of imminence for their
emergence.
Shock and amazement are other instrumental rhetorical strategies that help
constitute the allure of new technologies, together resulting in the feeling of
sublime. Throughout history, discussions surrounding telepathic devices have
usually been met with feelings of enthusiastic amazement combined with shock. In
fact, this response is typical of the initial emergence of most modern
technologies, which is why these technologies have been described as sublime.
Emily Rohrbach describes the sublime as a propensity to imagine the present in
its relation to futurity . Historically, and most
famously articulated by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the sublime is an
aesthetic experience related to but ultimately distinct from feelings of beauty.
Unlike beauty, the sublime so fully fills the mind (usually with terror or awe),
that other feelings and reasoning are excluded. The classic case of sublime is
found in the work of the Victorian painter Joseph Turner, whose dramatic
shipwrecks were the typical subjects of sublimity, evoking transcendent
terror. The word sublime has a long history of
theorization and scholarly attention in the humanities, and specifically
across the visual arts. We use the term to characterize the sense of intense
inspiration framed in representations that promote these technologies, which
claim to alter human cognition and thinking as a subjective practice. The
emphasis lies in how sublime constructions facilitate this shift in digital
conditions, discussed earlier. However, as James Carey and John
Quirk, Leo Marx, David Nye, and Vincent Mosco have identified, it is modern
technologies and not natural landscapes like Turner’s that are typically
associated with feelings of the sublime today .
Mosco traces the lineage of technological, electric, and scientific sublimes to
describe a new digital sublime, which is the tendency for digital
technologies to take up a transcendent role in the world beyond the
banality of its role in everyday life. According to Mosco, the sublime so fully fills the mind with its object
that it can entertain no other . The digital
sublime functions through myth, in the sense that digital technologies
(cyberspace first among them) are oriented towards this
common belief, which therefore guides social determinations and justifications.
In other words, the sublime informs how manifold inventions are perceived and
taken up in society, and therefore, how such inventions work to subsequently
shape attitudes toward future inventions. The digital sublime informs future
digital conditions.
An extreme version of Mosco’s digital sublime is described by Anne C. McCarthy
(2017), which she calls the Red Bull sublime. Referencing
the popular energy drink and media company, the Red Bull sublime fully rejects
the ideology of nature as other, or as a distinct site of sublime experience.
The Red Bull sublime is in essence a digital sublime, as it takes advantage of
social media sharing and digital distribution to pull viewers into
sublime experiences. These sublime experiences are usually already-mediated
feats of daredevil action, both natural and technical, made possible by wing
suits, so as to fly down mountain canyons, and high-tech balloons to jump from
space .
The role of myth in the digital sublime is especially important for turning the
common practices of speculation and forecasting into facts.
Barthes, for example, argues that the depoliticized speech of myth
produces an important naturalizing effect, writing, myth has the task of giving an historical intention a
natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal. Just as Bell believed forecasting was an important agent in the
post-industrial society, Barthes believed that the mythic process of making
contingency appear eternal was a reflection of bourgeois (or capitalist)
ideology. This process is seen most clearly when inventions are developed,
commercialized, and adopted, then subsequently, change in response to the latent
circulation of commercial myths. Once myth becomes ossified and stable these
commitments become history, or facts. Myth progresses not
through true or false claims, but instead, as a transformation from productive
and predictive desires, on the one hand, and ossified and stable commitments, on
the other. Finally, productive and predictive myths project a view of the world,
which entails the collective beliefs of its community.
As our examples of telepathic technology will make clear (below), predictions of
the future often start as mythic, which over time stabilize into fact. Facts,
just because they are stabilized, do not lack efficacy, rather, they are myths
turned invisible, and usually become powerful through this reconfiguration.
Electricity offers an example of this dynamic of myth, and the subsequent
increase in causal power. Mosco writes, electricity achieved its real power when it left
mythology and entered banality. Of course, facts can be overturned and changed, but this takes
considerable effort. The infrastructures and institutions built up around facts
are slow to change or fade, and true innovation, as Latour often describes, requires putting your reputation on
the line, and fighting against the structuring forces already in place. In the
end, when a myth has accreted sufficient “rationality” it becomes fact, just as
forecasting transforms into science and the scientific sublime.
The following section describes the design and development choices of
Fabric, and how it attempts to capture and trace the
movement of the telepathic sublime through forecasting and sublimity in the
Contemporary Telepathics collection.
Fabric of Digital Life Artifacts and Archival Representations
Fabric is an open-access digital humanities archive
that collects and classifies the rhetoric surrounding the emergence of platforms
of human-computer interaction, or personal technologies, through digital
multimedia objects, publically available at fabricofdigitallife.com
(see Figure 1) . The concept of personal
technology is here understood as broadly as possible, which includes
technologies that are worn on the body, but also those that are ingested,
implanted or embedded. Wearable technologies usually augment embodied actions,
but they also sometimes replace body parts, such as limbs or eyes, pointing to
the terms embedded and bionic, which sit on the fringe of
this collection, with some entries characterizing it. At the time of writing,
Fabric contains over two thousand digital
artifacts about personal technology (and is constantly growing), ranging from
images, film clips, academic research articles, video marketing materials, and
collected ephemera. The archive is implemented on the CollectiveAccess platform,
an open-source content management and description system developed commercially
by Whirl-i-Gig. The process to choose a suitable content management system
for the archive involved input from software developers, students,
librarians and online discussion. We also considered Omeka (https://omeka.org/) and DSpace (http://www.dspace.org/).
Currently, we hire developers at Whirl-i-gig to customize the
CollectiveAccess platform for Fabric, while students archive
materials.
As each artifact is entered into the archive, it is classified and described
using a customized schema. Most of the categories draw on the original Dublin
Core set of metadata elements. However, early on in the development of the
archive, the decision was made to customize a few of the standard Dublin Core
elements, to better reflect the specialized nature of the technologies being
archived, and to implicitly make an argument about the ways that such objects,
and the archival practices that surround them, are to be understood. In addition
to metadata attached to each artifact, the archive also features a number of
collections of artifacts, organized by curators with the goal to highlight
certain technologies, to explore research themes, or to disclose ideologies
embedded in the texts (e.g., transhumanism or surveillance culture). Visitors
access
Fabric through a web frontend that enables
searching, browsing, and ways to variously compare artifacts. Other more
specialized research tools include user-specified virtual
briefcases for saving collections, object viewers, and
the ability to automatically create timelines of objects.
Artifacts
As discussed above, for the purposes of this article we are concerned with
the telepathic sublime in the Contemporary Telepathics collection, a
phenomenon about the response of awe, terror, or amazement over
technological inventions that augment or replace the power, distance, or
effect of existing human capacities. These sentiments tap into an
individual’s or culture’s experience of the future — that is, using telepathic
devices often feels futuristic.
Perhaps most pragmatically, the archive also collects and tracks digital
materials related to an invention through its various stages of development
and public promotion or public response. As such, the archive follows
discourses over time by tracking cross-references and keyword designations.
One design intent for the archive is to reflect how an artefact is
positioned according to a function or human motivation. Discourses about
telepathic devices (and more broadly, wearables),
concentrate on how these devices will be used for
something — they have a for-ness — rather than just being
about something (aboutness).
Fabric distinguishes itself from technology
indexes such as the ACM Computing Classification System in this regard,
which implicitly focus on aboutness. See https://www.acm.org/publications/class-2012. Instead,
it sets out to problematize this orientation, strategically tracking how
wearables can be understood in terms of their social use. As a
result, the effect can sometimes blur optimal pathways for searching,
browsing, and information retrieval.
Fabric has multiple entry points that facilitate
browsing through categories, images, timelines, and index terms, as well as
full-text and keyword search. One of the ways users view the archive is by
entering through a specific Collection; each collection is a
curated set of documents that have been specifically selected by curators.
Each focus on a particular topic, theme, or argument. At the time of
writing, the Contemporary Telepathics collection holds 62 artifacts across
14 different media types ranging from 1999 to 2017.
There are also other collections, which reveal different rhetorical
motivations and arguments. In one such collection, the goal is to reveal how
commercial exoskeletons are developed by military industrial complex
producers in close partnership with global Hollywood film franchises (e.g.,
Iron Man). See: http://fabricofdigitallife.com/index.php/Browse/objects/key/ecc7411b22d8481e480b6140ebe83778/facet/collection_facet/id/4/view/images.
In this collection, video game play has also been archived to reveal how
fictional exoskeletons influence real world innovation, and vice versa.
Another collection concentrates on the evolving story of inventor/filmmaker
Rob Spence and his journey to create a digital prosthetic eye for
himself. See: http://fabricofdigitallife.com/index.php/Browse/objects/key/ecc7411b22d8481e480b6140ebe83778/facet/collection_facet/id/9/view/images.
His persona, sometimes the subject of a CNN clip, other times a portrayal of
himself trying to improve his life after a childhood gun accident, is
especially compelling when collected under a single banner. Ultimately, each
collection performs a specific task and offers a curatorial argument, set
out by the curator (or a number of curators) responsible for its
construction.
Collections are dynamic and grow over time with new artifacts added as the
arguments evolve, as classification adapts, and as contributors and curators
come and go on the project. This design prefigures what Miguel Escobar
Varela describes as the transience of archives: [t]raditional archivists could assert that digital
archives are not really built to endure the passage of time and
constitute a repository for future historical research. Addressing this challenge, Takhteyev and DuPont point to the spirit
of remix in suggesting that collection and preservation
are living, ongoing practice[s]. We embrace this state of flux and try to overcome the challenges
wrought by the passage of time by inviting new people to the archiving team,
who then create new archival practices and advocate for new ideas. Varela
argues that digital archives should be considered performance in part
because [o]ften the archives are not impersonal, but highly
modified by the interests of the participants. As such, since its inception in 2012, the archive includes
contributions by more than thirty people, even before it was opened for
public display.
Viewed as a timeline (see Figure 2), comparisons between different media and
sometimes heteroclite artifacts are possible. The earliest artifact in the
collection is a scene from the film The Matrix (1999), depicting the
character Neo learning about telekinesis. See: http://fabricofdigitallife.com/index.php/Browse/objects/view/timeline/key/769590c77f0f06a1af0831e5877373fd.
This film clip was included when one of the authors discovered a blog
article that directly referred to the film when describing a technological
innovation. This serendipitous discovery offers a powerful rhetorical
explanation about how a technology might eventually evolve — a forecast.
Therefore, multimedia representations such as films form an important part
of the discourse and analytical terrain.
Taken together, the artifacts displayed in the collection enable a visitor to
track the telepathic sublime, which is a keyword. One recent item in the
collection is a 2016 article that discusses the same university group who
used monkeys wearing brain interfaces back in 2000 . It reports on implanting a monkey with a chip
to move wheelchairs through the powers of telekinesis. In the 2016 article,
the final sentence concludes, [w]e hope to begin trying this on humans
soon — pointing to a vision of the future, and exhibiting the mythic
hope of telepathic sublime, which is never
questioned, but simply assumed . In tracking the
telepathic sublime through the metadata schema and collected artifacts, the
classificatory approach focuses attention on particular technologies’
for-ness, rather than as static and inert
technologies. Indeed, since it is often the case that the machinery of
telepathic devices becomes obsolete so quickly, tracking motive or intent
becomes a foundational critical practice.
Moving from monkey to human, the
Mind Control Your TV artifact (Figure 3) illustrates the unique
archival practices necessary to document the technology as well as the
complex rhetorical motivators bound up in this collection, and how they
evolve over time. See: http://www.fabricofdigitallife.com/index.php/Detail/objects/1089.
The item, a video clip, promotes the idea of using a wireless wearable
technology to select television shows to watch, simply through the power of
thought . In the video, human participants (or
maybe actors) wear a headset that reads brainwave fluctuations, which, with
suitable control and training of the mind, allows one to telepathically
change TV channels. The video is a 4-minute segment from a BBC blog, which
discusses how the BBC collaborated with the company This
Place to create the technology prototype for TV viewers . As such, the video combines executives and
developers passionately celebrating their innovative mind-control technology
and BBC insiders reacting with shock and awe over how television will evolve
in the future. To open the clip, Head of Business Development, BBC Digital,
Cyrus Saihan says: What we have developed here is a very experimental
proof-of-concept that hopefully gives an idea as to how audiences of
the future might be able to control devices, such as TVs, just using
their brainwaves. So, seeing colleagues using it first-hand has been
an interesting experience.The video reports on future promises as much as it does on current
developments. While This Place wants to sell its technological
abilities (e.g., writing software code, re-engineering of consumer devices,
etc.), the BBC wants to appear future-focused and on the cusp of emergent
ideas. On the whole, the technology itself is clunky, with awkward
brain-computer interaction (BCI) headsets and slow interactions as the
television receives the signal. However, the point of the video is not to
market a product, rather, the point is to position the BBC as forecasting a
future for its consumers. The video is compelling to watch because the
participants are awestruck when describing their desire to achieve
telekinetics. The visual rhetorical markers from participants, such as
excited expressions, gleeful remarks, and the sense that one has witnessed
magic, aligns well with the heritage of telepathic invention disclosures.
One person in the video says: [t]his is telekinesis… I am literally
controlling it with my mind, as if he witnessed phenomena deemed
extraordinary .
Like most web content, the BBC broadcasted this video on multiple media
outlets (which the archive tracks), and included a complementary blog story
that was written to further explain the original video . See also: http://www.fabricofdigitallife.com/index.php/Detail/objects/1768.
Saihan writes: A subject popular in works of fiction is the ability
to control things just by using your mind. The idea of being able to
simply think about something and then magically make it happen has
fascinated people for many years. Whether it’s using ‘the Force’ in
Star Wars, spoon bending on stage or The Matrix, controlling objects
simply with your brain has a unique appeal and could open up a whole
world of possibilities. So when we learnt that new technologies were
now available in the market that allowed you to control electronic
devices by measuring the brain’s electrical activity, we wanted to
experiment with the technology to see what types of audience
experiences this might result in.
This sublime language glorifies and romanticizes telekinesis, but it also
argues for the utility of telekinesis, a fantasy-turned-utility rhetoric.
Rhetorical allusions to
Star Wars and The Matrix ground the fantasy within a familiar
context (blockbuster film franchises), but they also make the argument
open-ended and seemingly otherworldly — a whole world of
possibilities, writes Saihan. Strikingly, this combination
makes telekinesis sound reasonable. Audiences are swayed not only with the
shock and awe of seeing this invention work, they are also swayed by the
familiarity of film culture contextualizing it. Fabric
of Digital Life archives these kinds of allusions as
cross-references to films through specially-designed metadata that makes
such connections and allusions clear.
Archival Representations
The
Fabric archive uses its metadata scheme
tactically. Highlighting our interest in rhetorical framings, one goal of
the archive is to make salient each artifact’s persuasive intent. For
example: what is the artifact for? What is it doing in terms of
changing attitudes? Is there an audience shaped by the genre? Or, returning
to a point made earlier, how might the artifact inform the digital as a
cultural condition ?
Similarly, Melanie Feinberg has argued that classification as communication
frees system designers from charges of bias .
In
Fabric, each artifact is designated a
classification with one persuasive intent: academic, advertisement,
art, entertainment, or information. Therefore, by its very
nature, Fabric is designed to
preserve bias, feature it, and display its connection to
scientific advancement.
Another goal of the archive is to track how a technology and its persuasive
intent emerges over time. News of a single piece of technology may go
through several stages, each with an intentional and rhetorical shift
according to the genre and content producer. For example, a brain interface
may transform from its representation in an academic conference paper
(academic), to a news broadcast celebrating an innovative
R&D discovery (information), to a commercial product
(advertisement), and finally, to a novel that interrogates
its dystopic implications (art). According to Diana Taylor,
this process of tracking across media and temporal stages is what makes
an object archival in the sense that it is selected, classified, and presented for
analysis. In this hypothetical example, these shifts in media would be
captured in
Fabric by each artifact’s metadata:
shifting classification from academic,
information, advertisement, to art.
Similarly,
Fabric tracks how technology is
carried near, on, or in a body, which is recorded in the metadata schema.
The metadata category location on the body lets a user
select a body part in order to find associated technologies, ideas, or
products. For example, one can select wrist to reveal all
wrist-worn wearables, and then compare how artifacts and their
representations change over time. In the Contemporary Telepathics
collection, nearly all items are associated with brain, but
several are also indexed with another body part. For example, inventor Kevin
Warwick achieves telekinesis with an arm implant, and so the artifacts
describing his work also include arm in their metadata. To help
facilitate high-level comparisons, Fabric also
includes a body analytics visualization. See http://fabricofdigitallife.com/index.php/Analytics/Index.
In this way, Fabric enables multi-dimensional
and multi-temporal exploration.
One of the more experimental metadata categories of the archive is the
augmenting field. It is meant to serve as an
experiential classification. All artifacts are archived according to an
action associated with human activities, which may be physical (e.g.,
moving, placing, killing), cognitive (e.g., thinking, choosing) or
existential (e.g., living, adoring, reminiscing). We acknowledge that
most actions defy this triadic reduction. Killing might be physical,
cognitive, or existential. However, considering this complexity helps
the archival practice. If we consider inventions as an aspect of lived
experience, this field helps us identify technical innovation in a
manner that reveals its purpose in terms of society or persons.
Manifesting the archive’s experimental and unorthodox approach, the
grammatical structure is always a gerund, as gerunds better suggest activity
and for-ness (see Table 1).
In requiring archivists to capture the ways that wearables augment a body,
the archivist must imagine what the technology is augmenting for a
seemingly, essentialized, pre-technologic human. This formulation
deliberately requires the archivist to cast a narrative about the implied
subject of an artifact, that is: if technology were not
available, how would the implied action be performed? Or, what would it be
replaced with, if at all? For example, surveillance technologies augment
watching, eldercare devices augment caring (or
perhaps ignoring), and military exoskeletons might augment
killing or protecting. Interestingly, new
archivists often misidentify this category by choosing technologic
activities (e.g., heart-monitoring instead of
living or healing). Resolving
this mistake requires a tacit exploration of posthuman identity through the
acts prescribed by these technologies. The archivist must therefore ask,
can we imagine activities without machines? The archival goal is
to explore how personal technologies augment constructions of human identity
and human action, and to understand how they adapt to a technological
world.
Most new technology is popularized as a commercial product through mass media
that dictate the ebb and flow of business trends. As such, devices, costs, and
market-share dominate the moment — the implied present. By erasing history, this
inclination also valorizes the future — a mythic facade that justifies technology
through forecasting (because the future demands it). While the machinery that
fulfills this forecast may become woefully obsolete in the future, the idea and
the desire might not. The rhetorical framing continues and evolves, and
therefore is tracked by the
Fabric archive.
Fabric is a growing digital humanities archive that
exposes the rhetoric of personal technologies (through acts of emergence,
forecasting, and myth-making), which invites visitors to explore artifacts
across multiple media at different times and locations. Fabric has been designed on humanistic principles to provide unusual and interesting foils to the
ways technology is often displayed, explored, and preserved. Fictional artifacts
appear alongside seemingly real ones, inviting comparison without privileging
either representation as more valid than the other. The metadata categories
focusing on embodied dimensions (location on the body and
augmenting) deliberately attempt to problematize
typical formulations that privilege commercial information over an experiential
one.
We described the Contemporary Telepathics collection and argued for its
analytical and exploratory utility. We did so because telepathic capabilities
are not yet fully realized as commercial products — in fact, they are partly
fictional and constituted by what we term the telepathic sublime. We argued for
the necessity of a metadata schema oriented towards tracking this kind of
complex phenomenon, which enables us to better preserve and experience the
sublime feelings associated with the technology. Our classification schema is
deliberately persuasive in that it maintains the archival bias felt and realized
as the sublime, rather than seeking objectivity. In this way,
Fabric displays its artifacts in a manner intended to be exploratory
and investigative.
Acknowledgments
We want to acknowledge Dr. Andrew Iliadis for his extensive work on metadata
development, interface design, and curator editorship for FABRIC. We thank many
of the archivists over the years who archived material in the collection
including Sharon Caldwell, Tameka Bailey, Samantha Reid, Jeremiah Baarbé, and
Douglas Trueman. We thank Dave DeCamp and the anonymous journal reviewers who
made this paper much stronger through suggestions and comments. We thank the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for supporting
this research. This research was undertaken, in part, thanks to the Canada
Research Chairs program.
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