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SPECULATIVE COMPUTING: Aesthetic provocations in humanities computing
by Johanna Drucker and Bethany Nowviskie
for publication in Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Humanities
With roots in computational linguistics, stylometrics, and other quantitative statistical
methods for analyzing features of textual documents, humanities computing has had very
little use for analytic tools with foundations in visual epistemology. In this respect
humanities computing follows the text-based, (dare I still say -- logocentric?) approach
typical of traditional humanities. "Digital" humanities are distinguished by the use of
computational methods, of course, but they also make frequent use of visual means of
information display (tables, graphs, and other forms of data presentation) that have
become common in desktop and Web environments. Two significant challenges arise as a
result of these developments. The first is to meet requirements that humanistic thought
conform to the logical systematicity required by computational methods. The second is to
overcome humanists' long-standing resistance (ranging from passively ignorant to
actively hostile) to visual forms of knowledge production. Either by itself would raise a
host of issues. But the addition of a third challenge – to engage computing to produce
useful aesthetic provocations-- pushes mathesis and graphesis into even more unfamiliar
collaborations. Speculative approaches to digital humanities engage subjective and
intuitive tools, including visual interfaces, as primary means of interpretation in
computational environments. Most importantly, the speculative approach is premised on
the idea that a work is constituted in an interpretation enacted by an interpreter. The
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computational processes that serve speculative inquiry must be dynamic and constitutive
in their operation, not merely procedural and mechanistic.
To some extent these notions are a radical departure from established practices in
digital humanities. As the articles in this volume attest, many of the practices in digital
humanities are becoming standardized. Technical and practical environments have
become more stable. So have procedures for developing meta-data, for content
modelling, for document classification and organization, search instruments, and the
various protocols of ordering, sorting, and accessing information in digital formats. In its
broadest conceptualization, speculative computing is premised on the conviction that
logical, systematic knowledge representation, adequate though it may be for many fields
of inquiry, including many aspects of the humanities, is not sufficient for the
interpretation of imaginative artifacts.
Intellectual debates, collateral but substantive, have arisen as digital humanists
engage long-standing critical discussions of the "textual condition" in its material,
graphical, bibliographical, semantic, and social dimensions. No task of information
management is without its theoretical subtext, just as no act of instrumental application is
without its ideological aspects. We know that the "technical" tasks we perform are
themselves acts of interpretation. Intellectual decisions that enable even such
fundamental activities as keyword searching are fraught with interpretive baggage. We
know this -- just as surely as we understand that the front page of any search engine (the
world according to "Yahoo!") is as idiosyncratic as the Chinese Emperor's Encyclopedia
famously conjured by Borges and commented upon by Foucault. Any "order of things" is
always an expression of human foibles and quirks, however naturalized it appears at a
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particular cultural moment. We often pretend otherwise in order to enact the necessary
day-to-day "job" in front of us, bracketing out the (sometimes egregious) assumptions
that allow computational methods (such as mark-up or data models) to operate
effectively.
Still, we didn't arrive at digital humanities naively. Though work in digital
humanities has turned some relativists into pragmatists under pressure of technical
exigencies, it has also reinvigorated our collective attention to the heart of our intellectual
undertaking. As the applied knowledge of digital humanities becomes integrated into
libraries and archives, providing the foundation for collection management and delivery
systems, the ecological niche occupied by theory is called on to foster new self-reflective
activity. We are not only able to use digital instruments to extend humanities research,
but to reflect on the methods and premises that shape our approach to knowledge and our
understanding of how interpretation is framed. Digital humanities projects are not simply
mechanistic applications of technical knowledge, but occasions for critical self-
consciousness.
Such assertions beg for substantiation. Can we demonstrate that humanities
computing isn't "just" or "merely" a technical innovation, but a critical watershed as
important as deconstruction, cultural studies, feminist thinking? To do so, we have to
show that digital approaches don't simply provide objects of study in new formats, but
shift the critical ground on which we conceptualize our activity. The challenge is to
structure instruments that engage and enable these investigations, not only those that
allow theoretically glossed discussion of them. From a distance, even a middle distance
of practical engagement, much of what is currently done in digital humanities has the
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look of automation. Distinguished from augmentation by Douglas Engelbart, one of the
pioneering figures of graphical interface design, automation suggests mechanistic
application of technical knowledge according to invariant principles. Once put into
motion, an automatic system operates, and its success or benefit depends on the original
design. By contrast, Engelbart suggested that augmentation extends our intellectual and
cognitive -- even imaginative -- capabilities through prosthetic means, enhancing the very
capabilities according to which the operations we program into a computer can be
conceived. Creating programs that have emergent properties, or that bootstrap their
capabilities through feedback loops or other recursive structures, is one stream of
research work. Creating digital environments that engage human capacities for subjective
interpretation, interpellating the subjective into computational activity, is another.
Prevailing approaches to humanities computing tend to lock users into
procedural strictures. Once determined, a data structure or content model becomes a
template restricting interpretation. Not in your tag set? Not subject to hierarchical
ordering? Too bad. Current methods don't allow much flexibility -- a little like learning to
dance by fitting your feet to footsteps molded into concrete. Speculative computing
suggests that the concrete be replaced by plasticine that remains malleable, receptive to
the trace of interpretive moves. Computational management of humanities documents
requires that "content" has be subjected to analysis and then put into conformity with
formal principles.
Much of the intellectual charge of digital humanities has come from the
confrontation between the seemingly ambiguous nature of imaginative artifacts and the
requirements for formal dis-ambiguation essential for data structures and schema. The
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requirement that a work of fiction or poetry be understood as a "ordered hierarchy of
content objects" (Allen Renear's oft-cited phrase of principles underlying the Text
Encoding Initiative) raises issues, as Jerome McGann has pointed out. Productive as these
exchanges have been, they haven't made the shrug of resignation that accompanies
acceptance of such procedures and presses them into practice into anything more than a
futile protest against the Leviathan of standardization. Alternatives are clearly needed,
not merely objections. The problems are not just with ordered hierarchies, but with the
assumption that an artifact is a stable, constant object for empirical observation, rather
than a work produced through interpretation.
Speculative computing is an experiment designed to explore alternative
approaches. On a technical level, the challenge is to change the sequence of events
through which the process of "dis-ambiguation" occurs. Interpretation of subjective
activity can be formalized concurrent with its production -- at least, that is the design
principle we have used as the basis of Temporal Modelling.
By creating a constrained visual interface, Temporal Modelling puts subjective
interpretation within the system, rather than outside it. The subjective, intuitive
interpretation is captured and then formalized into a structured data scheme, rather than
the other way around. The interface gives rise to XML exported in a form that can be
used to design a DTD or to be transformed through use of XSLT or other manipulations.
A description of the technical parameters that realize these conceptual premises is
described in the case study below. The project is grounded on convictions that subjective
approaches to knowledge representation can function with an intellectual rigor
comparable to that usually claimed by more overtly formal systems of thought. This
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experimental approach has potential to expand humanities computing in theoretical scope
and practical application.
Our path into the "speculative" has been charted by means of aesthetic
exploration, emphasizing visual means of interpretation. These are informed by the
history of aesthetics in descriptive and generative approaches, as well as by the
anomalous principles of 'pataphysics, that invention of late 19th century French poet-
philosopher Alfred Jarry. An outline of these aesthetic, literary, and critical traditions,
and their role in the ongoing development of digital humanities, forms the first part of
this paper. This is followed by a discussion of the project that demonstrates the working
viability of the precepts of speculative computing, Temporal Modelling. I invited
Bethany Nowviskie to author this second section, since the conceptual and technical
development of this research project has proceeded largely under her intellectual
guidance.
Aesthetics and digital humanities
The history of aesthetics is populated chiefly by descriptive approaches. These are
concerned with truth value, the specificity of individual media and activity “proper” to
their form, the development of taste and knowledge, and the capacity of aesthetics to
contribute to moral improvement -- and, of course, notions of beauty and the aesthetic
experience. These concerns are useful in assessing the aesthetic capabilities of digital
media -- as well as visual forms of knowledge production – even if only because of the
peculiar prejudices such traditional approaches have instilled in our common
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understanding. For instance, long-standing tensions between images and text-based forms
of knowledge production still plague humanist inquiry. A disposition against visual
epistemology is deeply rooted in conceptions of image and word within their morally and
theoretically charged history in western philosophy. A schematic review of such key
traditional issues provides a useful preface to understanding current concerns, particularly
as visual tools become integrated into digital contexts as primary instruments of
humanities activity.
Fundamental distinctions differentiate descriptive modes from the intellectual
traditions that inform our project: generative aesthetics, ‘pataphysics, speculative thought
and quantum poetics. Generative approaches are concerned with the creation of form,
rather than its assessment on grounds of truth, purity, epistemological, cognitive, or
formal value. Speculative aesthetics is a rubric hatched for our specific purposes, and
incorporates emergent and dynamic principles into interface design while also making a
place for subjectivity within the computational environment. ‘Pataphysics inverts the
scientific method, proceeding from and sustaining exceptions and unique cases, while
quantum methods insist on conditions of indeterminacy as that which is intervened in any
interpretive act. Dynamic and productive with respect to the subject-object dialectic of
perception and cognition, the quantum extensions of speculative aesthetics have
implications for applied and theoretical dimensions of computational humanities.
Before plunging into the vertiginous world of speculative and 'pataphysical
endeavors, some frameworks of traditional aesthetics provide useful points of departure
for understanding the difficulties of introducing visual means of knowledge
representation into digital humanities contexts. To reiterate, the themes of descriptive
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aesthetics that are most potently brought to bear on digital images are: truth value,
"purity" or capabilities of a medium, the cognitive values of aesthetics, and the moral
improvement aesthetic experience supposedly fosters. Debates about beauty I shall leave
aside, except in so far as they touch on questions of utility, and the commonplace
distinction between applied and artistic activity.
The emphasis placed on the distinction between truth-value and imitation in
classical philosophy persists in contemporary suspicions of digital images. The
simulacral representations that circulate in cyberspace (including digital displays of
information in visual form) are so many removes from "truth" that they would be charged
with multiple counts of aesthetic violation in any Socratic court. Platonic hierarchies, and
their negative stigmatization of images as mere imitations of illusions, are famously
entrenched in western thought. Whether we consider the virtual image to be a thing in-
itself, with ontological status as a first-order imitation, or as a mimetic form and thus yet
another remove from those Ideas whose truth we attempt to ascertain, hardly matters. The
fixed hierarchy assesses aesthetic judgment against a well-marked scale of authenticity.
From a theological perspective, images are subject to negative judgment except
when they serve as instruments of meditation, as material forms whose properties
function as a first rung on the long ladder towards enlightenment. Such attitudes are
characterized by a disregard for embodied intelligence and of the positive capacities of
sensory perception. Denigrating the epistemological capacity of visualisation, they
assume that art and artifice are debased from the outset -- as deceptive, indulgent acts of
hubris -- or worse, temptations to sinful sensuality. But if images are necessarily inferior
to some "Idea" whose pale shadow they represent, digital images are redeemed only
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when they bring the ideal form of data into presentation. The difficulty of such reasoning,
however, is that it collapses into questions about what form data has in a disembodied
condition.
Aristotle’s concern with how things are made, not just how "truthful" they are,
suggested that it was necessary to pay attention to the properties particular to each
medium. The idea of a "proper" character for poetry was opposed to -- or at least distinct
from -- that of visual forms. Likewise, sculpture was distinguished from painting, and so
on, in an approach dependent on specificity of media and their identifying properties.
This notion of “propriety” led to differentiation among aesthetic forms on the basis of
media, providing a philosophical foundation for distinctions that resonate throughout
literary and visual studies. Investigation of the distinct properties of media was
formulated most famously in the modern era by Gotthold Lessing, (Laocöon, 1766). The
value judgements that lurk in his distinctions continue to surface in disciplinary and
critical activity to the present day. Such boundaries are well policed. But "new media"
challenge these distinctions through the use of meta-technologies and inter-media
sensibility. In addition, artistic practices forged from conceptual, procedural, and
computational realms can't be well-accommodated by aesthetic structures with "purist"
underpinnings. If a data file can be input from a typewriter keyboard and output as
musical notes then the idea of the "purity" of media seems irrelevant.
Critics trained in or focused on the modern tradition (in its 20th century form and
reaching back into 18th century aesthetics) have difficulty letting go of the long-standing
distinction between textual and visual forms of representation – as well as of the
hierarchy that places text above image. The disjunct between literary and visual
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modernism, the very premise of an autonomous visuality freed of literary and textual
referents, continues to position these approaches to knowledge representation within
separate domains. The consequences are profound. Intellectual training in the humanities
only rarely includes skills in interpretation of images or media in any but the most
thematic or iconographic terms. The idea that visual representation has the capacity to
serve as a primary tool of knowledge production is an almost foreign notion to most
humanists. Add to this that many latter-day formalists conceive of digital objects as
"immaterial" and the complicated legacy of hierarchical aesthetics becomes a very real
obstacle to be overcome. Naivete aside (digital artifacts are highly, complexly material),
these habits of thought work against conceptualizing a visual approach to digital
humanities. Nonetheless, visualization tools have long been a part of the analysis of
statistical methods in digital humanities. So long as these are kept in their place, a
secondary and subservient "display" of information, their dubious character is at least
held in check. Other conceptual difficulties arise when visual interfaces are used to
create, rather than merely present, information.
In a teleologically grounded aesthetics, forms of creative expression are
understood to participate in spiritual evolution, moral improvement -- or its opposite.
Whether staged as cultural or individual improvements in character through
exposure to the "best that has been thought" embodied in the artifacts of high, fine art, the
idea lingers: the arts, visual, musical, or poetical, somehow contribute to moral
improvement. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, and Walter Pater all reinforced
this sermon on moral uplift in the 19th century. Even now the humanities and fine arts
often find themselves justified on these grounds. The links among ideas of progress and
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the application of "digital" technology to humanities continues to be plagued by
pernicious notions of improvement.
Hegel wrote a fine script for the progressive history of aesthetic forms. The
cultural authority of technology is insidiously bound to such teleologies – especially
when it becomes interlinked with the place granted to instrumental rationality in modern
culture. The speculative approach, which interjects a long-repressed streak of subjective
ambiguity, threatens the idea that digital representations present a perfect match of idea
and form.
But Hegel’s dialectic provides a benefit. It reorients our understanding of
aesthetic form, pivoting it away from the classical conception of static, fixed ideal. The
interaction of thesis and antithesis in Hegelian principles provides a dynamic basis for
thinking about transformation and change -- but within a structure of progress towards an
Absolute. Hegel believed that art was concerned "with the liberation of the mind and
spirit from the content and forms of finitude" that would compensate for the "bitter labour
of knowledge". Aesthetic experience, presumably, follows this visionary path. If an
aesthetic mode could manage to manifest ideal thought, presumably in the form of "pure
data" -- and give it perfect form through technological means, then descriptive aesthetics
would have in its sights a sense of teleological completion. Mind, reason, aesthetic
expression – all would align. But evidence that humankind has reached a pinnacle of
spiritual perfection in this barely new millennium is in short supply. In this era following
post structuralism, and influenced by a generation of deconstruction and post-colonial
theory, we can't really still imagine we are making "progress". Still, the idea that digital
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technology provides a high point of human intelligence, or other characterisations of its
capabilities in superlative terms, persists.
18th century aestheticians shifted their attention to the nature of subjective
experience and away from an earlier focus on standards of harmonious perfection for
objectified forms. In discussions of taste, subjective opinion comes to the fore. Well
suited to an era of careful cultivation of elite sensibility, this discussion of taste and
refinement emphasizes the idea of expertise. Connoisseurship is the epitome of
knowledge created through systematic refining of sensation. Alexander Baumgarten
sought in aesthetic experience the perfection proper to thought. He conceived that the
object of aesthetics was "to analyse the faculty of knowledge" or " to investigate the kind
of perfection proper to perception which is a lower level of cognition but autonomous and
possessed of its own laws". The final phrase resonates profoundly, granting aesthetics a
substantive, rather than trivial role. But aesthetic sensibilities -- and objects -- were
distinguished from those of techne or utility. The class divide of laborer and intellectual
aesthete is reinforced in this distinction. The legacy of this attitude persists most
perniciously, and the idea of the aesthetic function of utilitarian objects is as bracketed in
digital environments as it is in the well-marked domains of applied and "pure" arts.
In what is arguably the most influential work in modern aesthetics, Immanuel
Kant elevated the role of aesthetics -- but at a price. The Critique of Judgment (1790),
known as the "third" critique -- since it bridged the first and second critiques of Pure
Reason (knowledge) and Practical Reason (sensation)-- contained an outline for
aesthetics as the understanding of design, order, and form. But this understanding was
meant to grasp "Purposiveness without purpose". In other words, appreciation of design
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outside of utility was the goal of aesthetics. Knowledge seeking must be "free",
disinterested, without end, aim, he asserted. In his system of three modes of
consciousness -- knowledge, desire, and feeling. (Pure Reason, Practical Reason, and
Judgement)-- Kant positioned aesthetics between knowledge and desire, between pure
and practical reasons. Aesthetic judgment served as a bridge between mind and sense.
But what about the function of emergent and participatory subjectivity? Subjectivity that
affects the system of judgement? These are alien notions. For the enlightenment thinker,
the objects under observation and the mind of the observer interact from autonomous
realms of stability. We cannot look to Kant for anticipation of a“quantum" aesthetics in
which conditions exist in indeterminacy until intervened by a participatory sentience.
In summary, we can see that traditional aesthetics bequeath intellectual
parameters on which we can distinguish degrees of truth, imitation, refinement, taste, and
even the "special powers of each medium" that are contributing strains to understanding
the knowledge-production aspects of visual aesthetics in digital media. But none provide
a foundation for a generative approach, let alone a quantum and/or speculative one.
Why?
For all their differences these approaches share a common characteristic. They are
all descriptive systems. They assume that form pre-exists the act of apprehension, that
aesthetic objects are independent of subjective perception -- and vice versa. They assume
stable, static relations between knowledge and its representation -- even if epistemes
change (e.g. Hegel's dialectical forms evolve, but they do not depend on contingent
circumstances of apperception in order to come into being.) The very foundations of
digital media, however, are procedural, generative, and iterative in ways that bring these
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issues to the fore. We can transfer the insights gleaned from our understanding of digital
artifacts onto traditional documents -- and we should -- just as similar insights could have
arisen from non-digital practices. The speculative approach is not specific to digital
practices -- nor are generative methods. Both, however, are premised very differently
from that of formal, rational, empirical, or classical aesthetics.
Generative aesthetics
The Jewish ecstatic traditions of gematria (a method of interpretation of letter patterns in
sacred texts) and Kabala (with its inducement of trance conditions through repetitive
combinatoric meditation) provide precedents for enacting and understanding generative
practices. Secular literary and artistic traditions have also drawn on permutational,
combinatoric, and other programmed means of production. Aleatory procedures
(seemingly at odds with formal constraints of a "program" but incorporated into
instructions and procedures) have been used to generate imaginative and aesthetic works
for more than a century, in accord with the enigmatic cautions uttered by Stéphane
Mallarmé that the "throw of the dice would never abolish chance." In each of the
domains just cited, aesthetic production engages with non-rational systems of thought --
whether mystical, heretical, secular, or irreverent. Among these, 20th-century
developments in generative aesthetics have a specific place and relevance for digital
humanities.
Generative aesthetics is the phrase used by the German mathematician and visual
poet Max Bense to designate works created using algorithmic processes and
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computational means for their production. "The system of generative aesthetics aims at a
numerical and operational description of characteristics of aeesthetic structures," Bense,
wrote in his prescription for a generative aesthetics in the early 1960s. Algorithmically
generated computations would give rise to data sets in turn expressed in visual or other
output displays. Bense's formalist bias is evident. He focused on the description of formal
properties of visual images, looking for a match between their appearance and the
instructions that bring them into being. They were evidence of the elegance and formal
beauty of algorithms. They also demonstrated the ability of a "machine" to produce
aesthetically harmonious images. His rational, mathematical disposition succeeded in
further distancing subjectivity from art, suggesting that form exists independent of any
viewer or artist. Bense's systematic means preclude subjectivity. But his essay marks an
important milestone in the history of aesthetics, articulating as it does a procedural
approach to form giving that is compatible with computational methods.
Whether such work has any capacity to become emergent at a level beyond the
programmed processes of its original conception is another question. Procedural
approaches are limited because they focus on calculation (manipulation of quantifiable
parameters) rather than symbolic properties of computing (manipulation at the level of
represented information), thus remaining mechanistic in conception and execution.
Reconceptualizing the mathematical premises of combinatoric and permuatational
processes so they work at the level of symbolic, even semantic and expressive levels, is
crucial to the extension of generative aesthetics into speculative, 'pataphysical, or
quantum approaches.
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Generative aesthetics has a different lineage than that of traditional aesthetics.
Here the key points of reference would not be Baumgarten and Kant, Hegel and Walter
Pater, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, or Theodor Adorno -- but the generative morphology of the
5th century BC Sanskrit grammarian Panini, the rational calculus of Leibniz, the
visionary work of Charles Babbage, George Boole, Alan Turing, Herbert Simon, and
Marvin Minsky. Other important contributions come from the traditions of self-
consciously procedural poetics and art such as that of Lautréamont, Duchamp, Cage,
Lewitt, Maciunas, Stockhausen and so on. The keyword vocabulary in this approach
would not be comprised of beauty, truth, mimesis, taste, and form -- but of emergent,
autopoeitic, generative, iterative, algorithmic, speculative, and so on.
The intellectual tradition of generative aesthetics inspired artists working in
conceptual and procedural approaches throughout the 20th century. Earlier precedents can
be found, but Dada strategies of composition made chance operations a crucial element of
poetic and visual art. The working methods of Marcel Duchamp provide ample testimony
to the success of this experiment. Duchamp's exemplary "unfinished" piece, The Large
Glass, records a sequence of representations created through actions put into play to
create tangible traces of abstract thought. Duchamp precipitated form from such activity
into material residue, rather than addressing the formal parameters of artistic form-giving
according to traditional notions of beauty (proportion, harmony, or truth, for instance).
He marked a radical departure from even the innovative visual means of earlier avant-
garde visual traditions (Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism and so forth). For all their
conceptual invention, these were still bound up with visual styles.
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In the 1960s and 1970s, many works characteristic of these approaches were
instruction based. Composer John Cage made extensive use of chance operations,
establishing his visual scores as points of departure for improvisational response, rather
than as prescriptive guidelines for replication of ideal forms of musical works. Fluxus
artists such as George Brecht, George Maciuas, Robert Whitman, or Alison Knowles
drew on some of the conceptual parameters invoked by Dada artists a generation earlier.
The decades of the 1950s and 1960s are peopled with individuals prone to such
inspired imaginings: Herbert Franke and Melvin Pruitt, Jascia Reichardt, and the
heterogenous research teams at Bell Labs such as Kenneth Knowlton, Leon Harmon, and
dozens of other artists worked in robotics, electronics, video, visual and audio signal
processing, or the use of new technology that engaged combinatoric or permutational
methods for production of poetry, prose, music, or other works. The legacy of this work
remains active. Digital art-making exists in all disciplines and genres, often hybridized
with traditional approaches in ways that integrate procedural methods and material
production.
One of the most sustained and significant projects in this spirit is Harold Cohen's
Aaron project. As a demonstration of artificial aesthetics, an attempt to encode artistic
creativity in several levels of instructions, Aaron is a highly developed instance of
generative work. Aaron was first conceived in 197?, and not surprisingly its first iteration
corresponded to artificial vision research at the time. The conviction that perceptual
processes, if sufficiently understood, would provide a basis for computational models
predominated in research done by such pioneers as David Marr in the 1970s. Only as this
work progressed did researchers realize that perceptual processing of visual information
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had to be accompanied by higher order cognitive representations. Merely understanding
"perception" was inadequate. Cognitive schema possessed of the capacity for emerging
complexity must also be factored into the explanation of the way vision worked.
Aaron reached a temporary impasse when it became clear that the methods of
generating shape and form within its programs had to be informed by such world-based
knowledge as the fact that tree trunks were thicker at the bottom than at the top. Vision,
cognition, and representation were all engaged in a dialogue of percepts and concepts.
Programming these into Aaron's operation pushed the project towards increasingly
sophisticated AI research. Aaron did not simulate sensory perceptual processing (with its
own complex mechanisms of sorting, classifying, actively seeking stimuli as well as
responding to them), but the cognitive representations of "intellectualized" knowledge
about visual forms and their production developed for Aaron made a dramatic
demonstration of generative aesthetics. Aaron was designed to create original expressive
artifacts -- new works of art. Because such projects have come into being as generative
machines before our very eyes, through well-recorded stages, they have shown us more
and more precisely just how that constitutive activity of cognitive function can be
conceived.
'Pataphysical sensibilities and quantum methods
Before returning to speculative computing, and to the case study of this essay, a note
about 'pataphysics is in order. I introduced pataphysics almost in passing in the
introduction above, not to diminish the impact of slipping this peculiar gorilla into the
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chorus, but because I want to suggest that it offers an imaginative fillip to speculative
computing, rather than the other way around.
An invention of the late 19th century French physicist poet Alfred Jarry,
'pataphysics is a science of unique solutions, of exceptions. 'Pataphysics celebrates the
idiosyncratic and particular within the world of phenomena, thus providing a framework
for an aesthetics of specificity within generative practice. (This contrasts with Bense's
generative approach, which appears content with generalities of conception and formal
execution.)
The original founder of 'pataphysics, Alfred Jarry, declared the principles for the
new science in the fantastic pages of his novel Dr. Faustroll, 'Pataphysician: "Faustroll
defined the universe as that which is the exception to oneself". In his introduction to
Dr.Faustroll Roger Shattuck described the three basic principles of Jarry's belief system:
clinamen, syzygy, and ethernity. Shattuck wrote: "Clinamen, an infinitesimal and
fortuitous swerve in the motion of an atom, formed the basis of Lucretius's theory of
matter and was invoked by Lord Kelvin when he proposed his 'kinetic theory of matter.'
To Jarry in 1898 it signified the very principle of creation, of reality as an exception
rather than the rule." Just as Jarry was proposing this suggestive reconceptualization of
physics, his contemporary Stéphane Mallarmé was calling the bluff on the end game to
metaphysics. Peter Bürger suggests that Mallarmé's conception of "the absolute"
coincides with a conception of aesthetic pleasure conceived of as a technological game,
driven by a non-existent mechanism. The substantive manifestation in poetic form shows
the workings of the mechanism as it enacts, unfolds. Generative and speculative
aesthetics are anticipated in the conceptualization of Mallarme's approach.
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What has any of this to do with computing?
Without 'pataphysical and speculative capabilities, instrumental reason locks
computing into engineering problem-solving logical sensibility, programs that only work
within the already defined parameters. The binarism between reason and its opposite,
endemic to western thought, founds scientific inquiry into truth on an empirical method.
Pledged to rational systematic consistency, this binarism finds an unambiguous
articulation in Book X of Plato's Republic. "The better part of the soul is that which trusts
to measure and calculation." The poet and visual artist "implant an evil constitution" --
indulging the "irrational nature" which is "very far removed from the true." Ancient
words, they prejudice the current condition in which the cultural authority of the
computer derives from its relation to symbolic logic at the expense of those inventions
and sensibilities that characterize imaginative thought. By contrast, speculative
approaches seek to create parameter-shifting open-ended, inventive capabilities --
humanistic and imaginative by nature and disposition. Quantum methods extend these
principles. Simply stated, quantum interpretation notes that all situations are in a
condition of indeterminacy distributed across a range of probability until they are
intervened by observation. The goal of 'pataphysical and speculative computing is to keep
digital humanities from falling into mere technical application of standard practices
(either administered/info management or engineering/statistical calculations). To do so
requires finding ways to implement imaginative operations.
Speculative computing and the use of aesthetic provocation
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Visual or graphic design has played almost no part in humanities computing, except for
the organized display of already structured information. Why should this be necessary?
Or continue to be true? What are the possibilities of integrating subjective perspectives
into the process of digital humanities exists. And though emergent systems for dynamic
interface are not realizable, they are certainly conceivable. Such perspectives differentiate
speculative approaches from generative ones.
The attitude that pervades information design as a field is almost entirely
subsumed by notions that data pre-exists display, and that the task of visual form-giving
is merely to turn a cognitive exercise into a perceptual one. While the value of intelligent
information design in the interpretation of statistical data can't be underestimated, and
dismissing the importance of this activity would be ridiculous, the limits of this approach
also have to be pointed out. Why? Because they circumscribe the condition of knowledge
in their apparent suggestion that information exists independently of visual presentation
and just waits for the "best" form in which it can be represented. Many of the digital
humanists I've encountered treat graphic design as a kind of accessorizing exercise, a
dressing up of information for public presentation after the real work of analysis has been
put into the content model, data structure, or processing algorithm. Arguing against this
attitude requires rethinking of the way embodiment gives rise to information in a primary
sense. It also requires recognition that embodiment is not a static or objective process, but
one that is dynamic and subjective.
Speculative computing is a technical term, fully compatible with the mechanistic
reason of techno-logical operations. It refers to the anticipation of probable outcomes
along possible forward branches in the processing of data. Speculation is used to
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maximize efficient performance. By calculating the most likely next steps, it speeds up
processing. Unused paths are discarded as new possibilities are calculated. Speculation
doesn't eliminate options, but, as in any instance of gambling, the process weights the
likelihood of one path over another in advance of its occurrence. Speculation is a
mathematical operation unrelated to metaphysics or narrative theory, grounded in
probability and statistical assessments. Logic based, and quantitative, the process is pure
techné, applied knowledge, highly crafted, and utterly remote from any notion of poiesis
or aesthetic expression. Metaphorically, speculation invokes notions of possible worlds
spiralling outward from every node in the processing chain, vivid as the rings of radio
signals in the old RKO studios film logo. To a narratologist, the process suggests the
garden of forking paths, a way to read computing as a tale structured by nodes and
branches.
The phrase "speculative computing" resonates with suggestive possibilities,
conjuring images of unlikely outcomes and surprise events, imaginative leaps across the
circuits that comprise the electronic synapses of digital technology. The question that
hangs in that splendid interval is a fundamental one for many areas of computing
application: can the logic-based procedures of computational method be used to produce
an aesthetic provocation? We know, of course, that the logic of computing methods does
not in any way preclude their being used for illogical ends -- or for the processing of
information that is unsystematic, silly, trivial, or in any other way outside the bounds of
logical function. Very few fully logical or formally systematic forms of knowledge exist
in human thought beyond those few branches of mathematics or calculation grounded in
unambiguous procedures. Can speculation engage these formalized models of human
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imagination at the level of computational processing? To include an intuitive site for
processing subjective interpretation into formal means rather than circumscribing it from
the outset? If so, what might those outcomes look like and suggest to the humanities
scholar engaged with the use of digital tools? Does the computer have the capacity to
generate a provocative aesthetic artifact?
Speculative computing extends the recognition that interpretation takes place
from inside a system, rather than from outside. Speculative approaches make it possible
for subjective interpretation to have a role in shaping the processes, not just the
structures, of digital humanities. When this occurs, outcomes go beyond descriptive,
generative, or predictive approaches to become speculative. New knowledge can be
created.
These are big claims. Can they be substantiated?
Temporal modelling (Bethany Nowviskie)
Temporal Modelling is a time machine for humanities computing. Not only does
it take time and the temporal relations inherent in humanities data as its computational
and aesthetic domain, enabling the production and manipulation of elaborate,
subjectively-inflected timelines, but it also allows its users to intervene in and alter the
conventional interpretive sequence of visual thinking in digital humanities.
The Temporal Modelling environment, under ongoing development at SpecLab
(University of Virginia), embodies a reversal of the increasingly-familiar practice of
generating visualizations algorithmically from marked or structured data, data that has
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already been modelled and made to conform to a logical system. The aesthetic
provocations Johanna Drucker describes are most typically understood to exist at the
edges or termini of humanities computing projects. These are the graphs and charts we
generate from large bodies of data according to strict, pre-defined procedures for
knowledge representation, and which often do enchant us with their ability to reveal
hidden patterns and augment our understanding of encoded material. They are, however,
fundamentally static and (as they depend on structured data and defined constraints)
predictable, and we are hard-pressed to argue that they instantiate any truly new
perspective on the data they reflect. Why, given the fresh possibilities for graphesis the
computer affords, should we be content with an after-the-fact analysis of algorithmically-
produced representations alone? Temporal Modelling suggests a new ordering of
aesthetic provocation, algorithmic process, and hermeneutic understanding in the work of
digital humanities, a methodological reversal which makes visualization a procedure
rather than a product and integrates interpretation into digitization in a concrete way.
How concrete? The Temporal Modelling tools incorporate an intuitive kind of
sketching -- within a loosely constrained but highly defined visual environment -- into the
earliest phases of content modelling, thereby letting visualization drive the intellectual
work of data organization and interpretation in the context of temporal relations.1
Aesthetic provocation becomes dynamic, part of a complex dialogue in which the user is
required to respond to visualizations in kind. Response in kind, that is, in the visual
language of the Temporal Modelling toolset, opens up new ways of thinking about digital
objects, about the relation of image to information, and about the subjective position of
1
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any interpreter within a seemingly logical or analytic system. Our chief innovation is the
translation of user gestures and image-orderings that arise from this iterative dialogue
into an accurate and expressive XML schema, which can be exported to other systems,
transformed using XSLT, and even employed as a document type definition (DTD) in
conventional data-markup practices. The sketching or composition environment in which
this rich data capture takes place (the Temporal Modelling PlaySpace) is closely wedded
to a sister-environment, the DisplaySpace. There, we provide a set of filters and
interactive tools for the manipulation and display of more familiar, algorithmically-
generated visualizations, derivative from PlaySpace schemata or the already-encoded
data structures of established humanities computing projects. Like the PlaySpace,
though, the Temporal Modelling DisplaySpace emphasizes the flux and subjectivity
common to both our human perception of time and our facility for interpretation in the
humanities. We have not rejected display in favor of the playful engagement our
composition environment fosters; instead, we hope to show that a new, procedural
understanding of graphic knowledge enhances and even transfigures visualization in the
older modes.
Our work in building the PlaySpace, with which we began the project in the
Summer of 2001 and which now nears completion, has required a constant articulation of
its distinction from the DisplaySpace -- the implementation of which forms the next
phase of Temporal Modelling. What quality of appearance or use distinguishes a display
tool from an editing tool? At their heart, the mechanisms and processes of the PlaySpace
are bound up in: the positioning of temporal objects (such as events, intervals, and points
in time) on the axis of a timeline; the labelling of those objects using text, color, size, and
25
quality; the relation of objects to specific temporal granularities (the standards by which
we mark hours, seasons, aeons); and, in complex interaction, the relation of objects to
each other. Each of these interpretive actions -- the specification of objects and
orderings, their explication and interrelation -- additionally involves a practice we
designate inflection. Inflection is the graphic manifestation of subjective and interpretive
positioning toward a temporal object or (in a sometimes startling display of warping and
adjustment) to a region of time. This positioning can be on the part of the prime
interpreter, the user of the PlaySpace, or inflections can be employed to represent and
theorize external subjectivities: the inferred interpretive standpoint of a character in a
work of fiction, for instance, or of an historical figure, movement, or Zeitgeist. The
energies of the PlaySpace are all bound up in enabling understanding through iterative
visual construction in an editing environment that implies infinite visual breadth and
depth. In contrast, the DisplaySpace channels energy into iterative visual reflection by
providing a responsive, richly-layered surface in which subjectivity and inflection in
temporal relations are not fashioned but may be reconfigured.
I want to focus here on some specific qualities and tools of Temporal Modelling,
especially as they relate to the embeddedness of subjectivity, uncertainty, and
interpretation in every act of representation, which we take as a special province of
speculative computing. Our very process of design self-consciously embodies this
orientation toward information and software engineering. We make every effort to work
from imagery as much as from ontology, coupling our research efforts in the philosophy
and data-driven classification of temporal relations with the intuitive and experimental
work of artists of whom we asked questions such as: "What does a slow day look like?"
26
or "How might you paint anticipation or regret?" As our underlying architecture became
more stable and we began to assemble a preliminary notation system for temporal objects
and inflections, we made a practice of asking of each sketch we floated, "What does this
imply?" and "What relationships might it express?" No visual impulse was dismissed out
of hand; instead, we retained each evocative image, frequently finding use for it later,
when our iterative process of development had revealed more about its implications in
context.
In this way, the necessity of a special feature of the Temporal Modelling Project
was impressed on us: a capacity for expansion and adjustment. The objects, actions, and
relations defined by our schemata and programming are not married inextricably with
certain graphics and on-screen animations or display modes. Just as we have provided
tools for captioning and coloring (and the ability to regularize custom-made systems with
legends and labels), we have also made possible the upload and substitution of user-made
standard vector (SVG) graphics for the generic notation systems we've devised. This is
more than mere window-dressing. Our intense methodological emphasis on the
importance of visual understanding allows the substitution of a single set of graphics
(representing inflections for, say, mood or foreshadowing) to alter radically the
statements made possible by Temporal Modelling's loose grammar. Users are invited to
intervene in the interpretive processes enabled by our tool almost at its root level.
A similar sensibility governs the output of a session in the PlaySpace
environment. PlaySpace visualizations consist of objects and inflections in relation to
each other and (optionally) to the metric of one or more temporal axes. The editing
process involves the placement and manipulation of these graphics on a series of user-
27
generated, transparent layers, which enable groupings and operations on groups (such as
zooms, granularity adjustments, panning and positioning, simple overlays, and changes in
intensity or alpha-value) meant to enhance experimentation and iterative information
design inside the visual field. When the user is satisfied that a particular on-screen
configuration represents an understanding of his data worth preserving, he may elect to
save his work as a model. This means that the PlaySpace will remember both the
positioning of graphic notations on-screen and the underlying data model (in the form of
an XML schema) that these positions express. This data model can then be exported and
used elsewhere or even edited outside the PlaySpace and uploaded again for visual
application. Most interesting is the way in which transparent editing layers function in
the definition of PlaySpace models. The process of saving a model requires that the user
identify those layers belonging to a particular, nameable interpretation of his material.
This means that a single PlaySpace session (which can support the creation of as many
layers as hardware limitations make feasible) might embed dozens of different
interpretive models: some of which are radical departures from a norm; some of which
differ from each other by a small, yet significant, margin; and some of which are old
friends, imported into the PlaySpace from past sessions, from collections of instructional
models representing conventional understandings of history or fiction, or from the efforts
of colleagues working in collaboration on research problems in time and temporal
relations. A model is an interpretive expression of a particular dataset. More
importantly, it is what the interpreter says it is at any given point in time. We find the
flexibility inherent in this mode of operation akin to the intuitive and analytical work of
the traditional humanities at its best.
28
Our policies of welcoming (and anticipating) the upload of user-designed graphic
notation and of enforcing the formalization of interpretive models in the loosest terms
possible are examples of Temporal Modelling's encouragement of hermeneutic practice
in computational contexts. In some sense, this practice is still external to the visual
environment we have built, even as it forms an integral part of the methodology
Temporal Modelling is designed to reinforce. I wish to close here with a description of a
new and exciting tool for encoding interpretation and subjectivity within the designed
Temporal Modelling environment: a mechanism we call the nowslider.
Nowsliding is a neologism for a practice all of us do constantly -- on which, in
fact, our understanding of ourselves and our lives depends. Nowsliding is the subjective
positioning of the self along a temporal axis and in relation to the points, events,
intervals, and inflections through which we classify experience and make make time
meaningful. You nowslide when you picture your world at the present moment and,
some ticks of the clock later, again at another ever-evolving present. You nowslide, too,
when you imagine and project the future or interpret and recall the past. Our toolset
allows a graphic literalization of this subjective positioning and temporal imagining, in
the shape of configurable, evolving timelines whose content and form at any given
"moment" are dependent on the position of a sliding icon, representative of the subjective
viewpoint. Multiple independent or interdependent points of view are possible within the
context of a single set of data, and the visual quality of nowsliding may be specified in
the construction of a particular model.
At present, two display modes for the nowslider are in development. The first is a
catastrophic mode, in which new axial iterations (or imagined past- and future-lines)
29
spring in a tree structure from well-defined instances on a primary temporal axis. In this
way, PlaySpace users can express the human tendency to re-evalute the past or make
predictions about the future in the face of sudden, perspective-altering events. New
subjective positions on the primary axis of time (and new happenings) can provoke more
iterations, which do not supplant past imaginings or interpretations, but rather co-exist
with them, attached as they are to a different temporal locus. In this way, timelines are
made to bristle with possibility, while still preserving a distinct chronology and single
path. Our nowsliders also function in a continuous mode -- distinct from catastrophism --
in which past and future iterations fade in and out, change in position or quality, appear
or disappear, all within the primary axis of the subjective viewpoint. No new lines are
spawned; instead, this mode presents time as a continuum of interpretation, in which past
and present are in constant flux and their shape and very content are dependent on the
interpretive pressure of the now.
Our taking of temporal subjectivity and the shaping force of interpretation as the
content and over-arching theme of the PlaySpace and DisplaySpace environments we
have built is meant to reinforce the goal of the Temporal Modelling tools, and by
extension, of speculative computing. Our goal is to place the hermeneut inside a visual
and algorithmic system, where his or her very presence alters an otherwise mechanistic
process at the quantum level. Humanists are already skilled at the abstract classification
and encoding that data modelling requires. We understand algorithmic work and can
appreciate the transformative and revelatory power of visual and structural deformance.
We at least think we know what to do with a picture or a graph. What we haven't yet
tried in a rigorous and systematic way is the injection of the subjective positioning any
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act of interpretation both requires and embodies into a computational, self-consciously
visual environment. If speculative computing has a contribution to make to the methods
and outcomes of digital humanities, this is it.
Johanna Drucker
Bethany Nowviskie
see [PATACRITICISM] see also [HOW COMPUTERS WORK].
References for Further Reading
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Bürger, P. (1998). Mallarmé. In M. Kelly (Ed). Encyclopedia.of Aesthetics. Oxford, UK,
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Dunn, D. (1992) (Ed). Pioneers of Electronic Art. Santa Fe: Ars Electronica and The
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Lister, M. (Ed.), (1995). The Photographic Image in Digital Culture. London, UK and
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Renear, A. (1997). Out of Praxis: Three (Meta) Theories of Textuality. In K. Sutherland
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Ritchin, F. (1990). In Our Own Image. NY: Aperture.
Shanken, E. (n.d.). The House that Jack Built. http://www.duke.edu/~giftwrap/
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Sutherland, K. (Ed.). (1997). Electronic Text. Oxford, UK: Oxford, Clarendon Press.
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parallelization and optimization in DSM multiprocessors. Proceedings of the 1st
Workshop on Parallel Computing for Irregular Applications, 26
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/article/zhang99hardware.html
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Temporal Modelling is freely available at http://www.speculativecomputing.org , and is
delivered to the Web using XML-enabled Macromedia Flash MX and Zope, an object-
oriented open-source application server.
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