A box on your desk, 1997
1. What is a computer?
2. A Space Without Space
3. In Your Interface
4. Unofficial Intelligence
First Broadcast : Radio Eye : ABC Radio National : March 6 – 27 1999
A Box on your Desk
Sophea Lerner playfully explores our relationship with
that noisy grey object in the corner.
Sound engineer John Jacobs
Producer Sophea Lerner
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A Box on your Desk
Four Pieces of Radio about Computers and Computing by Sophea Lerner
The synopses below are loose summations of the main arguments of each programme.
1. What is a computer?
This episode examines this question from several perspectives; abstract,
physical and social; starting from the proposition that a computer is a
box on your desk and then looking at what else it might be.
From a computer science perspective a computer typically comprises the
basics an input mechanism a central processing unit and an output
mechanism and then peripherally; memory and storage devices. The
processing is conducted via boolean logic circuits that deal entirely in
binary states, and the process of digitisation, of rendering data into
binary numbers is fundamental to the range of input devices that
computers employ. Even with simple numbers this process is an
abstraction from the ten fingered basis of base ten digits. This
numerical system also resonates with other more relative binarisms such
as truth and falsehood that pervade our culture. The computer is an
abstract machine that processes input and produces output. Computers
started as a way of computing, of doing sums, they belong to a genre of
abstract representations where symbols represent numbers and relations
in a certain way.
From a material point of view computers are far from abstract, they are
comprised of physical hardware that is manufactured in particular ways.
What would a recipe for computers be like? Starting from basics,
extracting the silicon from the sand, making silicon wafers in an oven,
encasing them in plastic with little mettle legs to fit into circuit
boards, attaching input and out put devices; keyboard mouse monitor, and
memory and storage devices, a spinning hard disk…
Another way to look at computing is as a process that happens in a
social setting over time. Computers have a whole lot of grunt to chew
through lots of numbers quickly, but what they are, and what computing
means, is defined by the context in which it used. This way of looking
at computers produces very different kinds of software and applications
to the abstract machine model of traditional computer science and it
brings into question the dominance of the box on your desk as the
paradigm of what computers are.
From another point of view the image of the computer as a particular
kind of object, as a box on your desk, may be so powerfully embedded in
the cultural imaginary as the social meaning of �computer�, that the
proliferation of other kinds of computing devices may not be seen as
computing in the same way…
2. A Space without Space
The popular imagery surrounding cyberspace is of a disembodied zooming
through layered digital space of flying weightless and unencumbered
through the datasphere. This rhetoric is very misleading, as no kind of
interaction can take place, virtually or otherwise, without being
embodied somewhere. In fact the impact of these technologies on the body
is a major issue in interface design.
Competing definitions of virtual space are all in some way contingent on
perceptions of actual space. A useful working definition of virtual
space could be that it is the space where interactions not based in your
local physical space can take place, a basis for establishing shared
meaning in order to communicate with people not in the same physical
space.
Computer spaces can also be viewed as analogous to other kinds of
information spaces, akin to the networks of meaning with which we imbue
physical spaces in to traverse or inhabit them in various ways.
Whilst digital media are challenging what were once taken to be obvious
boundaries between the real and the imaginary people acting in digital
space are still acting from embodied states. Materiality and meaning are
tied together.
On another level the rhetoric of immateriality around the virtual serves
to obscure the huge amount of activity and technology which sustains it.
Whilst the material affordances of digital media are different to their
predecessors they not immaterial. What this rhetoric achieves, by
obscuring the hardware, is to obscure simultaneously the exploitative
conditions under which a lot of that hardware is produced and the
exclusion zone created by the material basis for the internet – more
cash more bandwidth.
3. In your Interface
Currently computer interfaces are dominated by screens and keyboards and
sound largely absent. This mode of interaction is in many ways congruent
with the abstract symbolic representation that the present computing
paradigm relies on.
The issue of visual/text overload is leading to developments in the use
of everyday sounds for conveying general awareness information. The
spacial properties of sound, however, tend to disrupt the screen based
illusion of a portal onto another world and instead makes the virtual
co-exist in the physical space. When the virtual ceases to be contained
by the box on your desk this box begins to lose its grip as a defining
form of what computing means.
Sound in the interface, similarly the sound of the computer humming
itself, affects your nervous system directly; bypassing to a certain
extent the rational cognitive apparatus traditionally addressed by the
computers symbolic representations and addressing a more bodily locus of
knowing things.
4. Unofficial Intelligence
The search for artificial intelligence the stakes are high for competing
definitions of human cognition. Early in the history of computing there
was a desire to study human intelligence using the model of input,
output and information processing as well as a preoccupation with
attributing intelligence and agency to machines.
This was made possible by delimiting the definitions of intelligence as
abstract disembodied and mental This rationalist conception of
intelligence projected onto machines then obscures the fundamental
differences between humans and machines.
Studies of human cognition have shown the information processing
metaphor to be inadequate and the useful differences between humans and
machines can only be recognised by acknowledging the embodied nature of
knowing that is tied into actual materials and processes not just to
acquisition of rules and propositions.
Extracted from longer program notes.