Digital Magic

Jenny Weight
RMIT University, Melbourne
E-mail: geniwate@ozemail.com.au
Key features: References; Notes; Author Details

All the nodes in this issue:

Editorial
Bibliography of Hypertext Criticism

Mez Breeze

Julianne Chatelain Richard E. Higgason Deena Larsen Bill Marsh Adrian Miles Jenny Weight

Recall Prospero, stranded on his island in the middle of the ocean (Shakespeare 1983). Over this island he exerts total power. He can even bring storms to the nearby sea. However, his magical powers go no further than command of the local spirits. The total universe is only marginally influenced by his power.

Prospero demonstrates Landow's (1997: 37) insight that "Western culture imagined quasi-magical entrances to a networked reality long before the development of computing technology". However, many more of us now possess versions of Prospero's island thanks to digital technology. These islands are signified by a name/address that starts 'http://'. We can visit other islands but our apparently magical powers mostly end at the borders of our own domain.

Electronic literature [1] and digital art exist within distributed networks of digital information. In the popular culture interpretations of these networks, digital information systems are often described as 'virtual reality', which is opposed to the 'real' (materially extended) world. Digital extremists openly worship the magicality of digital information [2]. This strand of popular thought is current to a less extreme degree in the marketing of the digital [3] and even some academic analyses of digital information (see footnote 3 to my node on Digital Art Criticism) implicitly portray digital information (and therefore digital art) as magical [4].

However, as users and creators of digital information, most of us don't completely believe our own magic. To those of us who are neither programmers nor network administrators, digital information is ambiguous: at once magical and scientific. Technical and scientific explanations written in unnatural language (code and formulae) are impenetrably abstract. Prospero is the ultimate programmer, an example to those of us who struggle with digital information and its apparent reducibility to code. We cannot read his 'book'.

Consequently, as Stivers (2001) comments about other 'magical' phenomena that infest popular culture, we are unable to decide what ontological status to grant digital information [4]. It does not seem to belong to the realm of objects and subjects, relations that humans reify in natural language.

Notes

[1] 'Literature' is a contested term in online contexts. For example, the trAce Incubation 2 conference committee consciously avoided using the term. The reasons are various: online art forms are not easily divisible according to non-digital art categories and the means of publication, distribution and production problematise romantic and modernist concepts of the author and the capitalistic book publishing industry. I prefer to use a more generic term, 'digital art'.

[2] See Stivers on digital extremists, for example technopagans like Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth who perceive the computer to be a "magic machine". The computer is the final and most powerful kind of magic; it recapitulates all earlier forms. Dery notes that technopagans locate spirituality in the computer. The computer creates a universe of information and in so doing promotes a mystical identification with itself. Its devotees become connoisseurs of information that at a certain level of ingestion provokes ecstasy. Technopagans are the high priests of the cult which believes that the universe and its deities are in the computer (Stivers 2001: 5).

[3] Three examples from advertising by-lines in my local newspaper which communicate the magical nature of digital technologies:

From software selling to career choosing, the digital has a magical effect.

[4] Stivers (2001: 108) believes that we are resorting to an epistemology of magic because of the changed values we attach to language, which has become less 'in the service of creating and renewing symbolic meaning' and more in the service of numbers and abstraction. Consequently: "We increasingly live in a materialistic world, for abstract words and numbers end up functioning like things. We vacillate back and forth between the abstract and the materialistic. Only the symbolic capacity of language can help us create an integrated concrete existence." A discontinuity exists between natural language and numbers (from which we can perhaps extrapolate to include programming languages). An effect of abstract words and numbers on the speakers of natural languages is to alienate them from their ability to 'integrate their experiences' (p. 108) and therefore 'we are susceptible to magical practices' (p. 108).

References

Landow, G. P. (1997) Hypertext 2.0: the Convergence of Contemporary Critical Ttheory and Technology (Baltimore, MD:  The Johns Hopkins University Press)

Shakespeare, W. (1983) The Complete Works (London: Regent Books)

Stivers, R. (2001) Technology as Magic - the Triumph of the Irrational (New York: Continuum)