[…] The Ontology of Digital Data. Digital data is formless, plastic and leveling. Stored as binary bits, it has no form as such. As Justin Clemens and I have written (2010), ‘Data is data. Data is absolutely not a phenomenological thing. It cannot be experienced as such, like Aristotelian prime matter. Unlike Aristotelian prime matter, however, we can manipulate data with ease.’ The fundamentally plastic nature of digital data is what allows us to manipulate it, but until we do manipulate it – until we modulate it into some kind of display register – any set of digital data is indistinguishable from any other set of digital data, until modulated into a display register, and this is the leveling nature of digital data. All information is reduced to an indistinguishable set of binary bits. To illustrate this, consider a digital image, such as may have been taken by a digital camera of a material scene. Once this visual information is stored as digital data, it can then be opened in, for example, a sound editing program and played as sound. It could equally be used as input to determine a height-map in a realtime 3D environment. The point is that once it is stored as digital data, it loses any determining connection with its semantic source. Therefore, as I said above, parameters must be rigorously established that govern how any given digital data is de- and re-modulated. The notion of protocols or standardised processes that abound in the contemporary technical sphere (such as govern the internet, image compression, audio reproduction and so on) are expressions of this codification of parameters – both sides of a modulation exchange agree to adhere to a set of parameters in order that the intended result is achieved. Naturally, once protocols are required, questions of intentionality, ideology and cultural convention arise. […] (from “Affect and the Medium of Digital Data”, by Adam Nash, The FibreCulture Journal, 2012)
http://twentyone.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-148-affect-and-the-medium-of-digital-data/
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