Digital Materiality

I have recently read with interest a paper by Wendy Griswold, Gemma Mangione and Terence McDonnell, titled 'Objects, Words and Bodies in Space: Bringing Materiality into Cultural Analysis', published in Qualitative Sociology 36:4 (2013). The article feeds into the current, exciting trend toward a re-examination of materiality and affordances, as envisioned by Actor-Network Theory (see, among many, Latour (2005)) and, even more recently, Object-Oriented Ontology (Harman, 2011). These frameworks are applied (the second one only implicitly) by the authors to the museum context, arguing that sociology has, so far, overemphasised readings of the museum experience as the browsing of 'cognitive categories ordering the social world' (Griswold et al, 2013), leaving unexplored the material encounter with the object. In the process, they propose three 'measurements' - distance, legibility and orientation - that, considered collectively, would help us understand the visitor-object relationship as an encounter regimented by mutual manipulation and affordances, rather than a mere 'reading' of cultural/social items.

While, at least in concept and underlying philosophy, this renewed interest toward the materiality of objects is alerady well practised in museums, mostly in the two-pronged diatribe 'museum as heritage vs. museum as educator' and 'real thing vs. reproductions', what I found particularly interesting are the logical consequences that can be extracted from the essay. The authors' examples and discussed cases are all located in the physical museum, dealing specifically with the parameters of a human body interacting with tangible, solid artifacts; yet, the theoretical framework they apply remains, at least in abstract, surprisingly open to discussion of the digital encounter with the online artwork as also potentially rooted in materiality and, to a measure, physicality. This aspect is not explored at all by the authors who, rather conventionally, assume materiality to be tied to the material world of the museum's physical structure and archives; nonetheless, I think It would be very interesting to see if the online museum context, with due differences, could allow a similarly 'material' and 'embodied' encounter with the art work.

It seems highly unlikely that the level of material immersion allowed by a screen could ever match the jouissance or, rather, the abjection engendered by certain physical experiences - such as the one Griswold et al. describe in conjunction with a Bruce Nauman environment/installation (albeit 'shock video reaction' YouTube clips seem to suggest otherwise). Nonetheless, it is also a mistake to assume that the online domain, experienced through currently widely-available peripherics, is divorced from materiality and material encounters (I am consciously leaving aside VR and AR for the moment). On one hand, the study of affordances and operations undetaken by Manovich (2013) and many others suggests that acting and being acted upon is an actual possibility even through removed software and peripherics; to this, we can add as a rationale the many studies that seek to emphasise the continuum between the digital experience and the physical, from a philosophical viewpoint if not a mechanical one.

The question is, then, would experience of a digital Bruce Nauman Green Light Corridor replicate real-world materiality through distance, legibility and orientation; would it preclude them; or would it engender a different kind of materiality, which nonetheless can be argued in terms of the three previous parameters, and through Actor-Network theory? First, we would surely need to emphasise the inherently physical experience of exploring, for example, even a rudimentary Quicktime tour of an hypothetical Nauman installation: the peripherals' level of responsiveness, lag, pixelation, our distance and position relative to the screen and environment surrounding the screen, all contribute to an overall experience that could be argued as possessing measurable parameters of distance, legibility and orientation - and not exclusively with regard to the screen surface. We are also likely to not simply absorb these parameters, but instead react to them appropriately (by switching positions, cursing the screen, getting fed up), therefore slipping into an Actor-Network kind of relationship. Surely it is unlikely, given current widespread means, to attain (at least with artwork reproductions) a level of immersion that deletes interface affordances, as much as it is unlikely that we'd passively accept affordances limitations without resorting to solutions - just as we would do in the physical installation.

One case in point, for me, that shows how (a certain, but analogous kind of) materiality is inherent even within digital reproductions is the 'megapixel' view of Google Art Project. As we move our cursor or finger around the screen, trying to match the enlarged image to the little thumbnail on the side, straining eyes and stretching our neck, we experience the reproduction as located within a frame of affordances and interfaces, possessing a varied degree of legibility, and orientated in a certain way relative to our proprioception - even more as devices become mobile and portable.

As technologies evolve, materiality is likely to become more and more a factor in our experience of digital reproductions: nonetheless VR devices will not costitute the breakthrough of materiality and encounter in a disembodied, literally virtual realm behind the screen. Even current experiences of art that some would define as 'virtual' have their peculiar tangibility, materiality and relational factors. More research on the ontological characteristics of digital art reproductions would be a good starting point for supporting such a line of thinking, resolving the excess of cognitive emphasis that Griswold at el. diagnosed in research on the museum experience, and that surely also plagues research into the digital and the online.

- Harman, Graham. The quadruple object. John Hunt Publishing, 2011.

- Latour, Bruno. "Reassembling the social-an introduction to actor-network-theory." Reassembling the Social-An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, by Bruno Latour, pp. 316. Foreword by Bruno Latour. Oxford University Press, Sep 2005.
- Manovich, Lev. Software takes command. Vol. 5. A&C Black, 2013.