The Postdigital Membrane: Imagination, Technology and Desire (review)

During Word War II German scientists found themselves in a bit of a predicament when they captured electronic equipment from the British. Some of the equipment they captured had been planted by British intelligence and its complex circuitry did not actually do anything. However, since they did not know which was which, they had to examine everything rather carefully. The Postdigital Membrane poses some similar difficulties for the reader. For example, the authors posit an analogy between the cellular biological membrane and a metaphorical membrane, which like its biological counterpart gives rise to complex phenomena. Such an analogy is sustainable, were one to compare the entropic changes within a living cell and within a living city. In both cases, to use Schrödinger's view, cell and city maintain themselves by sucking order from their environment.

Although the book has references both to Schrödinger and to entropy, such a straightforward analogy is never made and indeed much of the book evokes the surrealism of Last Year in Marienbad combined with the dialogue of My Dinner with Andre. Fostering this latter image is the imaginary empty seat for the discursive reader at the table in the café where the authors had their discussions.

As the title suggests, the book is rich in metaphor, especially of the mixed kind that one was encouraged to avoid by English teachers, who liked to nip that kind of thing in the bud, should one happen to float past. The authors argue that "the intellectual restrictions of the digital paradigm are now becoming unavoidable, not least since it insists on the reduction of continuous reality into discrete binary units." However, according to quantum theory, referred to elsewhere in the book in the context of the now resolved entangled-photon controversy (and, yes, Einstein was wrong), matter at the subatomic level matter is not continuous nor is even time continuous when one gets down to very small intervals. Reality is at a fundamental level quite lumpy. If one objects that the digitization of information is a distortion of continuous reality, then why not object also to the lack of continuity of moving images projected at 18 frames per second?

Besides, the binary restrictions alluded to are bits of a red herring, as the argument ignores the exponential terms in the equation. If one imagines one box where 0 stands for white and 1 for black, one box could specify only black or white. With eight boxes there are 2⁸ = 256 combinations that could specify 254 intermediate shades of grey. With 32 boxes there would be 232 or over 4 million shades of grey, so many that the human eye would be unable to distinguish between most of them. Indeed much of what we know of the movement of cellular membranes and organelles inside living cells in real time relies on video-enhanced contrast microscopy to make exactly such distinctions. The technique uses special video cameras that can detect these minute differences in contrast as well as computers to digitally refine the images and make them visible to our less discriminating senses. Thus, rather than restricting our perceptions, digital reality has expanded them by opening up new realms to our senses and to our imagination.

The book's subtitle, "Imagination, Technology and Desire," is based on the notion that imagination begets human desire that begets technology, which in a recursive fashion begets further desire. Recursion is an interesting topic, one that can truly be said to be of mythic proportions. Recursion was explored rather thoroughly by Douglas Hofstadter in his work on Gödel, Escher and Bach. While the works of the three disparate artists discussed by Hofstadter can be viewed as intrinsically recursive, the three strands of The Postdigital Membrane are not. They had recursion thrust upon them and doubtless a Buddhist would point to the eight-fold path as the solution to this recursive bane of imagination, desire and technology.

Recursion...