Magnitude: The Aesthetics of Digital Scale

Scale is an equation of relation between zero and infinity. Contemplating scale, then, requires one to volley the mind between the extremely small and the extremely large, a process that often ends in imaginative failure—what AMITAV GHOSH calls a "derangement" of mind.¹ This dossier orients attention to the ways in which technologies of scale lead us out of our minds by forcing a reckoning between the mind and the unthinkable, immeasurable, impossible, and imperceptible. Here, technologies of scale draw the mind to encounter the space beyond itself, warp epistemology, fracture the senses. The concept of digital magnitude stages a felt contradiction in terms of our relation to information. On the one hand, there is our seemingly unlimited access to knowledge, in the sense that the massive amount of data available to us in the early twenty-first century is mappable, searchable, navigable, and downloadable. Digital magnitude is experienced not only as overwhelming but also as controllable and tameable, with us, as users, positioned at its center.

On the other hand, we realize that all this data can never be fully available to us, in that our capacity to read, view, synthesize, and comprehend remains limited by our puny brains and our fragmented attention—or more generously, by constrictions on the time it would take for us to process all that data. Digital magnitude thus refers to not only our sense of our incapacity to traverse the far reaches of space but our incapacity to grasp the measure of existing knowledge, the reach of geological history, the depths of human experience, and the unknowability of the unconscious in the face of the apparent immediacy of information via touch-screen access. While we regularly utilize search engines, the extended architectures of the internet feel "opaque," "hardly navigable in their immensity and … our ability to comprehend them in their 'totality.'"²

Indeed, the spatial component (vast) in relation to the temporal component (fast) associated with the contemporary magnitude of digital information obscures the amount of time it takes for us to intellectually, experientially, and emotionally process data into something akin to relevant knowledge. Such experiences highlight a shifting human relationship to time and space that has inspired questions of how we now know the world—and how we can act in that world—through aesthetic and rhetorical forms.

In this dossier, we explore more familiar epistemological forms like the didactic online listicle and the data visualization, as well as through unexpected forms like birds, microbes, and film. Gloria Kim analyzes how data visualizations of global microbial movement and mutation require an indexing of processes occurring across scales impossible to behold, thereby fracturing loci of perception. Aubrey Anable restores a scale politics to contemporary interpretation and critique by examining the dynamics of surface and depth, as well as of informatics overload, overwhelm, and opacity as they reforge epistemological capacities. Tess Takahashi examines the magnitude of big data through analog artworks that reconcile the incomprehensibility of planetary scale and nuclear contamination with the measure of human bodies. Together, these essays examine contemporary aesthetic forms that organize human experience under conditions of digital magnitude.

—Tess Takahashi and Gloria Kim