![]() ![]() Digitally encoded instructions pass through the computer’s hardware and, like magic, they appear on our screens as surface effects. Our devices function: that is all we know. It is nothing more than an outer shell, and we experience its inner processes at a distant remove. But the computer, which lacks this ‘emblematic or visual power’, resists such idolatry. Consider the ‘kinetic energy’ of Futurist sculpture, or the ‘mimetic idolatry’ of Diego Rivera’s thundering pistons. ![]() Turbines and steam engines, of course, posses a certain visual power. What are we to make of this machine, the computer? Indeed, what is this device, whose operations are forever obscured behind its slim outer casing? Perhaps this is what the literary critic Fredric Jameson meant when, in 1991, he wrote that our digital technology does not possess the same capacity for representation as the older, analogue machines. ![]()
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