towards critical visualities of the web/software

This week's reading hit a nerve, or more appropriately, tapped into a rhizome of thoughts that I've been following since I first confronted the question of "software studies" in Braxton Soderman's wonderful seminar on code, software, and serious games last year. In that seminar, we engaged a lot of the same questions that Langlois is struggling with here, namely, how does the idea of meaning change when it is constructed in digital environments. In particular, I can remember quite a long discussion of Kittler's contention that "there is no software" only "signifiers in voltage differences."

Like Langlois, a lot of people felt this was an oversimplification, and in any case, Kittler's abstracting ignores the visual 'packaging' of the web, a concept that Langlois rightly stresses as essential for engaging the question of meaning-making in digital media. Towards that point, we might take Langlois statement that "the computer is not simply a transmission device, but also a device for representation" (47) as a charge for a further exploration into the aesthetics of digital informatics, and the ways in which the visual ("representational" layer) of the web cannot be black boxed or ignored, simply because it represents the most superficial layer of the user's experience. Instead, we must stress "The agency of software" as "not only the actor with which users have to interact but also the mediator that defines the conditions and cultural richness of these interactions" (48).

Langlois' Critical Visuality

I think it makes sense to start within Langlois' text and engage the ways in which she stresses certain visual schemas and angles to approaching visual signification witinh "technoculture." Two areas to start looking at, would be her section on "Technologies of the Web and the Question of Representation" (pp. 47 -51) and her discussion of "visual regimes" of the web, traced out in her introduction (pp. 8-13) alongside her analysis of webstalker and IssueCrawler.

In that first (introductory) section, where the arguement for critical engagements of the web visualities is first made, Langlois stresses the necessity of "alternative ways of exploring the potential of the Web through the creation of alternative modes of surfing" (9). The examples given, WebStalker and IssueCrawler, "represent(s) a first attempt to overcome the page metaphor and to represent Web browsing in spatial terms, where URLs are represented as circles and hyperlinks as lines, with text and images collected in a separate window" (9).

Why is this important? It must be because it is a change only in the top layer (to use Langlois' three tiered model of the web p. 52) of the web's construction. The schematic views of WebStalker for instance do not require new code or hardware, they simply reinterpret existing codes, using existing hardwares. So the opportunity for this experimental, critical visuality, demonstrates the fact that changes in one strata of web development do not necessarily impact other strata. That said, even this seemingly simple visual reintrepretation of the "lower" layers of web code and computer hardware, posit a powerful conclusion, that there is no one way to percieve this information, and the existing styles cannot be naturalized or essentialized. Like experimental film techniques then, the avant-garde visualities of WebStalker and IssueCrawler show us something new about already existing information, and make the web user think about how s/he views information in addition to what information is shown.

There is also the question of the persistence of the "page metaphor." Like Langlois, I have argued against the continued persistence of the page as visual schema in web culture, and like Matthew Fuller, I've worked with digital media designers to create new schemes for connecting/viewing and therefore understanding certain collections of data. Anecdotally, I worked at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society this summer, and was charged with the task of taking a vast set of multimeida information for a tenth anniversary conference, and putting it all together in a meaningful way. The Center being oriented towards new media, I had a lot of freedom, and immediately I knew that the page metaphor simply could not work. The media was far too overlapping (or "imbricated" as Langlois likes to say) to be broken apart into different cells of discrete data. I needed a way to bring things together, not pull them apart (which is inherent in the idea of the page, alongside it's insistence of linear, right to left, progression). So I became involved with a group that produced single-browser windows with multiplicitious networks, and we worked all summer to produce what the designer's would call a "knowledge space" where videos, blog posts, tweets, and audio recordings could be played without leaving the browser window. I think this worked to overcome the limits of traditional "code politics" because it literally had to be re-coded, not simply re-intrepreted (12). It also hacked "the technodiscursive and technocultural rules that create specific flows of content" to produce new flows, whose directionalities are much harder to determine, creating a new sense of perusing freedom on the part of the user (10).

It looks a lot like IssueCrawler, you can check it out here.

From Fuller's art/web-browser, to his theory of "sensorium" Langlois follows the lead of visual culture to engage with the idea of meaning being deeply embedded in how one sees (50). Langlois follows Manovich, to engage the soviet constructivist traditions possibly embedded in contemporary web browsing scopic regimes, but also engage with Shields' "bricolage
of digital images, text, and other elements linked together by hypertext references” (51). In both cases, the heterogeneity of the web browser is key. The elements of the web cannot be broken down beyond certain multimedia objects. They cannot, for instance, be all reduced to language (text) though ironically, they are of course reduced substantially on the side of code, and hardware. The essential differentiation here, is that the computer can think of the images as binary code, and the browser can think of it as html, but the user must see it as a jpeg image, or it's rendering correctly.

further critical visualities

It would be healthy, I imagine, to read Crary and his techniques of the observer in light of the questions raised by langlois' critical visualities of the web browser. It could be healthy to read perspective as symbolic form, and other theories of visuality that have been produced for art history, theories on painting, and questions of photography (especially the concepts of post-biology and digital photography). All of these texts, would not doubt, be wonderful to hybridize like Langlois does so capably with her many sources, towards some transcendent critical visuality.

But I can already see how these will not be adequate to assess what kind of things are going on in web browsers, and flash interfaces. No, considering perspective will surely be helpful, but it will also be a misdirection, for as sure as the web browser does invite a certain sense of depth, it also requires a literacy that painting could never posses, nor art historical theory could ever approach. Namely, the concept of the click, and what is clickable (a sort of cyber-tactility) and what is simply cyber-surface.

That's where I would wander towards in another 1000 words. In this page that is a blog that is an irony I cannot shake.

I wonder how you can compose a text in non-page space?