p.218:

Lucy is an invitation to loosen our grip on the human subject, not merely through consciousness of radically nonhuman, multiscalar ecology, but additionally through an openness to reconceiving subjectivity as existing between scales, an openness to dissociation, to inhabiting the loop in which scalar processes compose the subjects that compose scales that compose new subjects."

#scale #MediaTheory #DigitalLife

p.217:

"Far from the neoliberal dream of unfettered, resource-­free production, this is a messy, sticky process; messy because it admits of no central control, and sticky because everything that is created incorporates the creator(s) and the site of creation "

#scale #MediaTheory #identity

p.216:

"the recursive self would be multiscalar in its perspectival register. Like the train-­hopping itinerants of American folklore, the recursive self would be, by necessity, scale-­nomadic. But also like them, it would be free to follow the trans-­scalar infrastructures of its milieu, to hop a ride when necessary and thereby trace a continuity between non-contiguous scales."

#scale #DigitalLife #MediaTheory

p.215:

"My argument in the second half of this chapter has been that the same digital forms that entrap us in our current milieu also deliver the tools to extend that milieu, and thereby subjectivity."

#scale #DigitalLife #MediaTheory #identity

p.202:

"We face, as surveilled digital subjects, a strange dissociation between the scale of our narrative histories (encoded in narrative memory) and the scale of our database histories (encoded in computer memory). "

I'm not going to quibble with the use of 'encoding' here, that's a discussion for another time...

#scale #DigitalLife #MediaTheory

p.201:

"Wendy Chun has noted a modal shift, as digital media reaches critical mass, from “memory” to “storage.” (Biological) memory produces and arises from the classical self, from a unified perspective, in a narrative mode. “Memory contains within it the act of repetition: it is an act of commemoration—a process of recollecting or remembering.” "

#scale #DigitalLife #MediaTheory

For a few pages we have an interesting analysis of both the implicit cognitive science, and the explicit cinematographic techniques involved in the vertiginous opening credits of the film "Limitless".

https://youtu.be/768lISZY9oE?t=115

Camerawork: A zoom from roof to street, block to block, then brain to neuron to brain...

#CogSci : memory as database, any memory equally accessible.

#scale #DigitalLife #MediaTheory

p.193:

"Tracing the scales of capital has become imperative, and continued fixation on the presumptively scale-­fragile human subject merely plays into its hands by chaining us to one scale while capital plays out its effects at others. "

See also:
https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/08/05/oliver-sacks-human-scale/

#scale #MediaTheory #DigitalLife

p. 191:

"Database, then, an ostensibly
human invention intended to render visible new scalar milieus, and thus inaugurate new scalar events, has turned out to be monstrous in the classical sense: it has created a world that is not recognizably human in that it no longer addresses the human and no longer respects the boundaries of the liberal subject."

#scale #MediaTheory #DigitalLife

p.189:

"Scale, however, emerges between two or more objects as a spatiotemporal domain that encompasses and enables the expression of relationality. This is the ecological concept of scale that I have argued for throughout this book. Properly understood, scale in this sense is emergent, better expressed as a question than as an answer."

#scale #MediaTheory

p.186:

"Interfaces, as surfaces,
promise access to layers beneath, but actually they produce those layers; they make the cuts that stabilize the domains they supposedly bridge as windows or thresholds."

Access to other scales can only be done through interfaces, which necessarily involve theoretical (and political) commitments. Your typical #STS premise, applied to #scale here.

#MediaTheory

p.185:

"Relational databases, on
the other hand, can only be queried about sets...Each query,
then, produces a newly structured set of data that is novel in the sense that the relationships it expresses or models were not present in the initial act of entry into the database."

#scale #DigitalLife #MediaTheory

p.183:

"[R]elational databases demote relation from the status of
structure to that of content. They trade analogical fit for mutational flexibility by generating a greater degree of uniformity among their data. The relational database thereby offloads the burden of representational fit to the
“user” rather than the database creator."

The database flattens or homogenises scalar information. Scale is just another thing to access.

#scale #MediaTheory

p.180:
"The database wants to forget how to zoom. This is its greatest trick."

#scale #DigitalLife #MediaTheory

There follows over the next few pages a discussion of yet another cosmic zoom video, but this one produced by Pixar and narrated by Morgan Freeman.

In this case, though, the use of digital imagery makes it easier to flatten the scales - smooth transitions and not have to deal with the mismatching between different tools for accessing different scales (it also doesn't zoom in, only out to space).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQGz76_1feY

#scale #MediaTheory

Horton, Z. (2020). The Cosmic Zoom. Chicago University Press.

Getting back to this for the last (principal) chapter. Horton gearing up to talk about how considering human experience as scalable implies or affects what we think human experience is.

#scale #MediaTheory #DigitalLife

In that last quotation, we're back to the idea of scale as a dynamic, qualified negotiation of figure and ground. Dependent on the kind of agent you are (including embodiment), but also the technology and practices available to you.

There are hints of a theory of perception of images in particular, built on Gibsonian perception generally (though a very particular reading of Gibson too).

#scale #perception #MediaTheory

p.165:

"Medial evolution, like organic evolution, doesn’t necessarily pro­gress toward optimization, nor, certainly, toward more egalitarian or creative community building. Each trans-­scalar being possesses a different navigation system, and each is capable of seeing certain details in the world while remaining blind to others."

Put in mind of the 'natural drift' description of evolution in Chapter 9 of The Embodied Mind.

#scale #MediaTheory

p.155:

"The textures of the two surfaces enter into correspondence—a scale—as their resolutions are fixed in relation to the mediating agent, the observer for whom the scale is stabilized."

Horton here deploying his idea of scale as a forming of relationship - size per se has dropped out of the picture as definitional. What matters is something more abstract.

#scale #MediaTheory #Gibson

p.140

"Scale is thus an integral
player in the mangle of practice: it is both co-­constitutive of disciplinary protocols of scalar access and a key attribute of the objects that emerge through disciplinary agency. This is one of the reasons that it is so difficult to get a handle on scale: we can only describe it using the already scalar protocols of our disciplined knowledge."

#scale #practice #MediaTheory