In Being Digital (1995), a seminal text about digital technologies and their possible future, Greek American architect and computer scientist Nicholas Negroponte introduces a dichotomy between “atoms” and “bits.” Atoms refer to the base unit of the physical world, whereas bits are the base units of the digital world. In the text, Negroponte argues that, as the world becomes increasingly digitized, atoms will become bits, and all forms of information that are now conceivable through atoms will soon exist in bit-form. Twenty-five years later, as discs are replaced with streaming services, marketplaces go electronic, and the possibility of communication without some degree of tech-enabled channel becomes ludicrous, this prediction seems rather prophetic.
In a post-pandemic world, the distinction between atoms and bits will become increasingly pronounced, and the framework may even be extrapolated beyond the scope of information exchange. As the fragility of our own atoms (read: human life) becomes unquestionable due to the virus, people may begin to notice how our atoms are on lockdown, while our bits are free to roam the world.
But as we begin to extrapolate, what is the extent to which everything can be digitized? Can we be digitized? What is stopping us from becoming bits that are uploaded to the cloud? (When you consider it, it’s rather uncanny that we venture out into society, exposing our fragile bodies to risk, without backing ourselves up somewhere.) While we may conceive of certain functions to be uniquely “human,” there is an impressive array of so-called human characteristics that are not actually limited to atoms. For example, the fundamentally (and narcissistically anthropocentric) “human” sense of vision has already been conquered by technology, which is able to see more clearly, more totally, and from more advanced perspectives than we ever will via nonhuman agents like drones, satellites, microscopes, and more. Though there exist current insufficiencies in our self-upload and obstacles in our path to a purely bit-form existence, such as computers not being able to capture sensations like orgasms or the feeling of relieving oneself, we should probably start coming to terms with our atom-centric inferiority, if we haven’t already.
However, what if there are physical-world sensations and phenomena that cannot ever be captured by bits? Or at least, if they are captured by bits, the bit-form manifestation will never be able to do their atomic counterparts justice. This is the focus of my project.
In classical mechanics, there exists the notion of a rigid body: a continuous distribution of mass that has no deformation and remains constant in time regardless of any external forces exerted on the object. While such an object does not actually exist beyond theory, it piqued my interest in the underlying mechanics of phenomena that we may experience in the real world via atoms that may not be captured, converted, and uploaded to the digital world as bits. While these mechanical concepts are surely disseminated and even simulated through bits for scientific research and educational purposes, it seems to me that real-world sensations of physics are comparably harder to experience with bits than they are via atoms.
For my visuals, I repurposed rigid bodies from textbooks and scientific diagrams with the intention of giving them dynamic motion. While my theoretical reference point for resource collection is still digital, as these rigid (albeit fluid-looking) forms are appropriated from the Internet, they are very much rooted in the atomic world. Specifically, I chose the rigid bodies that most closely meet our layperson understanding of fluid, atomic structures, erased their scientific labels with photo-editing software, and brought them to life (albeit digitally) with different blur effects. The resulting images contain hazy atomic entities resembling physical sensations that have been captured in bits.
Not only do the collages capture the tension between atoms and bits and the insufficiency of our upload capacities, but they also invite the viewer to consider the inferiority of their own human vision. Acknowledging that these digital collages were created on a platform whose computations are translated via pixels that allow their creator to make sense of what he is creating (and really mean nothing to the majority of human eyes without this necessary translation), we, as viewers, are also subject to an endless search for a non-blurry anchor or point of reference. We are disorientated and deterred by the presence of an atomic process that is truly familiar to us (movement of a physical object), but we cannot make sense of it in its current visual state.
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