\u201cAwareness of the Mechanism,\u201d an exhibit featured at ETH Zurich in September 2021, aims to foster an awareness of how we are remaking our cultural inheritances by revealing the generative potentials, both positive and negative, of the digital technologies we use to reproduce them. As the media and literary theorist Matthew Kirschenbaum has suggested, many believe digital documents to be immaterial in the base sense of lacking material substance, even if they acknowledge the culture and political force that digital documents can exert. Kirschenbaum made this assertion more than a decade ago. But arguably many still think that digital documents are somehow only abstractions.[2] We may not be surprised that the materiality of digital documents and the mechanisms that produce them are frequently misunderstood by those that are not computer or information scientists. But arguably digital documentarity, which is to say after Ron Day, the powers by which digital documents are brought into presence and made evident, [3] is also misunderstood by scientists that do not consider the complex individual and cultural mechanisms that contribute to the materialization of digital documents. Aware of their mechanisms or not, those that study or simply make use of digital documents are rarely, if ever, able to feel them as the solid things they are.<\/p>\n
To suggest the material weight of digital documents, \u201cAwareness of the Mechanism\u201d presents material reproductions of abstractions used to constitute digital text. It focuses specifically on digital textuality and the abstractions of a widely used encoding standard for textual data. As part of an ongoing effort to dispel the widely held belief that digital texts lack materiality and raise awareness about the cultural significance of the mechanisms that produce their substance, the exhibition presents sculpture that lends material heft to some of the abstractions that help to constitute digital text. Each sculpture represents some of the abstractions used to recreate Korean songs and poems as digital documents. As felt, solid objects they aim to enable an awareness of the mechanisms that constitute digital materiality. As a statement about the generative, creative nature of digital reproduction, the figures mean to say something about the creative opportunities digital technologies provide when we wish to make what is important us available to the future and its distances. We can look at our cultures in entirely new ways.<\/p>\n
At the same time, the objects are also meant to be cautionary tales about how radically our new technologies can cleave the present and future from the past. We would not want the sculptures presented her to be thought of as the poems that they represent. Too much of what the poems have been would be lost. The sculptures suggest the potentially catastrophic losses that can result when digital technologies are used to reproduce cultural objects and the reproductions are confused for what they represent. They also remind us about the inevitably of loss when we copy what we care about. Earnest worry about these losses, those that are inevitable and those that are potentially tragic, can be mitigated by the promise of a growing awareness of our digital mechanisms. This awareness, we can hope, will help us think better and more carefully about how <\/em>we are making the gifts of our cultural inheritance available to the distant places and times we call the future.<\/p>\n \u201cHwang Jini\u2019s \u2018Green Hills and Blue Stream\u2019\u201d was created in 2019. It describes the Unicode code points used to represent an eighteenth-century manuscript version of a sijo<\/em> (song lyric\/ poem) by Hwang Jini, a sixteenth century gisaeng <\/em>(female entertainer) from Korea\u2019s Joseon dynasty (1392\u20131910). The eighteenth-century manuscript is the earliest extant version of Hwang\u2019s sijo<\/em>. Unicode is a widely used encoding standard that facilitates the creation and distribution of digital text. The Unicode standard does this by assigning numbers, so-called code points, to elements used in the world\u2019s writing systems. The roughly 65,000 abstract code points of what is called the Basic Multilingual Plane of the Unicode standard were mapped to the surface of a sphere. To describe the weave of the network they create when facilitating a digital transcription of Hwang\u2019s sijo<\/em>, connections were drawn between the Unicode code points on the sphere needed to recreate Hwangs sijo <\/em>as a digital text. The three-dimensional model created by this process was then 3D printed.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cKim Sowol\u2019s \u2018Azaleas\u2019\u201d was initially created in 2015. The logic of its creation is like that of \u201cHwang Jini\u2019s \u2018Green Hills and Blue Stream.\u2019\u201d Indeed, the software created with Sanghun Kim to produce the models on display was initially created in 2015 while working with the poetry of Kim Sowol (1902\u20131934). \u201cKim Sowol\u2019s \u2018Azaleas\u2019\u201d describes the Unicode values used to represent the title poem of Azaleas<\/em>, a canonical book modern Korean poetry by Kim. The book was initially printed in late 1925. Kim Sowol\u2019s poetry is often described as \u201cromantic\u201d and \u201ctraditional.\u201d Here too, the roughly 65,000 code points of what is called the Basic Multilingual Plane of the Unicode standard were mapped to the surface of a sphere. To describe the weave of the network they create when facilitating a digital transcription of Kim Sowol\u2019s \u201cAzaleas,\u201d connections were drawn between the Unicode code points on the sphere needed to recreate Kim\u2019s poem as a digital text. Once a three-dimensional model was created, it was 3D printed.<\/p>\n \u201cKim Sowol\u2019s \u2018Azaleas\u2019\u201d was initially created in 2015. The logic of its creation is like that of \u201cHwang Jini\u2019s \u2018Green Hills and Blue Stream.\u2019\u201d Indeed, the software created with Sanghun Kim to produce the models on display was initially created in 2015 while working with the poetry of Kim Sowol (1902\u20131934). \u201cKim Sowol\u2019s \u2018Azaleas\u2019\u201d describes the Unicode values used to represent the title poem of Azaleas<\/em>, a canonical book modern Korean poetry by Kim. The book was initially printed in late 1925. Kim Sowol\u2019s poetry is often described as \u201cromantic\u201d and \u201ctraditional.\u201d Here too, the roughly 65,000 code points of what is called the Basic Multilingual Plane of the Unicode standard were mapped to the surface of a sphere. To describe the weave of the network they create when facilitating a digital transcription of Kim Sowol\u2019s \u201cAzaleas,\u201d connections were drawn between the Unicode code points on the sphere needed to recreate Kim\u2019s poem as a digital text. Once a three-dimensional model was created, it was 3D printed.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cYi Sang\u2019s \u2018Poem No. 4\u2019\u201d combines several logical elements of the other representations on display. Initially created in 2018, it describes the Unicode values used to represent \u201cPoem No. 4\u201d by the Korean poet Yi Sang (1910\u20131937). \u201cPoem No. 4\u201d was printed initially in mid-1934 as part of a poetic series called \u201cCrow\u2019s Eye View.\u201d Yi Sang\u2019s poetry is often described as \u201cmodernist\u201d and \u201cavant-garde.\u201d To describe the ordered relationships that Unicode values create when facilitating a digital transcription of Yi Sang\u2019s printed poem, connections are drawn between sequentially located Unicode code points used to recreate Yi\u2019s poem as a digital text. As with Kim Sowol\u2019s poem, the result is a shape that looks like a tree. In contrast to our tree-like representation of the code used to present Kim Sowol\u2019s poem, here every code point utilized to create a digital transcription of Yi\u2019s poem is used to generate a tree-like shape. For example, a \u201ctree\u201d is drawn such that all the Unicode code points representing characters that precede 0 are drawn as \u201croots\u201d and all the code points representing characters that appear following 0 in Yi Sang\u2019s poem are drawn as \u201cbranches.\u201d Another tree is drawn to represent the code points used to represent characters preceding and following 1. The result is something that looks like a forest. To create what looks like the landscape from which the forest grows, the roughly 65,000 code points of the Basic Multilingual Plane of the Unicode Standard were mapped to a plane in three-dimensional space. The technique is similar to mapping the Basic Multilingual Plane to the surface of a sphere. Here, however, the locations on the plane associated with code points used to create Yi Sang\u2019s poem as a digital text rise along the z-dimension of the three-dimensional space according to how frequently they are needed to create a digital transcription of Yi\u2019s poem. Because numerals are so frequently repeated in Yi Sang\u2019s poem, one region of the plane rises high above the others.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Much more can be said about the histories of the Korean texts we reproduce and the mechanism by which they are reiterated as part of Korea\u2019s cultural heritance, a cultural inheritance that digital technologies help make available far beyond the Korea\u2019s historical or modern boundaries. More too can be said, of course, about the algorithms and software created to produce these shapes, as well as the 3D printing technologies used to create the sculptures on display. Each poem\/ song is iconic in Korea\u2019s cultural tradition. Each, in its own way, is something that has been cared for. This is clear because each has been copied repeatedly\u2014in manuscript forms and by industrial presses, by professors professing and students studying for exams\u2014and each time remade. It can be hoped that the objects made evident by \u201cAwareness of the Mechanism\u201d stand as examples of the diverse and creative ways that we can care for what we receive as cultural heritage, as well as the dangers and opportunities that attend our work to ensure what we care about. This exhibit makes use of examples from Korea, but the processes that make cultural inheritances evident to those that inherit them are hardly unique to Korea. By lending heft to the abstractions that formulate new forms of copying used widely around the world, the exhibition aspires to hint also at older recreations and their mechanisms as creations and processes worth conserving.<\/p>\n Matthew Kirschenbaum ends \u201cAwareness of the Mechanism,\u201d the introduction to his book Mechanisms <\/em>by writing: \u201cProduct and process, artifact and event, forensic and formal, awareness of the mechanism modulates inscription and transmission through the singularity of a digital present.\u201d[4] The ending of his introduction is a good place to end ours to \u201cAwareness of the Mechanism.\u201d How we modulate the inscription and transmission of what we have received as cultural inheritance is how we make these inheritances present again in the singular moments of the future.<\/p>\n _____<\/p>\n The App<\/strong><\/p>\n For those interested in experiencing the data models in a three dimensions, a web app was developed which can be accessed by simply scanning in the QR code below with any smart phone or tablet. Once you enter the app, choose the model that you would like to view and follow the simple instructions. Information about the models, images of the manuscripts, and a short info-video of the artist talking about each of the works and the poems is also available in the app. The app has been provided by the Special Interest Groups Digital Arts & Technology<\/a> and Digital Heritage<\/a> of the Swiss Informatics Society<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/magazine.swissinformatics.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/00_Fig.1._Article_deFremery.jpg\")
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