Suasive Iterations: Rhetoric, Writing, and Physical Computing

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

1 For/Get the Digital (and Ditch the Umbrella) 3

2 Transduction and Allegorized Style 31

2.5 Writing with Three-Dimensional Wa(y)ves 59

3 Onto-Allegories for the ‘Great Outdoors’ 66

3.5 Onto-Allegorized Tweets and the Third (Wayve) State 92

4 Plumbing the Paradoxical Depths 101

4.5 The Paradoxical Depths of Delivery 120

5 A Call for Distant (Transductive) Writing 127

5.5 Choric Capacitances 151

6 After the Bookish Era of the PC 159

Works Cited 163

Index 169

About the Author 177

Acknowledgments

There are many friends, family, and colleagues whom I need to thank for lending me their time, encouragement, and expertise. During the early drafting stages, members of the closed Facebook group, Savants on Sabbatical, helped me stay focused and motivated as I worked out the basic outline and content of my arguments. Susan Miller-Cochran in particular was an immense source of support through those stages of my writing process. Another colleague whom I cannot thank enough is Helen Burgess, who was my copyeditor and mentor in the final stages of the book’s development. A few more friends and colleagues who helped me at various stages include Jim Brown, Casey Boyle, Doug Eyman, Sarah Arroyo, Byron Hawk, Dave Blakeseley, Kevin Brock, and Wendi Sierra. I would also like to thank the CRDM PhD students in the spring 2015 seminar, Rhetoric and Digital Media, who read drafts of two chapters and let me demonstrate one of the projects that made it into the book. My biggest thanks are reserved for Shelley Garrigan, who sacrificed her own research time for my success, and my parents, Danièle and Ronald Rieder.

1 For/Get the Digital (and Ditch the Umbrella)

It’s time to bridge the gap between the physical and the virtual—time to use more than just your fingers to interact with your computer. Step outside of the confines of the basic computer and into the broader world of computing.

—Dan O’Sullivan and Tom Igoe, Physical Computing

It’s a hot afternoon in July in New York City, 2013. You have been waiting in line for over five hours to experience an immersive art installation at The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) titled Rain Room (Belcove). Since its opening two months earlier, over 50,000 people have waited in line before you—some for several more hours—to experience one of the most Instagrammed art installations that year (Rabinovitch). Its popularity is one of the reasons that you bought a ticket. The dramatic, Hollywood-like pictures and videos from this installation as well as from the inaugural one in 2012 at the Barbican Gallery, London, England, have contributed to your fear of missing out, a.k.a. FOMO (Rabinovitch).

But another reason for waiting in line is a YouTube video of The Guardian’s Architecture and Design critic Oliver Wainwright’s walkthrough in 2012, in which he offered the following remarks:

It’s really surreal. Not only is it raining indoors, but I’m not even getting the slightest bit wet wherever I go. It’s almost like I’m giving off some kind of wind that’s pushing the rain away, like I’m a human whirlwind. [Rain Room] somehow responds to me like I have a magnetic field. Wherever I go, it opens up around me. (Barbican’s Rain Room)

You want to experience something as novel as walking through a downpour without getting wet, which reminds you of descriptions of miraculous acts of water walking in several religious and fictional texts.

When you finally enter the dark, damp installation space, you and nine other participants have a ten-minute window of opportunity to engage with it. You notice that a larger group of participants are cordoned off behind a rope; the line to enter was shorter for them, but they can only watch. The installation is over 300 feet in length with a bright spotlight at the far end. The floor beneath you is a grate into which the rain falls. Looking up from where you are standing, you see that the simulated rain storm is based on a drop ceiling made up of hundreds of water valves. A few people in the space have gathered together to speculate about the technical design of the installation. Another two are taking selfies. Two more, who were holding hands, have started slow dancing together.

As you stand alone in the middle of the space, meditating on the experience of Rain Room, you realize that you are participating in a new form of popular computing, one in which invention or creativity is based on the ability to identify the available means of blurring the conventional line between the physical and virtual worlds. Rain Room may be a dramatic example of this new approach to what is called physical computing, but we are increasingly engaged and immersed in these kinds of hybrid realities, thanks to the growing number of smart, sensory-based, wireless, networked technologies in our everyday lives.

Suasive Iterations offers digital rhetors and writers, digital media artists, and digital humanists 2.0 a method of rhetorical invention and creativity within this new paradigm of popular computing. Physical computing is a relatively new computational paradigm in which practitioners build interactive objects and environments that can both sense and respond to the analog world. It is a computational approach predicated on blurring the conventional line between the virtual or digital realm and the real, physical or analog world. There are a number of other terms associated with this computational approach including ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), pervasive computing, ambient computing, Internet of Things (IoT), wearable computing, everyware, and natural-user interface (NUI) design. In this book, I offer an approach that all of the abovementioned terms share, which is to transform the conventional ways we experience and engage with the real by finding new ways to fold some of the affordances of the virtual into it. Whether wearable, NUI, or ubicomp smartifact, these and other technological approaches to the physical hybridize the conventional space-times in which we are engaged. There is no longer a conventional, binary relationship between the analog and digital, and this realization put into practice transforms our sense of self and those relations comprising our interactions with objects and environments.

While the argument that we are now living in hybrid realities is not new, it has become more relevant with the growing popularity of physical computing technologies. William Gibson’s use of the term eversion in the recent past, for example, demonstrates that he has recognized the shift to a more nuanced experience and engagement with the virtual. In 1982, in his short story Burning Chrome, Gibson coined the term cyberspace to describe a virtual realm separate and distinct from the real (195). Since then, he has adopted the term eversion to describe the process of hybridization that now characterizes the relationship between cyberspace and the physical realm:

Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. (Google’s Earth)

Citing Gibson’s quote above, Steven E. Jones underscores the cultural shift in perception of which eversion is expressive. Jones writes,

[eversion] articulates a widely experienced shift in our collective understanding of the network during the last decade: inside out, from a world apart to a part of the world, from a transcendent virtual reality to mundane experience, from a mysterious, invisible abstract world to a still mostly invisible (but real) data-grid that we move through everyday in the physical world. (19)

The shift to an era of physical computing is one in which innovation is defined by the ability to evert reality, and to creatively bend the conventional experience of reality toward some suasive end, by folding into it some of the affordances of the virtual. Such innovation can be fairly mundane, subtly enhancing an aspect of our everyday practices, or it can lead to a more dramatic shift in how we experience our sense of self and world, as occurs in Rain Room.

A theme that emerges at several points in this book is the need to innovate beyond the personal computing (PC) era. The PC era normed us to the computer anchored to our desk, lap, or hands: the all-in-one personal machine through which we did everything. It inaugurated an era of centripetal computing by establishing the distinction between the virtual and the real, and turning us inwardly toward the former. The cliché of the PC user surfing vast spaces in a virtual world while slumped over a keyboard and mouse is indicative of the extent to which the era interpellated its users to a computational world distinct and disconnected from the everyday. The notion that a commitment to the virtual necessitates a disavowal of the real is symptomatic of that era.

The title of this chapter is an implicit call to move beyond (forget) the exclusive focus on the digital that is reinforced by the constraints of the PC era, in order to engage (get) with the new, everted realities before us. The new era virtualizes our everyday experiences and expectations, but it does not ask us to disavow the world around us; rather, it integrates the virtual into it. In contrast to the PC era, the new era is centrifugal.

Two popular examples of the new era include FitBit’s fitness bracelets and the Waze app. In both cases, the technologies blur the stark distinction between the virtual and real. FitBit’s activity bracelet tracks and records its user’s daily movements and activities without any direct interaction. There is no keyboard, mouse, or speaker. The microcomputer is meant to work with the user’s lifestyle. Similarly, the Waze app crowdsources real-time traffic patterns from its users by uploading locative data from a phone to Waze’s network without direct input. In Figure 2 below, the red-colored street labeled 13 mph is generated from the speed at which users’ GPS-based movements are changing. The data is sent by the app without user input. The avatars are fellow Wazers who are currently on the road nearby.

Both of these technologies point to another reason for making the shift to a post-PC era of computational innovation, which is that PC-based computing (the PC era), has peaked. The majority of new, cutting-edge research in digital media is shifting away from the all-in-one computer. We are shifting to a paradigm in which inexpensive sensors, actuators, and microcontrollers (microtechnologies that can sense and act on the analog world) collapse the boundaries established during the PC era between the real and the virtual. Based on these technologies, innovation is now defined by novel ways that we transform our lived reality. Eversion is a sign of success.

The signs of the imminent paradigm shift are nowhere more obvious than in the popularity of tablets and smartphones. Unbeknownst to many users, they are a border technology between the old and new ways of computing. Like PCs, tablets and smartphones are designed to elicit a personal investment from their owners. They contribute to what Nick Montfort calls screen essentialism (Continuous Paper), which contributes to the narcissistic, gadget-loving gaze that is characteristic of the era. This centripetal gaze, however, blinds us to the dozen or more sensors and cloud-based processes with which those personal devices constantly communicate at the periphery of our attention. Our phones and tablets are repeatedly checking our email and social media accounts for updates, transmitting our geolocations to companies and services to which we’re subscribed, and monitoring ambient changes in or around the hardware itself. While we devote our attention to the data represented on the screens of our phones and tablets, our phones are busily sensing, transmitting, and receiving a far wider range of data to and from the global cloud.

For most contemporary rhetors and writers, the PC era is the only one in which we’ve worked. A review of the journal Computers and Composition shows that that many of its issues have been about personal computing and composition. During the first six years of the journal (1983-1989), word processing software on IBM-compatible and Apple PCs was a persistent topic. In the early 1990s, the focus began to shift to hypertextual and hypermedia software, and those new forms of writing were practiced on PCs. MOOing, too, became an important topic, and while the MOO foregrounded multi-user networked computing, the desktop computer was the interface through which it was accessed. In the mid-1990s, Cynthia Selfe and Richard Selfe’s article The Politics of the Interface focused on the politics of the desktop computing interface, thus reinforcing the power of desktop computing as the epitome of the PC era (64).

By the early 2000s, topics associated with internet-based communication shared journal space with web-based approaches to composition, augmented by a growing range of socio-cultural, political, and pedagogical approaches to digital media—including games. Nonetheless, the personal computer was the generic platform for engagement. As multimodality and new media studies showed up alongside the ever-growing range of topics in the mid- to late-2000s, the PC remained a persistent platform for theory and practice in our field. And by the mid-2010s, when the focus of the journal now includes handheld computing devices such as tablets and smartphones, the approach is still principally PC-based.

Four Technologies of the Post-PC Era

From a technological standpoint, there are four technologies that are essential for innovation in the post-PC era. The first are input technologies: microtechnological components known as sensors, which are designed to sense specific kinds of physical energy. There are sensors for ambient energy changes (temperature, humidity, light, movement, and more) as well as for direct user interaction.

The passive infrared (PIR) motion sensor is an example of the former. It is a ubiquitous technology in home security systems, classrooms, hallways, and public bathrooms. The sensor detects changes to the infrared radiation pattern in a space, which is the basis for defining changes in motion. The sensor is used conventionally to turn on floodlights outside a home, or to turn on or off the lights in a public space.

Input technologies that facilitate direct user interaction include the keys on a keyboard, rotary and slide potentiometers (see Figure 4 below), the touchscreen on a smartphone, and all of the various kinds of buttons, switches, dials, cameras, and microphones with which we interact everyday. When we interact with one of the sensors, the energy flows associated with them are changed.

Understanding generally how sensors work will allow us to understand an important technical basis for eversion. Sensors are microcomponents within an electrical circuit, which means that they have a specific and continuous amount of electricity passing across them at all times. Sensors are designed to produce changes to the continuous flow of electrical voltage across their surface. Thus if I have written a software program that is monitoring the number of volts running across a circuit in which the sensor is placed, any changes to that continuous, analog voltage will represent a change in the real world the sensor is designed to detect. The two energy flows—the one in the real world affecting the sensor and the electrical current flowing across it—are related.

The second kind of technologies are output devices, or actuators, which are microcomponents and mechanisms that can act in the real world. In other words, they can make sound, create light, and, with DC motors, move objects. Actuators include everything from small LED status lights to large screens and projectors, buzzers, speakers, and motors.

The third technology is methodological: the process of transduction. That process can occur in hardware or software. In this book, it is software-based. Dan O’Sullivan and Tom Igoe explain that transduction is about creating a conversation between the physical world and the virtual world of the computer (xix). In their book, Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers, they elaborate on the meaning of their term and the goal with which it is associated:

The process of transduction, or the conversion of one form of energy into another, is what enables this flow. Your job is to find, and learn to use, transducers to convert between physical energy appropriate for your project and the electrical energy used by the computer. (xix-xx)

In a physical computing project, the software programs that a rhetor writes are the basis for transductions of energy to and from the analog and the digital. Those software programs transduce the flow of energy in order to create a conversation between the physical and virtual. When William Gibson writes about the eversion of cyberspace, and about the colonization of the physical, he is implicitly writing about the impact of transductive processes. When the virtual and the real are folded together in some novel way, a moment of transduction has occurred. Eversion is the expression of a transductive process.

These three technologies—sensors (inputs), actuators (outputs), and transductive processes—are the basis for numerous physical computing projects, including the abovementioned Rain Room. In order to understand the technological bases of Rain Room, we can turn to the above-cited critic Oliver Wainwright. After his walkthrough, Wainwright asks the two artists who designed the project, Florian Ortkrass