Fifteenth #9: On binaries

Deconstructing binary thinking and classification

How the clumsy ontological capture of the individual belies misplaced binary thinking that seeks to make calculable the joyous mess of our personhood

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🎉 Announcing “Death and Dating Online: It’s not working, is it?”, hosted by SPACE4 in London on Thursday 10 October. I am teaming up with my friend and fellow design researcher Afreen Saulat of 100Kicks. Tickets are free but require booking and a refundable £5 deposit.

📚 You can buy any book featured in this newsletter from my page on Bookshop.org — Amazon doesn’t need your money.

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N/A-A (2023) by Merve Mepa is a sculptural work that asks searching questions on the nature of agency, predestination, and control in computerised environments

N/A-A

N/A-A (2023) is a larger-than-life installation made of perforated punch cards by Merve Mepa, an artist working at the intersection of material forms, cultural science, and computing culture. Each punch card has small holes, stitched together in a double-track and suspended from the ceiling of a gallery space. Mepa describes the algorithmically produced patterns as “reproducing itself according to neighbourhood relations in matrix systems, [becoming] a form of reproduction capable of weaving itself.” Despite the aesthetic and textural appeal, we must not lose sight of its utility.

Students of computing history will recognise punch cards as objects containing instructions required for early calculation engines. In the early twentieth century, a “computer” was a title given to women who translated requirements into the sequence of code represented by the holes seen on these punch cards.

We work with electronic devices capable of computing instructions of far greater complexity, however, we still rely on binary representation to capture data that exists in the world — a point argued compellingly by James Bridle in Ways of Being. Despite computer data being used to generate compelling images or operate complex predictive systems, it does not change its inherent limitations. Our data are abstractions of reality constructed from vast arrays of binary data: zero or one, true or false, on or off.

Fast forward to the twenty-first century and our understanding of interdependence in the natural world has advanced to such an extent, that we realise that the mental models we cling to forces binary thinking onto ecosystems where few exist.

Nature is littered with examples of plant and fungal life that defy binary categorisation. So what does it mean to deconstruct the binaries that form our data architectures which are often imposed as a result of our worldviews? Despite the richness of their descriptiveness, our data ultimately lacks the properties to respond to the unclarity of the lives they attempt to encapsulate.

Interlude: Human Decentered Design

In “Human Decentered Design”, which I presented at The Conference in Malmö a few weeks ago, I address the rewilding of our technological futures.

In 15 minutes, I use three metaphors — Soil, Self, and Sky — to imagine how we should decenter human domination while acknowledging the legacies of geological and racial trauma. I set out a vision to imagine how we should draw on Black and Indigenous knowledge traditions to strive towards more pluralistic futures.

Many of the concerns in this essay — the effects of binary thinking, and the inspiration we can draw from our natural environment — are present throughout this talk.

I hope you find it inspiring, instructive, and useful.