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Here an update of my musings on transcoding metaphors, in the form of an article which has been submitted to Configurations.
Comments are welcome!

Interfacing by icons and metaphors

In this article I explore the role of mediating metaphors in our daily use of software. More specifically, how we deal with the desktop interface and its common 'icons', such as the mailbox icon. It will be shown how digital iconicity tends to metaphorical condensation and reification, a material-semiotic process which not only represents but also depresents what is going on inside a computer on the level of code and machinic transferences. This instance of reifying 'icontology' obscures the indexical transferences set in action by software. The article will show how and why computer interfaces are different from other machine interfaces, and how its buttons and switches function as condensed metaphorical sign-tools, usually in the form of 'icons'. These sign-tools have to be analytically decomposed in order to see what they hide and how they perform their signifying and executing job. The mailbox icon will be subsequently considered as a Peircian sign, as a Heideggerian tool, and finally as a material metaphor, in order to open up the black box and disentangle the sign-tool-machine oscillation at work in our computing practices.

Complete text: Interfacing by icons and metaphors

An update of my musings on transcoding metaphors,  submitted to SPIEL.
Comments are welcome!

Transcoding metaphors after the mediatic turn

Hegel once wrote, rather regretful: ?The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk? (Hegel 1820). With this metaphor he indicated that philosophy understands phenomena only at the end of the day, when things have already passed. Wisdom always comes by hindsight, but at that moment the phenomenon at stake might be gone already. Hegel's winged words are still up to date. Thus, when philosophers and media scholars proclaim a mediatic or a medial turn, and start building conceptual frameworks, disciplines, and research programs around (New) Media Philosophy (Rodowick 2001, M?nker e.a. 2003, Sandbothe 2005), we could have a gut feeling that this media thing might be already behind us.
And indeed, right at the moment scholars start thinking about what media are, what they do, how they constitute what we conceive as reality and truth, and what this implies for ethics, politics, education and culture at large, media seem to be gone. Or at least they are on the move. Contemporary media seem to have lost their stable ontology as apparatus, they can no longer be located in particular carriers, devices, modalities or institutions. They seem to be ubiquitous, everywhere and nowhere. They have become floating signifiers, ready to embark on any instance of articulation or communication, ready to mediate anything at hand. And, as usual in philosophy, with the wisdom of hindsight, we realize retrospectively that after all no medium ? be it print, film, or television ? ever had a stable ontology.
What do we have then? A minimum definition would be: we have processes instead of ?things? ? mediations instead of media.

Complete text: Transcoding metaphors after the mediatic turn

Is it a hype? Yes.
Is it something real? Yes, also.
Is it good? No.
Is it bad? No.
Is it neutral? No!

What is it then? It is a metaphor.
Metaphors are funny things. They elude questions of truth and reality, and at the same time they produce truths and realities. They produce meanings and qualifications, frames of thought and action. They show things and aspects, and they hide other things. They compress and they decompress.
Especially when it comes to digital code they are extremely useful.
What's more, they are indispensable here. Read more… »

I bumped onto 3 very interesting lectures by Charles Forceville, Amsterdam based metaphor researcher, working on pictorial metaphors. He is currently working on a book called Multimodal metaphor (Mouton-de Gruyter 2007), and he is giving a A Course in Pictorial and Mulimodal Metaphor. The first three lectures can be found at
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/srb/cyber/cforcevilleout.pdf
But I think there is something funny with his work on computer metaphors…
Read more… »

Last week we – me and my collegues Imar de Vries and Mirko Sch?fer – were in Paris, for our bi-annual Paris-Utrecht Mini Symposium. PUMS is an initiative of the department New Media & Digital Culture (Institute Media & Re/presentation, Utrecht University) and the Laboratoire Paragraphe (Universit? Paris 8 ). Or better, the PhD-slaves from both departments.

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Het informationeel materialisme van N. Katherine Hayles
Boekbespreking voor Krisis, Tijdschrift voor Empirische Filosofie, special over posthumanisme. (Ja, de Academische Boeken Gids vond het bij aflevering 'te moeilijk' voor hun publiek – is ook zo.)
Over hoe je moeder letterlijk een computer kon zijn, over het downloaden van de menselijke Geest en hoe die weer uitgedreven moet worden, en over de spelregels van Platonistisch tennissen…

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Wow, a complete (well, nearly 4500 records…) on-line Bibliography of Metaphor & Metonymy.
Costs a lot of money (150 euro's a year) but there is a 90-day free trial.
Read more… »

Dwalend in de blogosphere, zoekend naar wat andere bloggers onder de Technorati tag 'metaphor' produceren, kwam ik terecht op Develop Mastery with Metaphor. Dat leek me wel wat. Das toch ook mijn doel?
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So my research is about metaphor. Internet metaphors – metaphors of the Internet, metaphors on the Internet, metaphors within Internet, the Internet as metaphor, and what have you. Metaphor in networks and computing. Metaphor as code, as protocol.
To clear the baseline, first what metaphor is NOT. Read more… »