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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

My blog has been very silent during this month, but honestly, I wrote like hell…
I finished my paper concept on conceptual, material and discourse metaphors, which now has been submitted for the ICA conference 2006 in Dresden, in the Philosophy of Communication division.
In fact, with this piece I outlined the base of my theoretical framework regarding metaphor theory, so I am very satisfied.

Meanwhile my 'metaphor club' (a lose association of people researching metaphors in technology, science and culture) is preparing two panels for the 4th European Biannual Conference of the Society for Science, Literature, and the Arts, called Close Encounters. We probably will do something called 'beyond Lakoff & Johnson', and in this context I will present the stuff on material and discourse metaphors.
Meanwhile, my half year course teaching period had started, and my course New Media New Citizenship is on the road again…

Draft 25 October 2005, critique on Bolter & Grusin
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Both in ordinary and in scholarly speech the word medium signifies very different things. We speak of 'the media' as a general container concept of all media or of all professionals working in this field, but we also speak of different media, implying medium specific features or medium ontologies. But what for example do we mean when we speak of 'the medium film' as distinguished from other media, what specific features do make up this medium: the celluloid, the cinema, the studio, Hollywood industry, cameras, framing and montage, screen projection, moving images? Read more… »

A lot of terms circulate to indicate the general large scale transformation processes taking place in Western societies. Terms indicating economic restructuring (late capitalism, globalization, privatization, commodification), political restructuring (neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism, fundamentalism) and social restructuring (individualization, consumerism, fragmentation, tribalism). Alongside the three classic domains of the economical, the political, and the social a fourth domain seems to be emerging in this discourse: the domain of media as such.
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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… »