Download PDF About the Interviewee Justin Hodgson is an assistant professor of rhetoric, writing, and digital media studies in the Department of English at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. His book, Post-Digital Rhetoric and The New Aesthetic is available as of March 2019. Justin is the founder and general editor of TheJUMP+, The Journal of Undergraduate Multimedia Projects. This juried, electronic journal publishes exceptional undergraduate multimedia projects from students around the world. It also serves as a pedagogical resource for teachers interested in and working in multimedia and digital composition and scholarship. About the InterviewerElizabeth Barnett is an MA candidate in Rhetoric and Writing in the University of New Mexico's Department of English Language and Literature. Her interests lie in the pedagogy of multimodal digital composition and technical writing. ContentsElectracy and Thinking Digitally |
Post Digital RhetoricXchanges: Your book comes out in March 2019. Who is your audience for this work? How you see James Bridle’s New Aesthetic operating in a post-digital world? Are we post-digital? JH: My argument is that we're so saturated by digital technologies now that we have as many, if not more, mediated experiences than we do non-mediated experiences in a very meaningful capacity. With that kind of condition and the kind of ubiquity of technologies with smart sensors everywhere that respond to us, we've just fully been enveloped by the digital. Digital is now just fundamental to the human condition in developed countries, and even in many non-developed countries. In the same way that writing dramatically impacted culture even in cultures that didn't write, the digital has done the same thing. To talk about the digital as something distinct or different or out there or unique is problematic today. The metaphor that we used to use was cyberspace. Cyberspace from William Gibson was this world that exists outside, and it's like, "It's floating out there, this digital space." Cyberspace, even if you think about it like that, is still very much materials built in plastic and circuits and energy and all kinds of weird materialities, but it's not out there anymore, it's actually down around us. We're not in cyberspace; it literally has "everted" into the world. Once that happens, then the distinctions we used to make and the way in which we think about our relationships to technology have to accommodate the fact that it's no longer a separate, digital/real dynamic. The digital and the real are just one and the same. To answer your question, I do think we're post-digital in this regard, that we are so saturated by technologies, particularly in developed countries, that it is very difficult to imagine doing things in ways that aren't already tied to a digital process. More importantly, when we see a really complex thing occurring, we start to think about the computationality behind it. The digital is a fundamental part of the way in which we filter and experience and make sense of the world. Rhetoric then has to account for what that does to us, and that's what the book is attempting to do. James Bridle is a digital futurist and around 2011, he makes a blog post on this site called Really Interesting Group, which is a bunch of artists, engineers, designers, and technologists in London who are just doing creative things. He basically writes that, "You know, I've been noticing there's this new aesthetic that's happening." He's not trying to invent a new aesthetic, he just says he sees this thing happening in the commerce and creative practices and culture and all kinds of weird ways. Bridle's point was what's happening is all these aesthetic things from this computational world, intentional or otherwise, are manifesting as aesthetics in a digital yet material world. It's like computationality has turned itself inside out to reveal its aesthetic values, and so, that gets labeled as this generic thing called "the new aesthetic" and the people then, of course, take issue with it and do all kinds of fun stuff. For example, we are surrounded by Wi-Fi. I'm on Wi-Fi right now, but we don't see it. It's not visible to the human eye except in this little icon that tells me it's on or off. There is this artist and design theorist by the name of Luis Hernan who figured out a way to take photographs of Wi-Fi, and he maps the different Wi-Fi intensities to a color spectrum and uses a long exposure lens to capture those signals. It's really funny and fascinating because we all have these tiny little swirling eggs of Wi-Fi around us from our phones. What Luis has done is he's reoriented the world to Hertzian space. The world is now a series of electronic waves and not just like physical material space. The question with all this stuff is how do we become aware of that? How do we re-attune our sensibilities to take stock of the things that we can see or can't? What practices can we then use to draw attention to these kinds of cultural conditions or help others become aware of them and use that awareness in rhetorical ways. I study it as an ecology, with its practices, to try and discern a set of guides for doing rhetoric in a post-digital culture. I'm trying to not systematize it but let it coalesce enough to hand off to other people and say, "Look, here's a set of ways you could think about human technology relationships today and how you can use them as a guide for making things." |