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title: MX02
tags: data and digital culture, mini exercise
---

# MX02
*Adam Kiil Naldal* – *3309 characters*
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Based on the one-bit data and computer workshop, try relating the hands-on activity (the way you engage with materials) to Dorish’s notion of materiality or Lupton’s notion of becoming-with data (the practice-theory articulation). What are the materialities of data, sensory wiring & physical computing? How the materiality of the digital shapes the cultural experience?
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Relating the hands on experience to either of the theoretical notions (Dourish's notion of materiality or Lupton's notion of becoming-with-data) is not a straight forward exercise. While i aknowledge the interconenctedness of data and the prossesing of data, i think it is important to maintain a meaningfull destinction between *what we talk about when we talk about data* and *what we talk about when we talk about data processing*. In almost all cases it is crucial to aknowledge both topics in any discussion about one or the other since they are so closely interlinked, but such discussion must simultainiously be able to maintain awereness of which of the two is which in order to meaningfully adress any question about data and data processing. In line with this view i think it is important to establish that the hands on workshop was much more about the fundamental buildingblocks of data processing (logic gates, transistors, diodes etc.) than about the data being processed. The one bit of true or false data was only relevant in so far as it changed the operations of the logical circuits we produced, it did not represent anything (as data usually does) other than the abstract idea of true or false. And so from my view the exercise was about data processing as a topic rather than data.

Lupton's ideas are mostly related to data sets about an individual created through activities of self tracking,as mentioned, the hands on activity was not concerned with the meaning of the one bit of data being manipulated but rather how one can manipulate one bit of data in the abstract sense of boolean true og false logic. In other words, that one bit was not *about or by* anyone and so had no connection to any particular body, making her theoretical framework somewhat unsuitable as a tool for analysis of the workshop-activity.

Similarily the main ideas explored by Dourish was about the ways that formats for storing and communicating data are not neutral or independent from their environment (materials, norms, implementations, and purposes etc.). Our hands on workshop was implementing simple logics with basic electrical components. Much of Dourish's theorising is on a higher level of computational abstraction. What can however be said is that many of his theoretical points do, in some ways, still apply at the level of 1-bit physical computing: Dourish mentions that depending on the materiality of the information, not all bits are equally significant, similarily very small changes to the logic circuit can sometimes be inconsequential and sometimes completely break the whole system. Perhaps most crucially Dourish asserts that data and the systems that, transmit, encode and decode (or represent) them are very closely connected and bound together by the norms and standards about them.