Declare your atoms not your bits! Martina O’Brien’s Quotidian
Francis Halsall


Can you ever properly see systems? They are, after all, made of multiple, distributed parts dispersed throughout time and space. It makes no more sense, for example, to ask what the Internet looks like than to think about how the global economic system smells. The global systems of everyday life are apparently ineffable, invisible, untouchable. This systemic turn is another way of thinking about modernity; that is, those social, economic, technological and biological evolutions of the past few centuries. This move to systems is part of a fundamental, rapid, unstoppable and irreversible shift in how societies operate that Nicholas Negroponte called the move from “atoms to bits.” Negroponte is referring to the migration of human interaction into virtual, distributed and cloud-like spaces. But, as he also observes, there is stuff left over. After all, he explains: “When you go through customs you declare your atoms, not your bits” (1)

Martina O’Brien’s new work Quotidian is an aesthetic exploration of some of these “atoms and bits.” It includes meteorological systems of the planetary climate; national institutional systems of weather recording and forecasting at Met Éireann; and local social systems embedded within communities such as the people who operate the Weather Observation Network. She focuses attention on different, material elements of the systems such as redundant copper cable; Met Éireann’s archive of historical rainfall postcards; the monthly transcription process made by the Observers; robotics in the world's largest weather data archive, UK; and the observers’ daily route to take rainfall recordings. Her work captures the interplay between a variety of juxtaposed systemic entities within which we are embedded: human and inhuman; artificial and natural; local and global; visible and invisible.

These ubiquitous systems of everyday life are undergirded by the prevailing myth of data as proposed by Claude Shannon in his theory of Information (2). Information Theory was formulated by Shannon with Warren Weaver in the aftermath of the 2nd World War, as what they called a mathematical theory of communication; understanding the world through systems and information abstracts from its muddy, damp complexity into the zeroes and ones of electronic circuits. It works from the foundational assumption that information is independent of the stuff through which it is communicated and that, as Negroponte says, “A bit has no color, size, or weight, and it can travel at the speed of light. It is the smallest atomic element in the DNA of information” (3). In other words, information treats the meanings of communication as independent of the means by which that information is communicated, so that the message will be considered the same no matter what its material or mode of transmission might be, be that cables, sound or light. The dots and dashes of Morse Code, for example, can be transmitted through marks, beeps or flashes. What this ignores, however, is that each of these different materials and modes come with different experiential effects. There are also tacit, second-hand meanings to communications as well as their apparent messages. There is a phenomenology to communication that comes bundled in with its processes of coding and transmission.

This phenomenology of communication comes about by paying attention to the encounter with the quotidian elements that support and accompany messages. It is suggested by Paul Dourish’s discussion on what he calls The Stuff of Bits. As he points out, the information that proliferates in contemporary society is only ever encountered in physical form: “whether that is marks on a page, electrons flowing through wires, or magnetized segments of a spinning disk.” (4) Dourish observes, even though digital data is superficially composed of zeroes and ones, not all information is created equal:
“those 1s and 0s are not all equivalent or equally important. Some have greater significance than others. Some affect the others, some play more central roles in the representation, and some are more critical.” (5)

Take, for example, as computer program. While the operating system follows the instructions of the program, what the computer actually does is more than what is specified by the instructions. There are, for instance, different ways in which the functions of the program might be carried out that vary from computer to computer and between different operating systems. Different platforms have different means of working that may change how the program operates which are not specifically detailed in the program itself. In other words, the experience of a computer program, and what it is like to use it, is not specifically designated by the set of instructions that it is comprised of. To type an essay using Microsoft Word on an Apple Powerbook is a different experience to using a Dell Latitude 7280, the laptop I am using to finish this writing with its irritating and awkward keyboard.

Dourish describes these differences between systems as the materialities of information which lie in the gaps and nooks between what is coded and what is expressed; between what is specified and what is subsequently produced. He explains that these materialities are: “those properties of representations and formats that constrain, enable, limit, and shape the ways in which those representations can be created, transmitted, stored, manipulated, and put to use – properties like robustness, consistency, compressibility, malleability, and others.” (6)

Dourish writes:
“In the slippage between notation and enaction, we find the lie of virtuality. The denial of materiality that is at the centre of virtuality rhetoric could be maintained only if the specification were complete: if a program really were an adequate account of what will happen in execution, if an mp3 really were a complete explanation of how music will be produced, or if a digital 3D model really specified what you’ll see through a display. Yet, none of these are, in fact, the case. The mechanics of devirtualization – of the production of actual effects based on digital specifications, be that the running of a program or the rendering of an image file – inherently exceed the reach of the specification itself.” (7)

Two consequences of this inherent and inevitable materiality of systems: ecological and aesthetic. Both of these are, beautifully, foregrounded by O’Brien’s work.

It can be easy to ignore and overlook the ecological impact of digital technology. Yet, as a recent report claimed:
“charging up a single tablet or smart phone requires a negligible amount of electricity;[but] using either to watch an hour of video weekly consumes annually more electricity in the remote networks than two new refrigerators use in a year.” (8)

As recently as 2015 the processing of data in global information centres used 416.2 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity or about 3 percent of the world’s electricity and thereby producing 2 percent of total global emissions. Google alone used 5.7 TWh that year. To put this into perspective, this was more than the electricity consumed by the whole of the United Kingdom’s usage (300 TWh) and the same carbon footprint as the global aviation industry (9) . Similarly, the energy demands of virtual block-chain currencies such as Bitcoin are immense and will only increase as the production of currency slows down. The Economist recently reported that the power use for the servers that produce the software for Bitcoin software is at least 22 TWh per year which is about the same as Ireland’s (10). There are people implicated in all of this too. Each time content is moderated in social media, what Wired calls a “a vast, invisible pool of human labor” checks it and reports that already in 2014 there were over 100,000 people moderating the content of the world's social media sites, mobile apps, and cloud storage services, which was around twice the amount of people working directly for Google and nearly 14 times that of Facebook (11).

Here is a fable about global systems that gives us a way of thinking about how we might see them. The story begins with an aging pirate king who has a secret treasure that he intends to share with his many children. He wants them to be able to recover the treasure if three or more of them work together, but not allow for a smaller group of one or two to find the treasure by themselves. To do this he divides information about the location in such a way that if any three of the siblings cooperate then they would have information to recover the treasure; but that one or two would not know enough by themselves. The story is told by Jon Kleinberg, Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, who writes:
“Like many deep insights, the answer is easy enough to understand in retrospect. The pirate king draws a secret circle on the globe (known only to himself) and tells his [children] that he’s buried the treasure at the exact southernmost point on this circle. Three points are enough to uniquely reconstruct a circle, so any three pirates can pool their information, identify the circle and find the treasure. But for any two pirates, an infinity of circles pass through their two points, and they cannot know which is the one they need for recovering the secret.” (12)

As Kleinberg explains, distribution of partial information forms the basis of modern data security protocols. However, what the parable also tells us is relevant to O’Brien’s work. On one hand it reminds us of the role of aesthetics in analytic and epistemological practices. And on the other it shows how cooperation and collaboration can be used to see the bigger picture of otherwise hidden systems.

The systems that O’Brien frequently bases her work on are both visible and invisible; sometimes overt and often occulted. From the ubiquitous climate system to the infrastructures of measurement that record its effects, all these systems are composed of so many different atoms and bits; and yet the very same rain falls on them all. O’Brien dwells on the grain and detail that make up the materialities of these information systems. Quotidian is a paean to their assorted fissures, edges and surfaces with their myriad flaws, patinas and blooms.

Francis Halsall is an academic, writer, and lecturer in Visual Culture at NCAD, Dublin. His work considers ideas, theories and histories of "Systems".

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1. Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1995) pg. 4
2. Claude Shannon, ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, Bell System Technical Journal, 27, (July & October, 1948) pp. 379–423 & 623–656
3. Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (1995) pg. 14
​4. Paul Dourish, The Stuff of Bits, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017) pg. 3
5. Paul Dourish, The Stuff of Bits, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017) pg. 17, original emphasis
6. Paul Dourish, The Stuff of Bits, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017) pg. 26
7. Paul Dourish, The Stuff of Bits, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017) pg. 23-4
8. ‘The Cloud Begins with Coal – Big Data, Big Networks, Big Infrastructure, and Big Power’, (2013) at https:www.tech-pundit.com (Accessed 26th Aug. 2019)
9. James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (London: Verso, 2018) pg.63
10. The Economist Group Limited, ‘Why bitcoin uses so much energy’, The Economist, (Jul 9, 2018) at: https://www.economist.com/ (Accessed 26th Aug. 2019)
11. These figures come from Hemanshu Nigam, who runs online safety consultancy SSP Blue and was former chief security officer of MySpace, quoted in Adrian Chen, ‘The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed’, https:www.wired.com (Accessed 26th Aug. 2019)
12. John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter, (London: Transworld Publishers, 2012) Pg. 74