Week 1 Response

Old media is continuous. For example, a painting’s brush strokes and lines are continuous. If we take a picture of the painting, we take the continuous strokes of the painting and render them using pixels. Thus, we are taking continuous data and converting it into discrete data to create an image. This is an example of digital media’s discrete property. Like digital media, language is also discrete. The world that we perceive is continuous, but when we express what we perceive, we convert our perception into a discrete representation by using sentences, words, and morphemes. We take the color spectrum, for example, which is a continuous entity, and we split the color spectrum into color names and categories (Manovich).

In Ian Hatcher’s Ping, Hatcher utilizes language to recreate sounds and events in the real world. At one point, sinking is repeated three times and sounds as if Hatcher is describing an object sinking. This is similar to how a computer may represent sinking in a video. It would utilize frames. The words sinking are similar to frames.

In The Listeners, Alexa’s synthetic language is used to represent a conversation, mimicking human conversation. However, Alexa’s synthetic language cannot recreate the human voice without converting the voice into a discrete representation of the voice.

Example: http://yhchang.com/ITS_A_BEAUTIFUL_AUTUMN_DAY_TO_RUN_FOR_YOUR_LIFE_V.html