Art, Code, and the Engine of Change

Abstract

When I was a boy, back in the 1960s, my father took me to the university computer center. I saw core memory that took up a huge, desk-size module. One bit was a donut-shape magnet, one millimeter across, that I could have held between thumb and forefinger. This represented the fundamental unit of the human artifact that Alan Turing referred to as a “universal machine.”1 Since then, one bit of storage has shrunk to dimensions so vanishingly small it seems more idea than object. Computers have become devices at once ubiquitous and practically invisible. Microprocessors hide in plain sight in cars and kitchens. Digital communications span the globe. The personal computer and the internet are only the most obvious sites of computational technology. Every medium bears its mark, as do the clothes we wear and the food we eat. It permeates our society, yet we are oddly oblivious to it. For a while, everything new and wonderful was “digital”—now the term elicits little more than a yawn, the consumer's ultimate revenge. Like the fish in the Zen koan, we swim but do not know the meaning of water.