Unfolding Digital Materiality: How Engineers Struggle to Shape Tangible and Fluid Objects

Abstract

indexing events (speeches, musical performances, applause, etc.) in the digitized files. To complete this work, operators must "tag" the events that occurred on stage at the time of recording. In order to do so, the lab team is often confronted with the need to remove a number of uncertainties that "primary digitization" (conversion of the analog signal into a digital signal) has not dispelled: what is recorded on the digitalized tapes? In what state are they? What does their video and video signal say? What songs were played that evening on stage?By working on the case of soft and very light artifacts -the shaping of digital pieces of music from recorded live concerts -we challenge the "hardness/softness" of things and look at specific textures of the digital such as digital spatiality, relations and embedded networks, enabling and constraining. The challenge here is that of working on a seemingly double immateriality: music and digital. Following Hennion (2015b), we propose to consider digital (music) as something that has no proper matter of its own while only manifesting its presence to those who interact concretely with it. It is made of matter in the sense of Latour (2013), that is to say "the set of all the other beings upon which any given entity depends" (Latour, MoE) 2 . This conception of matter as a network of relations allows to free the question "what is digital made of?" from the quest for an essence by providing a relational understanding of materiality. The matter-network proposed by Latour relates to a sociotechnical network, that is to say a set of associations between heterogeneous entities, human or not (Callon 1986), assemblage (Latour 2005) that makes beings exist. Since a thing is made through movements and the process of associating all the elements that constitute it, there is no reason to seek which of these elements is the most To be publisher in: D.Ribas, J.Vertesi, DigitalSTS: A Handbook and Fieldguide. Princeton University Presse important or ontologically superior, nor even of what "ingredients" it is composed.Understanding what a thing is made of thus equates to unfolding the operations that shape and maintain the sociotechnical network that underlies the existence of this thing.The aim of the analysis is then to describe this network of associations, paying attention to all the