Fabrication

Cubitt, Sean (2010) Fabrication. In, Kalantzis-Cope, Phillip and Gherab-Martin, Karim (eds.) Emerging Digital Spaces in Contemporary Society. Basingstoke, GB. Palgrave, pp. 207-219.

Abstract

A false etymology leads to a the word 'fabric', with its associations of weaving and knitting, practices Sadie Plant and others have descried in internet and mobile media. There is also a relevance to the archeology of visual imaging through the early use of textiles in half-tone printing, origin of the raster display nopw dominant in digital visual media. A second application takes us to the nano-scale production of chips, far too small to be made by hand, the root meaning of the alternative term 'manufacture'. An understanding of the material processes underpinning the glossy surfaces of digital audiovisual media takes us to such processes as growing crystalline lattices on CCD substrates. The third phase of the analysis takes us to the derogatory use of the term as a synonym for fiction. Digital entities are neither simulacra nor spectacle, nor in any clear sense constructions or realisms. They should be understood as fabricated in the two prior senses of weaving and of the taming of natural physical processes.

This tells us how and from what digital media are fabricated, but not why. Why weave fabrications over the world? Is it to hide the destruction of the natural environment in which digital media are so deeply implicated? Is it to harness human creativity to the cycle of innovation which an increasingly systematised capitalism is no longer capable of producing itself? Or is this the most recent terrain for the centuries-old struggle between flux and order?

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