A common experience which is hardly ever seriously discussed is the higher level of stress involved in working with digital media. Artists find themselves in the new situation of relying heavily on an only partially understood medium. The fear that your computer could suddenly develop a fault which you are ill equipped to solve is one which gains force as a deadline approaches.

If such a fault does occur at a critical moment then your reaction is likely to swing between blind panic and a kind of numbing fatalism. Both reactions stem from the fact that when something goes wrong there may be little you can do in time even if there is a technician at hand and a valid manufacturer's warranty.

The situation assumes the qualitiy of an act of God from which we can only pray for deliverance. In principle every problem in a machine can be traced back through some series of causal events, but in the case of a computer the possibility of practically doing so is often remote in the extreme and may not always lead to a solution anyway. This is the point at which people begin to treat their computers like spoilt children or jealous gods that must be pampered and appeased in order to ensure their continued co-operation. It is the limiting condition at which scientific determinism fades into myth, and anthropomorphism steps in to fill the void.

When it comes to the installation and maintenance of hardware architectures and operating systems the contingency of technical knowledge becomes apparent. Because the specifications of individual components are never entirely standardised one can never completely predict what the results of using them will be. Our knowledge of the system requirements of a certain device is never detailed enough to be certain that it will not conflict with another device or piece of software. Manufacturers can publish lists of hardware that their products have been 'tested' with but they cannot come close to examining all the combinations and permutations that are possible in a configured system. Computers are already so complicated that their enigmatic operation is nearer to the processes of a natural organism than a rigid machine.

All of this means that it can be impossible for the computer user to generalise their experiences into knowledge. When a problem is encountered on a computer the solution is very often to reinstall the software or to replace the malfunctioning component. The computer 'expert' is merely the person who can decompose the machine into individual parts for testing until the source of the problem is isolated. If instead each item is found to be in working order then the system will have to be repeatedly reconfigured in a process of trial and error until the incompatibility between the components is overcome. In this case the result will not necessarily lead to any information that is useful beyond the domain of each individual case because the configuration of each computer system is so specific.

This highly contingent situation removes the consistencies and repeatabilities that are necessary for a body of knowledge to take shape. We are left with the prospect that each person's computer is as individual as that person themselves. Each computer then becomes a historical object, in the sense that its diagnosis is dependent on a unique chain of upgrades and installations like a body with its unique medical record of allergies, operations and propensities. The engineer is replaced by the clinician. And it is a 'holistic' clinician at that, having to adjust each body part in accordance with the needs of the whole configured system. Just as a feeling of helplessness descends on those when their illness is treated by strange doctors with no understanding of their background or priorities, it is distressing to see a technician rummaging around inside a computer upon which they depend every day for their livelihood. Confidence is restored and effectiveness may be increased when the 'expert' is taken through the computer's evolution, through cycles of replacements and augmentations and introduced to the history of the success and failure of previous attempts to reconfigure it. The user returns to a position of direction and responsibility in which detailed technical expertise is not essential rather than remaining the victim of unknown forces. Knowledge then becomes localised and situated, a combination of sensitivities, workaround solutions and compromises and as well as familiarity with patterns of logical resources and specifications. Anthropomorphism is replaced by therapeutics.

Dr. Future [future@backspace.org]