The indiscernibility of disciplines - as an indirect result of exhausting media’s limits - along with the proliferation of possibilities that the digital introduces, opens up new problematics; translatability, being one of them.

 

The battered dualism ‘analog vs digital’ is only overcome by posing new problems that point beyond essentialistic differences. In other words, it no longer seems relevant to ask how the continuous waveform becomes a discrete sequence of samples. Instead, and perhaps more interestingly, we should examine the ways in which the material conditions of media become digital, and even more importantly, how the digital conditions of software engineering become material. Constant exchange between these perpetually reconfigured domains suggests anything but similarity, even though they could maintain certain relationships. To that extent, through these transformations, the categories of sensibility seem to fuse to a point where we can legitimately ask: How to render the phonon visible, or the pixel audible?