Another extract of the rwm.macba.cat interview with Matthew Fuller.

"Friedrich Kittler proposes that the early 70s was the last time any single person knew what was going on in a particular computer, now the complexity of each semi conductor, each circuit is such that it has to be jointly held knowledge or different teams of specialist within a company would be able to describe this.

That is interesting because there is a kind of threshold of knowledge that has been passed. It's often said that Leibniz was the last real polymath, who was able to operate across disciplines, you know this was in the 17th century.

And if what Kittler suggests is true, then we have a condition where a single artefact has become so complex that a single person can not describe it in all its detail anymore. And this is very interesting state being on the one hand it means that the traditional form of knowledge if humanities knowledge is being held by an individual person is no longer tenable and we have to start working in ways that are collective, to think about what is the form of knowledge that is appropriate or what is the form of research that is appropriate to the humanities and the arts if collective working becomes more and more a way of gaining traction on different scales of reality, then maybe this is something that we have to deal with? But it also that, since the systems are less knowable, there is more capacity in some ways for approaches that de-structure the possibilities for control, there is the possibility within a grounds of a more or less knowable more or less unknowable system for certain kinds of autonomies, certain kinds of freedom certain kinds of experimentation to be established, so the unknowable is also useful in this regard."

Thanks to Colm for the transcription! (link)

Link to the interview on Macba: http://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/matthew-fuller-main/capsula