[...]locks, rulers, and bodies in force-free motion

Einstein's rethinking of *distant simultaneity* (part philosophy & part physics)
-judgment of simultaneous event: “that train arrives here at 7 o'clock" = "the pointing of the small hand of my watch to 7 and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events”

electrodynamics always depended on a view about kinematics : how clocks and rulers behaved in the absence of force

1891 Germany Leipzig was the site of one of the first electrically distributed time systems (to bind distant clocks to a single central clock) --> railroad lines

piecemeal ruin of time
•an inconvenience for the traveler
•actual difficulty of vital importance for the railway business and military

means of consistent calibration

🕓 coordinated time --> material-economic necessity + cultural imaginary
==> 1900 blossoming of chronometric patents: on remote alarms, remote regulation of pendula, telephonic, even wireless-transmission of time
}--> pass through the Swiss patent office in Bern & Einstein's desk --> Einstein's expertise on electromechanical devices (1902)

electromagnetic clock coordination : transforming small electrical currents into high-precision rotatory movements

}--> “time is money” --Galison--> no old-fashioned mechanical, hydraulic, or pneumatic system would do--electricity was the key to the future (a future that would only come about properly if humankind broke with its mechanical clock past riven by anarchy, incoherence, and routinization)

distant simultaneity --> political, profitable, pragmatic =/= anarcho-clockism

#title
international bureau of measurement

Einstein agonizing over the nature of moving bodies and electrodynamics
=/= ether: the centerpiece of nineteenth-century physical theories

kinematics: geometry of motion, behavior of matter in the absence of force

metaphysics of Einstein's relativity theory --Galison--> underlined through some of the most symbolized mechanisms of modernity ~ determining train arrival times using electromagnetically coordinated clocks (was precisely the technological issue that had been racking Europe 1902) : symbol of the interconnected sped-up world of modernity

*centralized time* distribution was the temporal-physical glory of the unified German empire

turn-of-the-century Euro-American world --> overlapping networks of coordination: webs of train tracks, telegraph lines, meteorological networks, longitude surveys under the watchful, increasingly universal, clock system
--> Einstein's special theory of relativity was (an imaginative) machine <-- Galison's technological reading of (Einstein's) most theoretical paper

Einstein had opened the zone of unification (but in the process:)
•he removed Berlin as the Zeitzentrum
•designed a machine that upended the very category of metaphysical centrality

post world war I
all the activities of man, whether conscious or unconscious (sleeping, eating, meditating, playing) take place in time; without order, without specified plans, we risk falling into anarchy (physical, intellectual and moral misery)
--Favarger--> the remedy: the precise measurement and determination of time with the rigor of an astronomical observatory
(to) democratize time : time rigor must be distributed electrically
(=/= gears and magnets)

Galison's exploring the material culture of clock coordination is to set Einstein's place in a universe of meaning --avoid--> two problematic positions (*on the relation of things to thoughts*):
1. materialism or empiricism: inductive, observation-centered account of scientific development (~ that ideas emerge causally and univalently from the disposition of objects and the impressions they make upon us) ==> “theory = provisional addition”
2. antipositivist movement of the 1960s and 1970s (that programmes, paradigms, and conceptual schemes came first ==reshape==> experiments and instruments all the way down) “thoughts fully structured things”

1902 --> triumph of the *electrical over the mechanical* was already symbolically wired to dreams of modernity
*electrical chronocoordination --signified--> political, cultural, technical unity all at once [*Einheitszeit = imperial empire (~= democracy, world citizenship, and antianarchism)]
*patent office: grandstand seat for the great parade of modern technologies
==> Einstein (eliminating the master clock + raising the conventionally set time to a physical principle ==> modern 20th century physics of relativity)

...................................

James Ash
on videogame designer (<-- i am applying that to technical animators)
distribution and transmission of media affects

[animators] work to create the potential for *positively affective encounters to occur* (encounters which increase the body’s capacity to act & produce associated positive senses of intensity)
creating critically and commercially successful

*producing contingency* (that designers attempt to manage and control)

rigging
the code space of the software environment +  embodied techniques hackers generate (in response to that environment)

*structural determination + emergent practice*

a key aspect of media today --Stiegler--> [*]selection: a decision is made to broadcast one story over another

testing --> calculative logics of anticipation and preemption --shape--> the contingency of the event

the actual practices of riggers (technical animator)

animation industry
the ways in which affect can be actively manipulated for commercial and economic ends in the design and production of consumer services and good

***technologies are affectively engineered*** <--Thrift--Ash-- microbiopolitics of the subliminal: doing without thinking, practices of anticipatory manipulation ==> position consumers of media as passive dupes (<-- زیرپوستی *hypodermic model of media power*)
--✕--> Ash: affective manipulation is necessarily a fragile achievement that is prone to failure and always reliant upon being continually reworked in the creative responses users develop in relation to the designed environments with which they interact [---> go to fandom and fan culture]

animation design (videogame): is a complex, problematic, and ongoing struggle between:
•the openness and performative play of contingency & chance (which emerge through the techniques and intelligences that users develop as they become skilled at these games)
•the mechanical systems and calculative rationalities through which these environments are designed

affective properties of contingency ==> commercially and critically successful

rig: assemblage of human and nonhuman actor
staging, managing, and controlling event [movement] within the limited computational architecture

(asking with Ash) how agency is distributed in the assemblages of various human and technical actors that make up rigging?

rig =/= architecture
shaping corporeal dispositions

(entertainment industry does work) to maintain and guard the contingent as a positive force

contingency: the unexpected, the random, the singular, the unrepeatable, or the surprising (that which cannot be pinned down by any process that attempts to pin it down) =/= boring
(Dastur, Dewsbury, Delanda)
--> you need *open skill: contingent tactically oriented understanding* (contextually-appropriate responsiveness, context-dependent ways, regulated improvisation) <-- hacker's talent

(Deleuzian) [*]affect: the outcome of an encounter between two or more bodies (which can be human or inhuman, organic or inorganic), which either increases or decreases a body's capacity for action

captivation --> the specificity of the ecological relationship between user and (image) environment

(game) design
cultivation of the right kinds of affects through quantitative variables in the game's database ~= (Latour's) laboratories: theatres of proof (through a process of decontextualization, the scientific experiment which isolates the factors it wants to study, an entity becomes nameable & calculable ==> predictable & knowable)
•Latour's laboratory --render--> a particular object/process =/=
•game develop --render--> contingency (contingent events [within an already existing horizon of expectation / coded struc[...]