Induction, Deduction and Transduction: On the Aesthetics and Logic of Digital Objects

Abstract

The article questions the two dominant views on media aesthetics – one takes the empiricist stance, and the other pushes forwards a media-technological a priori – in order to posit a third view. This view is transcendental empiricism, which one can trace in the work of Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze. This article demonstrates this argument with the example of digital objects – the new form of industrial objects composed of data and metadata – and proposes to investigate their aesthetics by articulating three logical operators – induction, deduction and transduction – as correlations to the three views mentioned above.