The E-Chink and the Origins of Binary Code

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Godfreeed liteness, a polymath, and also a very religious person had a role in the development of binary numbers.
For him, rather than this binary being about the ultimate either or, the purity of the one and the zero were symbolic of the Christian idea of creation, ex niello, out of nothing, something.
In other words, the one and the zero were symbolic of emergence.
He was contrasting both the materialism of his time but also the free scientific thinking.
Complex. But yeah, it's more interesting than just ones and zeros.
Exactly. There it is. At least there's this little chink of light that in the DNA of the binary.
He got that idea out of the echink.
And then he worked with the ichink, right? That's so fascinating.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
No, I mean, he was trying to shore up this idea he had of ones and zeros being emblematic of creation, ex niello, as the kind of power of creation and ultimately of God.
And he was looking for examples of it in other ancient traditions so that he could show it came not just out of his own kind of study, but that was present within the history of humanity more broadly.
He had a friend who was a Jesuit missionary to the 17th century,.

You might want to take a walk with this one. It is big and full of brain food and an enlivening opening of imagination to possibilities that are emergent now: the notion of the “broad commonwealth of life” that we are “inextricably entangled with and suffused by”; the paradox that the more accurately you try to measure some things, the more unmeasurable they become; the way words we use all the time have kept our cellular belonging to the natural world alive, even as civilization forgot.

The technologist/artist James Bridle brings all of this into interplay with an intriguing, refreshing lens on our lives with technology — and with all that artificial intelligence is and might become.

You might not think of intelligence the same way again, or the truth of mythology, or the letters of the alphabet, or what it means to be human. And you will smile next time you access the place where your digital life is stored and realize what it says about us that we named it The Cloud.

James Bridle is an artist and technologist and author of the books Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence and New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. Their writing has appeared in The Guardian, Wired, The Atlantic, and many other places. Their art has been exhibited around the world, including at NOME Gallery in Berlin.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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