black box // last words

 the black box functions as a perfect synecdoche: one surviving part that at a human and material level, can reassemble the disintegrated whole

http://planecrashinfo.com/lastwords.htm

Eric Partridge suggests that it is in use from 1945 in RAF slang to signify any mysterious, clever piece of equipment on board a plane (interestingly, he says it was first applied to a device that allowed bomb aimers to see through clouds or darkness). Presumably the term gets transferred to one specific device, the flight recorder, not because the insides of such a thing are particularly intricate or mysterious (it’s just a sound recorder), but because they are made to be inaccessible. But, in either case, the ‘black box’ seems to point to a new phase of machinery, one in which machines, traditionally things which can be made fully explicit, and opened up to show their workings, start to have the same magical inaccessibility as selves, persons or souls.

http://literature-technology-media.co.uk/?p=280

Definition of the Composite

 Definition of the Composite
Any body, assumed under a determined name, is divisible, as we consider it act of the body.

Definition of the Whole and the Part
In the whole the part is identified by any thing you individuate as smaller than the whole; the whole is that which results as a composite of all the parts.


Definition of the Figure
The figure is that which is limited by a curved line or by more than two straight lines, that is, a determined proportion of body and plane.

De Minimo IV, vii, 284-287

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To this end, the process of bringing the materials together (orchestration) in the minimum is not of composition but is determined by squeezing, wrapping endlessly, creasing within and over creases, compressing into each other, shoving upward and downward, pressing out from the sides, staging all processes that bring together through the dynamics of forces risen between materials and masses, yield and stress, nonlinear elasticity and flow plasticity: an architectural forge-press.

Reza Negarestani

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 digital dark ages
A famous real example is with NASA, whose early space records have suffered from a Dark Age issue more than once. For over a decade, magnetic tapes from the 1976 Viking Mars landing were unprocessed. When later analyzed, the data was unreadable as it was in an unknown format and the original programmers had either died or left NASA. The images were eventually extracted following many months of puzzling through the data and examining how the recording machines functioned

Of Parts and Wholes

Self-similarity and Synecdoche in Science, Culture and Literature