In which Hammie considers the word Cipher

Cipher is a very noir word with a certain amount of sex appeal because it brings to mind swarthy code-cracking strangers or Francis Bacon doing steganography (my type). Cipher is also a generous word – it has at least seven definitions – and a currently a la mode word – it has less than six degrees of separation from hacking, hacktivism and digital activism, as its contemporary usage often describes an algorithmic method for performing encryption and decryption on the net.
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It’s a word that started out meaning very little, with an etymology that leads us back to nothing, zilch, goose egg, void, and zero; it’s the grandchild of the Sanskrit name śūnya, literally meaning ‘empty,’ and later the Arabic çifr, used to describe the arithmetical symbol ‘zero’ or ‘nought.’ It moved through medieval Latin: cifera, Spanish: cifra, on through Old French: cyfre, along the way retaining its gist of zero-ness, but also graciously opening up its usage to apply to all numeral figures, then more generally to describe any set of characters with symbolic or hieroglyphic functions. In the nineteenth century, a weatherman in Cincinnati used it to describe the zero-point on a thermometer, indicating its persisting allegiance to zero – and the likelihood of a raw evening.
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By the sixteen hundreds, Cipher was used most commonly in its sense of being a symbolic string of characters, or a code – one used to conceal a message with a key required to unlock it. Later, as computation developed, cipher took on a technical meaning: an algorithmic series of steps used to encrypt digital information. Today the usage of cipher enlists both technical and non technical definitions. Its hybridity reminds us how intuitively alike language and mathematics are; it’s used by some writers as a big-hammer style replacement (but not a synonym for) metaphor, and by white-hat digital activists to describe a computational tool used to convey a message in a way that circumvents digital surveillance. And it’s also used, increasingly by new-media-focused scholars and critics, with a bent somewhere in the middle: as an amphibious term triangulated by proxy, metaphor, and encryption, usually to describe a set of aesthetic choices that exist to translate something absent, either a future or a past that is unavailable for literal use this instant. Its zero origin lurks beneath the surface in this contemporary usage; it describes something that is not present – a zero – but that may multiply in a teratological futurity. 

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Andrew Norman’s review of Wyatt Niehaus’s first solo show for DIS magazine describes the exhibition’s content – eight C-prints depicting car interiors and a video televising their entirely robotic production process – as functioning to highlight the absent laborer in the contemporary ‘smart’ robotic assembly line. So the exhibition suggests, the thickening layers of code written by machines for machines render cars a distant derivative of human labor, mediated by numerical strings, or ciphers, which are increasingly not written for human comprehension. Norman speculates that the topmost layer of production – automobile R&D – may be the next stage to be swallowed up by ‘smart’ technology, wondering ‘what if this cipher were to move up a level?’. Cipher here takes on a multi-functional usage, referring to the new ‘smart’ software being used in the industry – the ‘dark language’…never intended to be read by a person’ – but also referring to the broader symbolic value of the installation: the installation acts as a cipher for a certain set of ideas about the future. 

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This future-speculative quality of cipher also appears in a Frieze op-ed written this June: Rachel Marsden describes the narrative around Hong Kong that emerges in a group show of Hong Kong artists: ‘As 2047 draws closer, when the ‘one country, two systems’ deal between Hong Kong and China expires, ‘From Ocean to Horizon’ attempts to construct an anti- or apolitical state of being, as a cipher for an unknown future’. Cipher here acts as encryption of something to come; as placeholder for currently inscrutable space or characters. 

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Perhaps the most hybrid and etymologically unifying application of cipher is the Xenofeminist usage of it in cultural theory and aesthetics. Cipher is used in a way that reunites its original meaning of zero with its evolved meaning of acting as a code or cryptogram. Amy Ireland prefaces a recent essay for e-flux – in which she presents the ideas of Cyberfeminist scholar Sadie Plant and considers the molecular potential of a bio-hacked and bootstrapped female body of the future – with a quote from ‘Amphibious Maiden,’ the 1998 cybernetics speculative fiction: ‘This sex which was never one is not an empty zero but a cipher. A channel to the blank side, to the dark side, to the other side of the cycle’. Cipher here is enlisted as a multitool. It is zero; woman as lack of phallus; void. But it is ‘not an empty zero,’ because it is also a code, a set of signs, a lexicon which intimates the production of something in the future – for Plant, ‘cyberfeminism is received from the future.’ Here, Cipher is zero as much as it is a constellation of ideas and signs that need to be cracked open. 

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The uptick in use of cipher in contemporary art criticism and fields like cultural studies has supplanted the (observable) declining popularity of the term metaphor, perhaps because where metaphor has a certain clunkiness that appeals to an oversimplified ontology, cipher has the texture of actually bringing the thing being alluded to into being. Metaphor, ironically, perhaps feels too literal for contemporary writers, too dismissive of the potential to actualize the absent information encoded. Whereas cipher, a code with productive capacity, feels more like a portal. 

1. OED, Cipher, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/33155, [accessed 23 September 2017].
2. Andrew Norman, ‘Discerning the Darkness: Wyatt Niehaus’s ‘Lights Out’’, DIS magazine, http://dismagazine.com/blog/65768/discerning-the-darkness-wyatt-niehauss-lights-out/ [accessed 24 September  2017]. 
3. Norman, ‘Discerning the Darkness: Wyatt Niehaus’s ‘Lights Out’’, in reference to Kenneth Goldsmith’s book Uncreative Writing
4. Rachel Marsden, ‘On Shaky Ground’, Frieze, https://frieze.com/article/shaky-ground, [accessed 24 September 2017]. 
5. Xenofeminism refers to a cybernetic feminist ‘coalition with the belief that “Technoscientific innovation must be linked to a collective theoretical and political thinking in which women, queers, and the gender non-conforming play an unparalleled role’. Labor Cuboniks, ‘Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation’, XF Manifesto, http://www.laboriacuboniks.net/#zero/3 [accesed 24 September 2017]. 6.  Amy Ireland, ‘Black Circuit: Code for the Numbers to Come’, e-flux, Journal #80 - March 2017, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/80/100016/black-circuit-code-for-the-numbers-to-come/, [accessed 23 September 2017] (Section 2, Women). 

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