Comment by zenoprax
3 days ago
I think you're playing language games here. What does an "analog virtual thing" look like?
Digital = expressed by discrete bits of encoded digits (1s and 0s). Analog = lossy and necessarily physical
A "digital physical thing" is just a physical thing (disc) with digital things encoded on it.
>What does an "analog virtual thing" look like?
The image of an apple, stored as an analog signal on a magnetic tape.
>A "digital physical thing" is just a physical thing (disc) with digital things encoded on it.
Correct, a digital physical thing stores digital virtual things, and an analog physical thing stores analog virtual things.
> image of an apple, stored as an analog signal on a magnetic tape
If I am following along...
analog virtual: representation of apple on photographic film digital physical: disc with film.mkv
Given the two remaining combinations:
analog physical: unexposed photographic film? digital virtual: binary-encoded data (film.mkv)?
Anything beyond this and it becomes a philosophical or metaphysical discussion though.
Another example of Analog Virtual is Hokusai's The Great Wave (and similar prints). I recently watched David Bull's videos about his recreation of it [0] and it was fascinating to hear him tell about how even the "original" prints were made from slightly different woodblocks made in the same workshop.
[0] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLK-Wicsj5rAasS2g7e-Z9eFUd...
>digital virtual: binary-encoded data
Arguably the raw binary data still has a physical aspect, because it hasn't been interpreted yet (other than a reordering by the file system). The virtual thing is what the data ultimately represents.
Another subtlety is that a drawing on a page would be an analog representation of the thing, but if the drawing has the shape 右 and the page is placed between two doors, there would be a virtual idea encoded digitally as well.