Digital technology did not only give art new tools. Along the way it quietly rewrote the meaning of the words we use to describe communication itself. The lecture follows six of them.

Communication. The central model remains Shannon and Weaver's, from 1948: a sender encodes a message, sends it down a channel, and a receiver decodes it, with noise working against them the whole way. The model was built for telephony, but it is precise enough to describe any exchange between living beings and elastic enough to absorb everything electronic that came after it. Its most important clause is the reversal — when the receiver becomes the sender, communication has succeeded.

New media. For McLuhan, every new medium introduces a new tempo, and is an extension of the human body; electricity is the extension of our nervous system. The medium does not merely influence the message, it is the message. Media divide into hot and cold according to how much involvement they demand of the user. New media are the whole category of systems that the information technologies brought with them — and their decisive move was to take the centralized media of the previous technology and make them decentralized. They handle the complex, the subjective and the asynchronous. They are multimedia, fast, non-linear, interactive, hypergeographical.

Network. Networks were first built to spread a communication system outward, not to concentrate it — yet the railway network of the industrial revolution needed central stations and large urban centres, and road networks were hierarchical, ranked by the poles they joined. Electricity broke that: the electric network was present in every building, independent of size or place. Radio and television are available everywhere without exception, permitting "discontinuity and variety in the organization of space". With that, the network introduced a new scale as a method of perceptual organization — the unit and the whole — and its content acquired a dipole that recurs across social structures: the Individual and the Collective. Buckminster Fuller would later call these local instances and Universe. A network connects distant points of the same system.

Data and information. Data is what is given. Information is the crystallized image of the data — a subset, the part that interests us. Information always serves a particular organization, a gestalt; every organizing system selects and classifies data into information automatically. Information carries no noise, but for a different use the same information can be noise. Benjamin's flâneur gathers data from different physical spaces in order to convert it into the information that lets him keep wandering. The data is simply there.

Interaction. The most developed form of interaction is a live conversation between two people. One listens closely, understands the argument, and sets his own against it; in near real time the second changes tactics, and every sentence is the product of the one before. Nobody repeats the same argument in the same way. What matters is each speaker's capacity to handle non-linear events. Designing interaction means deciding how the machine will answer what a person does — and in physical computing the machine is no longer the closed box we know, but something dispersed, invisible, serving ordinary functions. The hybrid form asks us to define, from the start, who acts and how, what it will respond to, what information it will accept and what it will output.

Interface. The point, the space, the object, the field where communication takes place as interaction — as action and reaction. The interface encourages communication, makes it possible, and sometimes makes it necessary. As a filter or membrane it knows both poles, establishes their connection and mediates it.

Physical computing brings these together in an oxymoron: the relation of physical space to digital data, to information, and to computers — for many, a clearly separate and distant relation. It gives computers input and output devices other than the familiar mouse and keyboard, and lets the capabilities of a program and a machine enter a room.

The research presented here was developed for the chapter "From the Mechanical Age up to the Age of Information", in Keyboard Events: Architecture and Information — An Introduction to Physical Computing, edited by Aaron Cohen and Angelos Floros, University of Thessaly / Futura Publications, Athens, 2012.