BITS AS ANY-UNITS PUT IN PROPORTION WITH PROPORTION AND RATIO
Every building practice needs a smallest unit to bring things into proportion and controllable relations. Traditionally, these units are derived by setting some defined magnitude as elementray. The paradigmatic example is the so called column modules in the Art of Greek Temple Building, from which the ratio can be derived and declinated across scales to put the whole building into proportions. Today we are working with computers, where the elementary units are bits. Bits are the kind of units which render information into a technologically handable quantity. Yet bits are literally speaking a very strange thing – looked at within the language game of quantities, they are finite formal units of determinacity, or pure determinability. Hence we will call them Any-Bits, or Intensive Quantities. How exactly can they be thought to fit within the language game of quantities, magnitudes, numbers?
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