Kleine Geschichte des
deutschen
Fernsehens.
Kittler-Friedrich-Optical-Media-pdf
If this high-tech muse did not exist, the only other remaining possibility would be a return from wireless transmission back to cable, as telegraphy was once defined.
By now, mind you, these cables have become more advanced with the development of higher-frequency optical fibers.
As you know, fiber-optic cables operate on the basis of laser light, which is reflected inconceivably often from one end of an inconceivably fine mirrored tube to the other.
They thus represent the first and probably very significant method of exceeding the speed of electricity, which is considerably delayed by conductors.
For the first time in the entire history of media, in other words, fiber-optic cables transmit optical signals as light rather than electricity, which enables them to absorb the enormous frequency band of HDTV.
This sensational tautology
of light becoming a transmission medium for light includes rather than excludes the possibility that the same speed of light also benefits all other signals. Besides television signals, optical fibers can also transport electronically converted acoustics, texts or computer data, and can thus be promoted to the position of a general medium, just as Hegel had already celebrated light.
224
? ? -4- COMPUTERS
Projects like ISDN (an integrated fiber-optic network for any type of information), which have long been in the planning stages, change not only the transmission methods of contemporary media systems but also the processing itself. The introduction of HDTV and ISDN conflates television not only with old-fashioned film, but also and above all with the medium of all media: computer systems. It is already clear that a data compression technology like MUSE is no longer concerned witb genuine optical processes like signs, colors, and etchings (to formulate it in old-fashioned painter terminology). On the contrary, MUSE entails tbe application of rules for computing or algorithms on optical signals, which could be applied just as well in acoustics or cryptography because they are perfectly indifferent towards medial contents or sensory fields, and because all of them end up in that universal discrete machine invented by Alan Mathison Turing in 1936, the computer. In 1943, the computer had a mission that was crucial to the war: to crack the Wehrmacht's entire coded ultra short wave radio. Ever since the Pax Americana has become the worldwide basis of all high technology, it has assumed the task of decoupling the knowledge of this planet from its populations and thus also making it transmissible on an interstellar level. For this
reason, visible optics must disappear into a black hole of circuits at the end of these lectures on optical media.
To begin with, computer technology simply means being serious about the digital principle. What are only the edits between frames in film or tbe holes in the Nipkow disks or shadow mask screens in tele- vision become the be all and end all of digital signal processing. There are no longer any differences between individual media or sensory fields: if digital computers send out sounds or images, whether to
225
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a so-called human-machme interface or not, they mternally work only with endless strings of bits, which are represented by electrical voltage. Every individual sound or pixel must then actually be con- structed out of countless elements, but when these bIts are processed quickly enough, as the mathematician John von Neumann recognized in the face of his first atomic bomb, everything that is switchable also becomes feasible. The standard currently lies somewhere between ten and 70 million bit operations per second, but in the near future optical circuits could increase this number still further by a factor of a few million. In any case, Melies' Charcuterie mechanique, with its cutting between frames every second and its cuttiug of a pig every minute, is now obsolete because a computer that processes or outputs audiovisual data functions like a cutter that no longer circumvents only our perception time (like all analog media), but also the time of so-called thinking. That is why every possible way of manipulating data is at its disposal.
In contrast to film, television was already no longer optics. It is possible to hold a film reel up to the sun and see what every frame shows. It is possible to intercept television signals, but not to look at them, because they only exist as electronic signals. The eyes can only access these signals at the beginning and end of the transmis- sion chain, in the studio and on the screen. Digital image processing thus ultimately represents the liquidation of this last remainder of the imaginary.
The reason is simple: computers, as they have existed since World War II, are not designed for image-processing at all. On the contrary, it is possible to grasp the history of their development in connection with Vilem Flusser's notion of the virtual abolition of all dimensions. In Flusser's model, the first symbolic act, which began at some point in the prehistory of human civilization, was to abstract a three- dimensional sign out of the Jour-dimensional continuum of space and time. This sign stood for the continuum, but because of this dimensional reduction it could also be manipulated. Some examples are obelisks, gravestones, and pyramids. The second step consisted in signifying this three-dimensional sign through a two-dimensional sign. A gravestone could be signified by a painting of a pieta, for example, which once again increased the possibilities of manipula-
tion. The third step was dimensional through the which McLuhan's media pages since the eleventh deserves its own lecture.
the replacement or denotation of the two-
alleged one-dimensionality of text or print, theory also claims, although all of our book century are structured surfaces - but that
226
? ? COMPUTERS
What all of these reductions had in common was that the n-l dimensional signifier at the same time also concealed, disguised, and distorted the signified, that is, n dimensional. This is the reason for the polemics of Greek philosophers against gods of flesh and blood, the wars of iconoclasts or reformers against religious images, and finally, in the modern era, the war of technology and natnral science against a textual concept of reality. In this last war, according to Flusser, one-dimensional texts have been replaced by zero-dimen- sional numbers or bits - and the point is that zero dimenslOns do not include any danger of concealment whatsoever.
When seen from this perspective, computers represent the success- ful reduction of all dimensions to zero. This is also the reason why their input and output consisted of stark columns of numbers for the first ten years after 1943. Operating systems like UNIX introduced the first one-dimensional command lines in the sixties, which were then replaced by a graphic or two-dimensional user interface in the seventies, beginning with the Apple Macintosh. The reason for this dimensional growth was not the search for visual realism, but rather its purpose was to open up the total programmability of Turing machines at least partially to the users, which demands as many dimensions as possible due to the inconceivable number of program- ming possibilities.
The transition to three-dimensional user interfaces (or even four- dimensional ones if time is included as a parameter), which today goes by the phrase "virtual reality," can of course also be understood as an expansion of the operational possibilities. Virtual realities allow for the literal immersion of at least two distant senses, the eye and the ear, and at some point they will also enable the immersion of all five senses. Historically, however, they did not originate from the immanence of the development of the computer, but rather from film and television.
An American named Fred Waller already realized in the thirties that normal film formats do not fill up the field of vision of two eyes at all. For this reason, Waller developed Cinerama, which combined three or even five cameras and projectors arranged next to each other. The films were projected onto semicircular screens, which surrounded the spectator so that the spectator's entire field of vision was conse- quently immersed in the film image. This technology was primarily designed for flight simulators, and it thus served a military purpose. In the fifties, Morton L. Heilig replaced Waller's film projectors with small television cameras directly in front of both eyes, which thus replaced the mass consumers in the cinema hall with a simple,
227
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lonely cybernaut. Virtual reality as the bombardment of the senses, and above all of the senses of bomber pilot trainees, was born (see Halbach, 1993).
However, this hunt for visual realism should not deceIVe us with regard to the basic principles of computer graphics. The fundamen- tal difference between Heilig and today's virtual realities is that Cinerama simply filmed the New York Broadway, while computers must calculate all optical or acoustic data on their own precisely because they are born dimensionless and thus imageless. For this reason, images on computer monitors - and there are now already almost as many as televisions - do not reproduce any extant things, surfaces, or spaces at all. They emerge on the surface of the monitor through the application of mathematical systems of equations. In contrast to television images, which ever since Nipkow's disks consist of more or less continuous lines but discrete columns, this surface is composed from the outset of a square matrix of individual points or even pixels, and it is therefore also discretely controlled on the horizontal axis. With super VGA, the leading monitor standard at the moment, the manic cutter known as the computer has free reign over 640 times 480 pixels and 256 different colors, and these variables are determined at the leisure of the image-processing algorithms. Whether the screen is supposed to represent the quantity of real numbers or complex numbers is mathematically only a question of convention. In any case, the computer functions not merely as an improved typewriter for secretaries, who are permitted to relinquish their old-fashioned typewriters, but rather as a general interface
between systems of equations and sensory perception - not to say nature. In 1980, the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot proceeded to analyze a very elementary equation of a complex variable point for point on the computer screen. The equation itself had been known since 1917, but it would take mathematicians at best millions of days to calculate it with paper and pencil. It is also significant that the color samples first made possible on the computer screen have since been given splendid names like "apple men," "cantor dust," or "seahorse region," as they produced a nature that no human eye had previously recognized as a category: the category of clouds and sea waves, of sponges and shorelines. Digital image-process- ing coincides with the real, therefore, precisely because it does not want to be a reproduction like the conventional arts. Silicon chips, which consist of the same element as every pebble on the wayside, calculate and reproduce symbolic structures as digitizations of the real.
228
? ? COMPUTERS
For this reason, the transition from today's system, which consists of silicon chips for processing and storage and gold wires or copper webs for transmission, to systems of fiber-optic cables and optical circuits will exponentially increase not only the calculation speed of digital images, but also the mathematical structure of self-similarity discovered by Mandelbrot. For example, when a glass diffracts inci- dental light, producing the effects known since Fresnel as interfer- ence and color moire, it is already by nature a mathematical analysis that could only be processed in an extremely time-consuming way by serial Von Neumann computers. So why spend so much effort translating this light into electrical information and then process- ing this information serially or consecutively if the same light can already calculate itself and above all simultaneously? At the end of this lecture, I would like to look ahead to the future of optical media, to a system that not only transmits but also stores and pro- cesses light as light. In a last dramatic peripeteia of its deeds and sufferings, this ligbt will thus cease to be continuous electromagnetic waves. On the contrary, to adapt Newton freely, it will again func- tion in its twin nature as particles in order to be equally as universal, equally as discrete, and equally as manipulable as today's computers. The optimum of such manipulability in the virtual vacuum of inter- stellar space is already mathematically certain. With this optimum,
every individual bit of information corresponds to an individual light pixel, yet these pixels no longer consist of countless phosphorescent molecules, as on television and computer screens, but rather of a single light quantum or photon. Whereupon the maximum trans- mission rate of the information of a simple equation, which can no longer be physically surpassed, is: C = (3. 7007)(ffi/h). To put it into words, the maximum transmission rate of light as information or information as light is eqnal to the square root of the quotient of photon energy divided by Plank's constant mnltiplied by an empirical coefficient.
Equations are there for the purpose of being inconceivable and thns simply circumventing optical media and lectures about them. For this reason, allow me a single illustration at the end. Imagine an individual photon in a vacuum like the first star in the evening sky, which is otherwise empty and infinite. Think of the emergence of this single star in a fraction of a second as the only information that counts. And listen to this passage from Pynthon's great world war novel, where the old rocket officer from Peenemiinde talks to the young man whom he sent on the first rocket trip into space, from which he will never return:
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The edge of evening . . . the long curve of people all wishing on the first
star . . . Always remember those men and women along the thousands of miles of land and sea. The true moment of shadow is the moment in which you see the point of light in the sky. The single point, and the shadow that has just gathered you in its sweep . . . Always remember. (Pynchon, 1973, pp. 7S9-60)
So much for the algorithms of random, namely digital data in the domain of images. What I have been able to tell you are only the algorithms that America's National Security Agency, the NSA, have released up to now. There are possibly algorithms from general staffs or secret services that have long been more efficient, but which are still top secret. It is impossible to persuade oneself that November 9, 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall) marked the end of every war. The east is surely defeated - through propaganda television at the consumer level and through computer export embargoes at the pro- duction level; but in the southern hemisphere there still remains the problem of information versus energy, algorithms versus resources, which is at least 200 years old.
In the world war between algorithms and resources, the 2,000-year- old war between algorithms and alphabets and between numbers and letters has practically faded into obscurity. For this reason, I would like to address my final words directly to you. For the past 14 lec- tures about optical media I have resisted the temptation to write my own computer graphics programs (whatever "own" means in the world of algorithms). Instead, simple boring lecture manuscripts emerged under the dictates of a text-processing program named WORD 5. 0. As long as Europe's universities have not installed high- performance data lines to all auditoriums and dormitories, no other choice remains. Under high-tech auspices, however, the entire lecture has been a waste of time. I am comforted by the hope that your generation will lay the high-frequency fiber-optic cables and crack the secret world war algorithms. All that remains is for me to thank your old-fashioned open ears and to conclude with an old-fashioned rock song, which penetrated the ears of my generation, which as you know, nothing and no one can close.
Leonard Cohen, A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes
I sing this for the army,
I sing this for your children
And for all who do not need me.
230
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of light becoming a transmission medium for light includes rather than excludes the possibility that the same speed of light also benefits all other signals. Besides television signals, optical fibers can also transport electronically converted acoustics, texts or computer data, and can thus be promoted to the position of a general medium, just as Hegel had already celebrated light.
224
? ? -4- COMPUTERS
Projects like ISDN (an integrated fiber-optic network for any type of information), which have long been in the planning stages, change not only the transmission methods of contemporary media systems but also the processing itself. The introduction of HDTV and ISDN conflates television not only with old-fashioned film, but also and above all with the medium of all media: computer systems. It is already clear that a data compression technology like MUSE is no longer concerned witb genuine optical processes like signs, colors, and etchings (to formulate it in old-fashioned painter terminology). On the contrary, MUSE entails tbe application of rules for computing or algorithms on optical signals, which could be applied just as well in acoustics or cryptography because they are perfectly indifferent towards medial contents or sensory fields, and because all of them end up in that universal discrete machine invented by Alan Mathison Turing in 1936, the computer. In 1943, the computer had a mission that was crucial to the war: to crack the Wehrmacht's entire coded ultra short wave radio. Ever since the Pax Americana has become the worldwide basis of all high technology, it has assumed the task of decoupling the knowledge of this planet from its populations and thus also making it transmissible on an interstellar level. For this
reason, visible optics must disappear into a black hole of circuits at the end of these lectures on optical media.
To begin with, computer technology simply means being serious about the digital principle. What are only the edits between frames in film or tbe holes in the Nipkow disks or shadow mask screens in tele- vision become the be all and end all of digital signal processing. There are no longer any differences between individual media or sensory fields: if digital computers send out sounds or images, whether to
225
? oPTICAL MEDIA
a so-called human-machme interface or not, they mternally work only with endless strings of bits, which are represented by electrical voltage. Every individual sound or pixel must then actually be con- structed out of countless elements, but when these bIts are processed quickly enough, as the mathematician John von Neumann recognized in the face of his first atomic bomb, everything that is switchable also becomes feasible. The standard currently lies somewhere between ten and 70 million bit operations per second, but in the near future optical circuits could increase this number still further by a factor of a few million. In any case, Melies' Charcuterie mechanique, with its cutting between frames every second and its cuttiug of a pig every minute, is now obsolete because a computer that processes or outputs audiovisual data functions like a cutter that no longer circumvents only our perception time (like all analog media), but also the time of so-called thinking. That is why every possible way of manipulating data is at its disposal.
In contrast to film, television was already no longer optics. It is possible to hold a film reel up to the sun and see what every frame shows. It is possible to intercept television signals, but not to look at them, because they only exist as electronic signals. The eyes can only access these signals at the beginning and end of the transmis- sion chain, in the studio and on the screen. Digital image processing thus ultimately represents the liquidation of this last remainder of the imaginary.
The reason is simple: computers, as they have existed since World War II, are not designed for image-processing at all. On the contrary, it is possible to grasp the history of their development in connection with Vilem Flusser's notion of the virtual abolition of all dimensions. In Flusser's model, the first symbolic act, which began at some point in the prehistory of human civilization, was to abstract a three- dimensional sign out of the Jour-dimensional continuum of space and time. This sign stood for the continuum, but because of this dimensional reduction it could also be manipulated. Some examples are obelisks, gravestones, and pyramids. The second step consisted in signifying this three-dimensional sign through a two-dimensional sign. A gravestone could be signified by a painting of a pieta, for example, which once again increased the possibilities of manipula-
tion. The third step was dimensional through the which McLuhan's media pages since the eleventh deserves its own lecture.
the replacement or denotation of the two-
alleged one-dimensionality of text or print, theory also claims, although all of our book century are structured surfaces - but that
226
? ? COMPUTERS
What all of these reductions had in common was that the n-l dimensional signifier at the same time also concealed, disguised, and distorted the signified, that is, n dimensional. This is the reason for the polemics of Greek philosophers against gods of flesh and blood, the wars of iconoclasts or reformers against religious images, and finally, in the modern era, the war of technology and natnral science against a textual concept of reality. In this last war, according to Flusser, one-dimensional texts have been replaced by zero-dimen- sional numbers or bits - and the point is that zero dimenslOns do not include any danger of concealment whatsoever.
When seen from this perspective, computers represent the success- ful reduction of all dimensions to zero. This is also the reason why their input and output consisted of stark columns of numbers for the first ten years after 1943. Operating systems like UNIX introduced the first one-dimensional command lines in the sixties, which were then replaced by a graphic or two-dimensional user interface in the seventies, beginning with the Apple Macintosh. The reason for this dimensional growth was not the search for visual realism, but rather its purpose was to open up the total programmability of Turing machines at least partially to the users, which demands as many dimensions as possible due to the inconceivable number of program- ming possibilities.
The transition to three-dimensional user interfaces (or even four- dimensional ones if time is included as a parameter), which today goes by the phrase "virtual reality," can of course also be understood as an expansion of the operational possibilities. Virtual realities allow for the literal immersion of at least two distant senses, the eye and the ear, and at some point they will also enable the immersion of all five senses. Historically, however, they did not originate from the immanence of the development of the computer, but rather from film and television.
An American named Fred Waller already realized in the thirties that normal film formats do not fill up the field of vision of two eyes at all. For this reason, Waller developed Cinerama, which combined three or even five cameras and projectors arranged next to each other. The films were projected onto semicircular screens, which surrounded the spectator so that the spectator's entire field of vision was conse- quently immersed in the film image. This technology was primarily designed for flight simulators, and it thus served a military purpose. In the fifties, Morton L. Heilig replaced Waller's film projectors with small television cameras directly in front of both eyes, which thus replaced the mass consumers in the cinema hall with a simple,
227
? oPTICAL MEDIA
lonely cybernaut. Virtual reality as the bombardment of the senses, and above all of the senses of bomber pilot trainees, was born (see Halbach, 1993).
However, this hunt for visual realism should not deceIVe us with regard to the basic principles of computer graphics. The fundamen- tal difference between Heilig and today's virtual realities is that Cinerama simply filmed the New York Broadway, while computers must calculate all optical or acoustic data on their own precisely because they are born dimensionless and thus imageless. For this reason, images on computer monitors - and there are now already almost as many as televisions - do not reproduce any extant things, surfaces, or spaces at all. They emerge on the surface of the monitor through the application of mathematical systems of equations. In contrast to television images, which ever since Nipkow's disks consist of more or less continuous lines but discrete columns, this surface is composed from the outset of a square matrix of individual points or even pixels, and it is therefore also discretely controlled on the horizontal axis. With super VGA, the leading monitor standard at the moment, the manic cutter known as the computer has free reign over 640 times 480 pixels and 256 different colors, and these variables are determined at the leisure of the image-processing algorithms. Whether the screen is supposed to represent the quantity of real numbers or complex numbers is mathematically only a question of convention. In any case, the computer functions not merely as an improved typewriter for secretaries, who are permitted to relinquish their old-fashioned typewriters, but rather as a general interface
between systems of equations and sensory perception - not to say nature. In 1980, the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot proceeded to analyze a very elementary equation of a complex variable point for point on the computer screen. The equation itself had been known since 1917, but it would take mathematicians at best millions of days to calculate it with paper and pencil. It is also significant that the color samples first made possible on the computer screen have since been given splendid names like "apple men," "cantor dust," or "seahorse region," as they produced a nature that no human eye had previously recognized as a category: the category of clouds and sea waves, of sponges and shorelines. Digital image-process- ing coincides with the real, therefore, precisely because it does not want to be a reproduction like the conventional arts. Silicon chips, which consist of the same element as every pebble on the wayside, calculate and reproduce symbolic structures as digitizations of the real.
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For this reason, the transition from today's system, which consists of silicon chips for processing and storage and gold wires or copper webs for transmission, to systems of fiber-optic cables and optical circuits will exponentially increase not only the calculation speed of digital images, but also the mathematical structure of self-similarity discovered by Mandelbrot. For example, when a glass diffracts inci- dental light, producing the effects known since Fresnel as interfer- ence and color moire, it is already by nature a mathematical analysis that could only be processed in an extremely time-consuming way by serial Von Neumann computers. So why spend so much effort translating this light into electrical information and then process- ing this information serially or consecutively if the same light can already calculate itself and above all simultaneously? At the end of this lecture, I would like to look ahead to the future of optical media, to a system that not only transmits but also stores and pro- cesses light as light. In a last dramatic peripeteia of its deeds and sufferings, this ligbt will thus cease to be continuous electromagnetic waves. On the contrary, to adapt Newton freely, it will again func- tion in its twin nature as particles in order to be equally as universal, equally as discrete, and equally as manipulable as today's computers. The optimum of such manipulability in the virtual vacuum of inter- stellar space is already mathematically certain. With this optimum,
every individual bit of information corresponds to an individual light pixel, yet these pixels no longer consist of countless phosphorescent molecules, as on television and computer screens, but rather of a single light quantum or photon. Whereupon the maximum trans- mission rate of the information of a simple equation, which can no longer be physically surpassed, is: C = (3. 7007)(ffi/h). To put it into words, the maximum transmission rate of light as information or information as light is eqnal to the square root of the quotient of photon energy divided by Plank's constant mnltiplied by an empirical coefficient.
Equations are there for the purpose of being inconceivable and thns simply circumventing optical media and lectures about them. For this reason, allow me a single illustration at the end. Imagine an individual photon in a vacuum like the first star in the evening sky, which is otherwise empty and infinite. Think of the emergence of this single star in a fraction of a second as the only information that counts. And listen to this passage from Pynthon's great world war novel, where the old rocket officer from Peenemiinde talks to the young man whom he sent on the first rocket trip into space, from which he will never return:
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The edge of evening . . . the long curve of people all wishing on the first
star . . . Always remember those men and women along the thousands of miles of land and sea. The true moment of shadow is the moment in which you see the point of light in the sky. The single point, and the shadow that has just gathered you in its sweep . . . Always remember. (Pynchon, 1973, pp. 7S9-60)
So much for the algorithms of random, namely digital data in the domain of images. What I have been able to tell you are only the algorithms that America's National Security Agency, the NSA, have released up to now. There are possibly algorithms from general staffs or secret services that have long been more efficient, but which are still top secret. It is impossible to persuade oneself that November 9, 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall) marked the end of every war. The east is surely defeated - through propaganda television at the consumer level and through computer export embargoes at the pro- duction level; but in the southern hemisphere there still remains the problem of information versus energy, algorithms versus resources, which is at least 200 years old.
In the world war between algorithms and resources, the 2,000-year- old war between algorithms and alphabets and between numbers and letters has practically faded into obscurity. For this reason, I would like to address my final words directly to you. For the past 14 lec- tures about optical media I have resisted the temptation to write my own computer graphics programs (whatever "own" means in the world of algorithms). Instead, simple boring lecture manuscripts emerged under the dictates of a text-processing program named WORD 5. 0. As long as Europe's universities have not installed high- performance data lines to all auditoriums and dormitories, no other choice remains. Under high-tech auspices, however, the entire lecture has been a waste of time. I am comforted by the hope that your generation will lay the high-frequency fiber-optic cables and crack the secret world war algorithms. All that remains is for me to thank your old-fashioned open ears and to conclude with an old-fashioned rock song, which penetrated the ears of my generation, which as you know, nothing and no one can close.
Leonard Cohen, A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes
I sing this for the army,
I sing this for your children
And for all who do not need me.
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