No More Learning

Techno- logically, television - as electrified four-color printing - will derive from this its separation between chrominance (or color value) and luminance (or brightness value).
The first person to convert the new color physiology into technol- ogy again was none other than James Clark Maxwell, to whom we
204
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
owe the general field theory of magnetism and electricity - the prin- ciple of all wireless radio communication - and the clarification that visible light does not consist of elastic vibrations, but rather it is only a special case of that electromagnetic spectrum. In 1861, Maxwell took black-and-white photographs of the same object, colored them in the three primary colors, and successfully projected the images over one another. This would later become the basic circuit of both color film and color television, and it had consequences for painters and technicians.
To begin correctly with the technicians: in 1868, the "ingenious [photographer] Ducos du Hauron" connected the physiology of Young (and Helmholtz) with the media technology of Maxwell (Bruch, 1967, p. 35). He literally suggested: "Small points and lines in the three primary colors red, green, and blue are placed next to each other on a plate so closely that they all merge into the same blended white at the same time. When the elements of all three colors are equally bright, they cover the same parts of the surface; when one color is less bright, more elements are taken from this color and they become larger" (Bruch, 1967, p. 35).
Ingenious blueprints rarely creep up so softly. First, Ducos du Hauron reversed the entire working principle of painting by replac- ing the subtractive color synthesis of a painter's palette, where the mixing of all colors together results in black, with Newton's and Maxwell's additive synthesis, where the sum of all colors results in white. Because there are no white phosphorescent materials in nature, incidentally, the white that has appeared on black-and-white screens since 1930 is also in technological reality a meticulously bal- anced mixture of complementary colors, whose addition results in this white. Second and possibly even more importantly, Ducos du Hauron hegan the digitization of color images. Just like the recently invented telegraph, he built colored areas out of "dots and dashes," which in the eye became the illusion of an apparently uniform colored area. Young's model, which broke the eyes down into nothing but discrete rods and cones for primary colors, was thus transferred to a picture or medium that could simulate human eyes and show them how to perform.
Painters only needed to transfer this technical model of vision to their canvases, through the mediation of a certain Chevreuil, and Europe's last object-oriented art movement was born. The so-called pointillists - Seurat, Signac, Pissaro, and so forth actually built their landscape pictures out of nothing but points in the primary colors, which then within the eye, and indeed sensationally through
205
? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
additive synthesis, blurred into blended pamts. This last competition between fine arts and optical media was followed only by abstract painting.
There was only one artist at the tIme who drew techmcal rather than aesthetic conclusions from these digitized colors: Charles Cros, who was a lyricist, painter, bohemian, and tinkerer all at the same time. He had already accurately described the phonograph shortly before Edison, and he also described the first method of making color photographs. After Young and Ducos du Hauron, all that remamed necessary for color storage was the development of emulsions, which contain static, dispersed receptors for all three primary colors just like the eye. This is precisely what Cros proposed, although Edison said that he "was inconsistent, sought immortality at one time as poet and at other times strove for the painter's laurels, and thus he lacked that peculiar ability of concentration and inner composure, without which nothing great and permanent can be created" (Eder, 1978, p. 651). To put it more simply: the money from color photography was made by others.
In order to get to television, I will not bother tracing the lengthy history leading up to the mass production of Agfacolor in 1941. To put it briefly, it consisted simply in the commercialization of the theories and experiments we have already discussed. In the first phase, the rule already given concerning silent film still applied: silent black-and-white film was neither silent nor black-and-white. First, the technique of film tinting was developed on the basis of Maxwell's experiment: black-and-white films were simply dyed in uniform, monochromatic colors such that love scenes were depicted in pink, a yearning for nature was expressed through the color blue, etc. Second, there were attempts to color the thousands of frames in an entire film by hand, which was lavish, expensive, and rare - like
impressionists painting the Cathedral of Chartres in all the changing shades of color of an entire day. Third, in 1897 the Berliner Hermann Issensee applied for a patent for color cinematography, which in the spirit of pointillism showed three differently colored frames one after the other in rapid succession, and these colors blended together at the extremely high frame rate of 120 hertz (Bruch, 1987, p. 19). Fourth, it is important to keep in mind that black-and-white films were never perfect before the developmeut of panchromatic films, because the emulsion responded to the individual primary colors with varying degrees of intensity and these imbalances could only be adjusted through the use of expensive carbon arc lamps or sunlight (Monaco, 1977, p. 96).
206
? OPTICAL MEDIA
In any case, you can see that it still took a long time after the introduction of sound film to erase the last difference between simu- lation and reality. As I said before, World War II was the first war in color. At the end of the war, the first color film material was provided to the propaganda companies that had been systematically established in all of the armies (see Barkhausen, 1982). In contrast to World War I, these propaganda companies were ordered to take part in the combat with weapons, and in contrast to Griffith or Messter they were consequently forbidden simply to reconstruct battle scenes. Unlike war correspondents on the radio, who were only equipped with transmitters, and unlike journalists, who were only equipped with typewriters (see Wedel, 1962), film could supply a multimedia show of color and sound, word and noise.
For this reason, the introduction of stereo sound and widescreen after the war was only a small step that enabled color film to be able to deceive the three-dimensionality of ears and eyes. In World War I, varions professors, physicists, and musicologists had attempted to use perspective to detect invisible enemy artillery by artificially extending the range of vision or hearing. One of them, the French physicist Henri Chretien, transferred his military detection technique to the civilian trick of horizontally compressing film images during recording to squeeze more optical information into Edison's stan- dard format. During playback, however, this deformation would once again be equalized (Virilio, 1989, p. 69; Monaco, 1977, p. 87). Widescreen film was thus born, and it would be cinema's last life saver before the competition of television became overpowering. Up to now, the horizontal viewing angle of slipper cinema has been beneath contempt, but widescreen, cinemascope, and stereo sound can no longer change the fact that for us the highest purpose of film is already in the past. Strictly according to McLuhan's law, film has devolved into an evening program content filler for another medium: television.
3. 3 Television
Unlike film, which simply inherited all the complexities of the image as accoutrements, television is a high-tech object. Therefore, we can and must link together many of the technical explanations that have already been given. It will be impossible, however, to draw any connections between television and literature or fantasies. Unlike film, there were no dreams of television prior to its development. In
207
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
1880, when the British humor magazine Punch published a carica- ture showing people watching television in the future, the principle underlying the technology had already been fixed. And when Liesegang edited his Contributions to the Problem ofElectrical Tele- vision in 1899, thus naming the medium, the principle had already been converted into a basic circuit. Television was and is not a desire of so-called humans, but rather it is largely a civilian byproduct of military electronics. That much should be clear.
It should also be clear that the history of the development of televi- sion was the first realization through electronics of all of the functions named in Shannon's information theory. First, it was a fully elec- tronic converter of images into currents, and thus a television signal source. Second, it was a fully electronic transmission circuit, and thus a television channel. Third, it was a fully electronic converter of current into images, and thus a television receiver. Its fourth function, which only developed much later, was also to serve as an electronic image storage device. The technical specifications were so complex because the digital processing of optical signals is two-dimensional; it must be able to cope with the square of the amount of information processed by records or radio transmitters.
Since 1840, however, the single electrical news channel was teleg- raphy, which had been standardized by Morse. It was a channel, therefore, that was just as linear as alphabet and letterpress - the media it had displaced. Just as letters are read one after the other, so too were the dots and dashes of Morse code transmitted one after the other through isolated copper-cored cables. On the other hand, Siimmerring's attempt to transmit the 26 letters and ten numbers over 36 parallel wires during the war of 1809 proved to be much too expensive and prone to interference. "A Gennan idea/) Napoleon reportedly said about Siimmerring's telegraphs. In contrast to film, therefore, the problem of television from the very beginning was how to make a single channel dimension from two image dimen- sions, and how to make a single time variable from convertible surfaces.
It was no coincidence that the principle answer was found by
Alexander Bain, a Scottish philosopher and printer. Because the print-
ing of writing processed data streams in a linear fashion, while the
printing of images broke these surfaces down into dots, Bain was able Col to suggest that images should be principally conceived as rectangular
grids, and that the individual raster elements should be transmitted point by point. In principle, therefore, images became discrete quan- tities of data, like telegrams. In strict opposition to photography,
208
? OPTICAL MEDIA
which prided Itself on its analogy to nature, and m partlal contrast to film, which consisted of a discontinuous or discrete sequence of many analog photographs, television began as radical cutting: it not only cut up movements in time, but it also disintegrated connections or shapes into individual points in space. The symbolic thus now triumphed where once the imaginary had ruled over perception and consequently also painting. And the fact that these individual points are today called pixels or "last elements" already shows how close television was to Young and Ducos du Hauron's theories concerning colored dots. This proximity had only to be realized.
It happened in 1883, even before the development of the feature film, when a 23-year-old physics student made a useable and patented television circuit based on Bain's principle. Paul Nipkow studied here in Berlin with Helmholtz, whose important experiments with sounds, voices, and colors laid the groundwork for the invention of the telephone and the gramophoue. But while Helmholtz received an imperial physical-technical institute as a gift from Werner von Siemens, the telegraph industrialist, his student Nipkow remained in classic Mecklenburg poverty. In 1883, therefore, he spent Christmas Eve in his dormitory room in front of a small Christmas tree with the candles burning, a cheap petroleum lamp, and a German National Post Service telephone that one of his few friends had misappropri- ated as a private gift for himself. From this misuse of an imperial device emerged - on the last Christmas in the history of the world, if you will - not an entertainment medium, as our current misunder- standing might assume, but rather a channel in Claude Shannon's literal sense of the word. As it says in Nipkow's patent specifications,
"the purpose of the apparatus described here is to make an object at 'location A visible at any location B" (Rings, 1962, p. 37).
The idea of this image transmission occurred to Nipkow either at the sight of the Christmas tree candles, which flicker, or at the sight of the telephone, which Alexander Graham Bell had first invented: if human voices were transmissible, why should it not also be possible to transmit the corresponding face? According to Bain, the image would then have to be cut up into individual points, which would be transmitted to a receiver using a telephone cable and would then be reassembled once again as a flickering image; as a good student of Helmholtz, however, Nipkow also knew about the inertia of the eye and its unconscious ability to filter out the image flicker either physiologically through the after-image effect already employed by film, or more generally or mathematically through the integration of individual pixels.
209
? OPTICAL MEDIA
The sender of such a system stood (ill his own words) "automati- cally" in Nipkow's mind's eye (if the literary quotation "mind's eye" had not become obsolete under the conditions of television). The so- called Nipkow disk - a metal disk that rotates around its axis - stood between the image source and the transmitting channel, and its sale function was to carry nothing but holes. When the disk turned, the holes arranged in spirals generated a visual axis of changing points on the image, which activated a fixed selenium cell that reacts to fluctuations of light with oscillating current, as already emphasized with sound film. The number of holes in the Nipkow disk corre- sponds to the desired number of lines in the television image, as Klaus Simmering points out:
As the disk turns, one pixel after the other wanders in an approxi- mately straight line over the screen, thus delineating an image line. H one point disappears on the left edge, the next point in the spiral, which shifts roughly one line space towards the center [of the disk], reaches the right edge and subsequently begins delineating the follow- ing line. The distance between the holes thus corresponds to the width of the screen, and the difference between the distance of the first and last holes from the center of the disk defines the height of the screen, which necessarily assumes a more or less trapezoidal form. (Simmering, 1989, p. 13)
To put it more simply: Nipkow imposed the discrete line form of a book or telegram onto images with sweeping success.
The inventor was less successful on the receiver side. What was missing was a method of converting the weak current produced by the photocell back into visible light, which in turn would have then been cut up by a Nipkow disk and projected as a two-dimensional image. Above all, Nipkow did not waste much thought on how to ensure that the continuous stream of electrical pixels on the receiver side would construct precisely the same lines as on the transmitter side. For example, if a 20-line television were reproduced with line 1 as line 19, line 2 as line 20, but line 3 as line 1, the imaginary of pattern recognition, on which Nipkow's video phone entirely depended, would have greatly suffered. In other words, the patent awarded by the imperial patent office in Berlin on January 6, 1884 did not provide a solution for a synchronization problem, and because this problem occurred between the transmitter and the receiver it was even more dramatic than the synchronization problem of image and sound with sound film.
210
? OPTICAL MEDIA
Nlpkow's third handIcap was the mechanics of Image scanning and image reconstruction. The electrical channel had the advantage of moving at the same absolute speed as the optical data itself; the selenium cell also kept pace, although it was admittedly slower than later Kerr cells (Simmering, 1989, p. 15); however, the rotating disks at both ends of the system were hopelessly slow and obsolete.
For this reason, Nipkow never thought about his Christmas idea agam nntil his old age, when imperial German broadcasting dragged him once more mto the spotlight of Berlin radio shows as a pioneer of German technology. One year after his patent, he joined the Berlm Railway Signal Company as a constructor, and for the next 30 years he constructed nothing but security equipment and signalling devices. He thus exchanged electrical high-frequency television signals, which were not yet technically feasible, for mechanical railway signals, and during the years of this regression he even forgot that he had applied for a television patent at all (Rings, 1962, p. 37).
Others fared no better than the patent holder. The processing of moving images in real time practically never succeeded with Nipkow disks; it only sncceeded in later practice when real time played no role. In 1928, long before the Federal Criminal Police Office's computer sur- veillance, the Imperial Criminal Police were already able to slowly scan wanted posters and fingerprints, broadcast them with electrical speed, and then convert them slowly back into images again at distant police stations. Television in Germany thus did not begin with entertainment
broadcasts; the states first learned how to secure evidence from across the country, which has led to remarkable arrests even quite recently.
But back to Nipkow's patent. I am sure you already anticipated that his three weak points were not corrected until the development of the tube. First, the tube enabled the virtually unlimited amplifica- tion of low-frequency currents, like those supplied by selenium cells after images are scanned. Second, the tube, at least in principle, made it possible to turn Nipkow's wire-bound video telephony into televi- sion, which like radio also transmits high-frequency wireless signals. By modulating the low-frequency pixel fluctuations, which cannot be radiated as such from any antenna, with a high carrier frequency, the television transmitter is complete. Third, the tube originated as the Braun tube even before it served the functions of amplification and feedback. Braun's oscilloscope could not only convert current immediately into light, thus avoiding all of the light bulbs that were still necessary for Nipkow, but it could also direct the luminous electron beam to arbitrary points on a screen using electromagnets, thus forming truly digital images out of nothing but points of light.
211
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
In 1897, Braun had made alternating current visible with his oscIl- loscope, but he was not interested in transmitting images, as I have said. In 1908, on the other hand, Campbell-Swinton proposed the installation of a revolutionary television system with a Braun tube on the transmitter side as well as the receiver side. The image to be recorded was supposed to be projected on the screen of a Brann tube, which was covered with a mosaic of inertia-free photocells. The elec- tron beam of the tube was supposed to read out the electrical charge generated by the light falling on the photocells, thus converting it into oscillating current. On the receiver side, anotlier Braun tube would then perform the reverse process by converting this current back into visible images (Simmering, 1989, p. 25). That IS preCIsely how it happened.
Bnt it took a long time to eliminate all of the mechanical weak points of Nipkow's transmission chain. Because every information system is only as good as its weakest component, the development of television was slowed down above all by the bandwidth of medium wave radio, which arose from World War 1. These medium wave transmitters, in contrast to today's VHF, actually offered enough frequency bandwidth to transmit aconstic or one-dimensional signals, but a Braun television tube raised the amount of information by a power of two. To adapt Morgenstern freely, medium wave trans- mitters were not built for this at all, and it exploded the capacity of the channel. For this reason, mechanical Nipkow disks contin- ued to be used through the twenties even though the frame rate was a pathetic 12. 5 hertz, which was still below that of film, and the 4 X 4 cm large image only had 30 lines. The German National Post Service experimented with this standard, and the engineers in charge were professors Mihaly and Karolus, who also worked on optical sonnd. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) also experimented with this standard, with the passionate Scottish dilet- tante John Logie Baird in charge. For people, on the other hand, the
blurredness of a scanned newspaper photograph magnified 20 times seemed meaningless; only a few amateurs, who had to synchronize their private Nipkow disks with the transmitter's Nipkow disk nsing fingerprints (Simmering, 1989, p. 17), played along with the new technicians) toy.
The thirties were thus influenced by a double optimization. First, propaganda experts had to invent images that wonld tune the popula- tion into television, which was best accomplished by the spectacular Berlin Olympics iu 1936 and the Nuremberg rally crowd scenes. Second, even after broadcasting had electrified the televisiou channel,
212
? OPTICAL MEDIA
technicians still had to replace the Nipkow disks wIth tubes. Manfred von Ardenne, who played a leading role in the history of the National Socialists and the German Democratic Republic, succeeded at playing back television images, and Vladimir Zworykin, an officer of the Tsar who emigrated to the USA, succeeded in recording them.
Strangely, it was once again at Christmas in 1931 that von Ardenne astonished journalists with his flying spot scanner, which had a reso- lution of 10,000 pixels and a frame rate of 16 hertz. Von Ardenne thus achieved an Image quality that was far superior to that using mechanical Nipkow disks and even the frequencies of radio at that time. The channel capacity of Ardenne's television images increased even more after an ultra short wave radio was developed under pres- sure from the Wehrmacht, which was the only army in the world with ultra short wave radio-controlled tank divisions engaged in a blitzkrieg in 1939. As a BBC correspondent wrote, "Herr Eugen Hadamovsky, Director-General of the German broadcast service, [established] the world's first regular high-definition television service on Friday, 22 March 1935" (Simmering, 1989, p. 12).
But the German National Post Service's first regular high-definition television cannot be compared to Sony's high-definition TV today. It did not even have adequate transmitter tnbes. The result was that only one other medium could be considered for the content of televi- sion: sound film, which had just recently been developed, was divided into image and sound. Radio transmitted the sound quite easily, while a Nipkow disk laboriously scanned the image - not even in real time at first. McLuhan's law was thus absolutely valid. Television could only be decoupled from feature films and turned into a live broad- cast medium by developing an endless film: immediately after its development, it would be scanned by television, given a new emul- sion and then it would be exposed and scanned again, etc. , etc. This technique enabled the transmission of television in real time, just as radio broadcasters produced their own expensive canned recordings prior to the development of audiotape.
Third, the so-called "sweatbox" emerged as a genuine television recording studio, which functioned without the interposition of film technology. However, because the (even improved) Nipkow disks could only scan objects that were lit externally rather than self- illuminating objects like candles or light bulbs, the first television actors - like the telephone exchange after 1900, there were natu- rally no spokesmen but only spokeswomen - had to perform in an absolutely black box that was illuminated by the strongest available lamps, which was therefore also extremely hot. It was the last time in
213
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
history and the first time since Edison's Black Mary that the camera obscura was implemented.
All of these deficiencies on the transmitter side disappeared with the 1936 Olympics, a spectacle of world war sport staged by the National Socialists. A young engineer named Walter Bruch focused his electronic camera on the athletes from a specially constructed, invisible trench or television bnnker in the Berlin Olympic Stadinm. The iconoscope developed by Zworykin was actually supposed to be mounted in the heads of rockets to enable remote military recon- naissance (Virilio, 1989, p. 75); however, Zworykin's company, the Radio Corporation of America, turned it into a twin of von Ardenne's playback tube: the massless and inertia-free recording tube, Just as Campbell-Swinton had imagined. Because Nipkow's individual sele- nium cells were replaced with an entire screen composed only of
light-sensitive elements, the iconoscope supplied a light yield that was 40,000 times better, and it thus released early television stars from their sweatboxes.
With ultra short wave radio as the transmission channel, the icono- scope as the recording tube, and the flying spot scanner as the play- back tube, the high-tech information system known as television was finally complete, because its combined functions (in Shannon's sense) shifted from mechanics to electronics. Like sound film, however, only countries and global companies on the technical warpath could still finance the fully electronic television system. The German National Post Service, for example, gave its patents on phosphorescent chemi- cals to the USA, as they were necessary for the apparent black and white of receiver tubes; in return, they received the iconoscope patented by RCA.
The political effects of this new image and sound medium were also similar to the effects of sound film. Television became a medium of national and domestic politics because it was transmitted in national languages and its extremely high transmission frequencies (prior to the development of satellite and cable television) only had a quasi- optical range of 60 to 70 kilometers. It was therefore no wonder that the Paul Nipkow television station, which had been named in honor of the inventor who was still living at that time, immediately had political functions. Hitler and Goebbels explicitly stated that novel- ists would be permitted to retain the completely ineffective medium of print provided that the state alone maintained a monopoly on all sounds and images. Despite its own claims or those made by its enemies, however, the National Socialist state was not monolithic and totalitarian but rather a conglomeration of power subsystems, so
214
? OPTiCAL MEDIA
televisiOn got mvolved in a war even before the beginning of World War II. After a long struggle between these power subsystems, from which the Third Reich emerged like a polyp, in December 1935 there was a decree: the National Post Service retained the rights to civil- iau technical developments, the Ministry of Information retained the rights to "representative forms for the purpose of popular enlight- enment and propaganda," while the Air Ministry "in consideration of the special meaning of television for air traffic control and civil air defense" retained the rights to mannfacture and distribute all television technologies (Bruch, 1967, p. 53). This tripartite division between civilian technology, program content, and military arma- ment already proves that prior to World War II television was not a mass medium that would have derived its mass impact paradoxically from the intimacy of the picture size, program, and reception.
In fact, television worked much more like radio broadcasting, as dictators from Berlin to Moscow did not just rely on the intimacy of a recording microphone and a room speaker, but rather they rehearsed the mass impact of loudspeakers at party rallies or in Red Square. Following the model of the Volkswagen or the Volksrund- funkempfiinger (people's radio), the electrical industry developed the Volksfernseh-Einheitsempfiinger El (people's television) at a price of 500 reichsmarks. It was the first rectangular tube in the world (Bruch, 1967, p. 71), and it stood in post offices and other public agencies in Berlin, where its screen was enlarged so that it could be seen by many spectators at the same time. The people who attended these "large picture stations" did not actually pay an entry fee, but they had to show tickets, as in the cinema, to regulate the amount of traffic. These broadcasts ran continuously with only brief interruptions from the ontbreak of the war in 1939 until the bombing of nearly all the German transmitters: the few television receivers that were actually manufactured (50 instead of the planned 10,000) stood in mili- tary hospitals in Berlin and occupied Paris, where France's national television service could be connected directly to the Wehrmacht in 1944.
Now that we are discussing World War II, it is time to pause for a moment. It was clear since the Renaissance that perspective was closely related to firearms and ballistics.
Photography was also applied to criminology and cryptography. World War I reconnais- sance planes even connected film cameras to machine guns, and sound film was also developed on the basis of war technologies. But the high-tech medium of television is the only one among all of these optical media that functions according to its own principle as
215
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
a weapon. For this reason, it would not have risen to world power without World War II.
We begin the overview of World War II television technologies in France, where a color television system named SECAM, based on Wehrmacht television, was promoted after the war. The developer of the SECAM system was Henri de France (1911-86), who worked in the field of radar and whose company received their commissions after 1930 "primarily from the War Ministry, the Department of the Navy and the Air Ministry. In 1934 Henri de France applIed for his first patent for a direction finding system. Under contract with the French navy he developed a television system for the armoured cruis- ers of the second Atlantic fleet using a cathode ray tube and with an image resolution of 240 lines. In 1936 he succeeded in establishing a wireless television connection between warships on the high seas
and the port of Brest" (Bruch, 1987, p. 63).
French postwar television was a product of radar - an electroni-
cally perfected variant of World War I detection methods - which had begun with analog or natural sensory media like the eye and the ear. Great Britain proceeded similarly, but much more systematically; unlike the Wehrmacht's aggressive ultra short wave tank campaign, they had to prepare for a defensive war. The German physicist Christian Hiilsmeyer had already successfully received the first elec- tronic echo on May 18, 1904. He transmitted a radio impulse that traveled through space at lIght speed, was reflected by surfaces in its path, and was then once again received at the same location as the transmitter. When the signal delay was divided in half and multiplied by the speed of light, the result of course was the distance between the transmitter and the object that had reflected the signal. According to Virilio's brilliant formulation, therefore, radar is an invisible weapon that makes things visible (Virilio, 1989, p. 75) because it converts objects or enemies that do not want to be seen or measured at all into
involuntary and compulsive transmitters (with the exception of the US Air Force's brand new stealth bomber). For the strategic benefit of Great Britain before the war, Sir Watson-Watt developed Hiilsmey- er's basic circuit into a functional radar network. Radar stations were connected by radio throughout all of southern England, and they could report attacking Messerschmitts or Heinkels of the German Luftwaffe even while the approaching planes were still invisible. It was for precisely this reason that on the day the war began, the BBC discontinued the civilian television service it had introduced in 1936; from then on, the same high-frequency tubes that worked in televi- sion transmitters were sent to radar stations, and the same screens
216
? oPTICAL MEDIA
that worked I I I teleVIsion receivers also made the Illvisible enemy visible on radar screens. Without any friction loss, an entertainment medium had been converted into a war technology. And because Watson-Watt understood that the quality of radar images was stra- tegically crucial and inversely proportional to the wavelengths of the sent signals, Great Britain developed increasingly higher frequency tubes. At the same time, these tubes also had the advantage of becom- mg smaller and smaller, until finally entire radar installations could also be constructed on board airplanes. USIllg such UHF and VHF frequeucies, which had been researched and made usable strictly for military purposes, civilian postwar teleVISIOn later became a world power. First, however, they endowed Royal Air Force fighter planes with electronic vision: airborne radar first made their blind enemies on the Luftwaffe'S side visible, but after 1943 it also made the rivers, streets, and cities of the empire visible, which were destroyed by the carpet bombing of fighter-supported long-range bombers.
At first, the Luftwaffe could only counter this terror bombing by linking radar and anti-aircraft searchlights to form the Kammhu- berlinie, which was named after a Luftwaffe general who was also a Bundeswehr hero. This is the final manifestation of the actively armed eye - the spotlights used on the Russian-Japanese front. In World War I, these spotlights already gave rise to those anti-aircraft searchlights that later shone in the company logo of Fox's Movietone talking newsreels and were misused by Albert Speer during the 1935 Nuremberg Nazi Party convention to create the first truly immaterial architectnre. As Berlin burned in 1943, tbe same Speer wrote that he was "fascinated" by the "grandiose spectacle" of British bombers, German anti-aircraft searchlights, and crashing enemy planes, yet he neglected to add that his "dome of light" had already evoked this spectacle. In tbe Wehrmacht's defense system, anti-aircraft search- lights (a visible weapon that made things visible) and radar (an invisible weapon that also made things visible) were thus parts of a feedback loop, and anti-aircraft searchlights as well as Luftwaffe planes were both directed towards their targets. In our terminology, therefore, radar would indeed have to be called an actively armed but electronic eye.
More effective feedback weapons remained in the developmental stages. Walter Brucb, who had operated the iconoscope at the Berlin Olympics and later developed the German color television system known as PAL, spent the war partly in Peenemiinde and partly at Miiggelsee. In Peenemiinde, his two television cameras filmed the start of the first self-guided rockets and immediately transmitted
217
? OPTICAL MEDIA
these images by cable to a concrete bunker, where the engineers could remotely activate the V2 without being blown up by an even- tual false start. Television thus assumed one of the basic functions of mathematical simulations: namely, using feedback loops to shield from something real.
At Miiggelsee, the General Electricity Company (AEG) engineer succeeded in creating an even more promising feedback system: he left a pleasure steamer (in Bruch's words) "without any passengers of course" bobbing up and down on the lake for an approaching bomber to take aim at. This ballistic function was not assumed by the bomber pilot, however, but rather Bruch had constructed a tele- vision camera inside the bomb itself, which was supposed to be able to track down the enemy entirely on its own, follow it despite any evasive manoeuvres, and blow it up. World War II thus produced the first self-guided weapons systems, which have since made people, the subject of all modern philosophies, simply superfluous.
With the end of the subject, a television audience became possible in the postwar period, and with the triumph of radar, color television became possible as well. As the only country in the war that did not need to fear air attacks, the USA did not discontinue its development of television for the sake of radar. At the same time, the radar theory that emerged during the war was a key inspiration for the theory of digital signal processing in general. American physicists and math- ematicians like Shannon were the first to come to the conclusion that telecommunications overall should not be based on continuous oscillations or waves, but rather on simple discrete radar impulses. There was a clear correlation between the precision of radar echoes and the wavelengths of transmitted signals: the shorter and steeper the signal, the more precise the echo. The rectangular pulse discov- ered through radar thus became fundamental for modern telephone networks, computer circuits, and even television standards. It was no wonder, therefore, that the USA emerged from World War II as the leading power in television technology. It was also no wonder that the war was continued by technical and economic means: it became a war over the standards of the worldwide mass medium television, which has not yet been resolved. When asked whether television was art, for example, Klaus Simmering answered: "Television is an internationally standardized way of seeing defined in CCIR Report 407-1" (Simmering, 1989, p. 3).
Unfortunately, there is no more time today to describe the war over television standards with all its victories and defeats. In terms of the theory, I can only remind you of the difference between styles and
218
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
standards from the first lecture, and in terms of economics I can only remind you of the fact that when it comes to changing the standard of a high-tech medium billions of dollars are always at stake. As a brief history, it should finally be said that beginning in 1941 the USA introduced the leading black-and-white standard at that time, which still remains dominant today: 525 lines interlaced with a display of 30 frames per second instead of 25 frames per second, which later became the standard in Europe. This standard was developed simply because the power frequency in the USA is 60 hertz rather than 50 hertz and because it is important to synchronize the power grid and the frame rate to avoid optical noise. In an extremely short amount of time, this standard initiated the death of cinema and turned radio into a secondary medium. While President Roosevelt had still deliv- ered fireside chats over the radio during the war, it is well known that John F. Kennedy defeated the cold warrior Richard Nixon in the presidential election of 1960 through a single television debate, in which he proved to be more telegenic.
In its competition with cinema, on the other hand, television still had much to learn, and it had to catch up with the war innovation of color film. The American network CBS made a first attempt at this, but naturally not until after the world market had been satu- rated with black-and-white televisions. Unfortunately, the Columbia Broadcasting System had learned nothing from a high-tech world war; it presented a color television even more primitive and mechani- cal than the Nipkow disk. An aperture with three sectors rotated in front of the screen, enabling the viewer to look at red, green, and blue frames one after the other. By the modest standards of American committees and populations, this was either too much or too little. The government and (as President Eisenhower's farewell speech about the "military industrial complex" had prophesied) the arms industry intervened, not only to create a better color television, but also to make black-and-white and color compatible. On the one hand, color television also had to be capable of being received on black-and-white screens, only without color. On the other hand, a color screen also had to be capable of correctly reproducing black- and-white broadcasts (Bruch, 1967, p. 91). To conform to these specifications, engineers from 30 electrical companies founded the NTSC or National Television Systems Committee. After 1954, the Federal Communications Commission, a central government agency that also controls the level of nudity and violence broadcast over the airwaves, made this committee the standard, and it sub- sequently became a big business. The only problem was that this
219
? OPTICAL MEDIA
standard was oriented more towards economIC profit than techmcal feasibility.
To see perfect colors, it would logically be necessary to trans- mit tbree times more information as with black-and-whIte televi- siou. Instead of simply transmitting black-and-white frames, in other words, it would be necessary to transmit red, green, and blue frames. However, there would then only be enough space left in the ether for a single television program for the entire broadcast area. For this reason, NTSC either had to reduce or compromise the color information. That was possible and also correct because the human eye contains fewer color receptors than movement receptors. NTSC therefore broadcasted only imprecise or narrow wave band color information and used the resulting free space for compatibility with black-and-white broadcasts. After the color signal was divided into luminance and chrominance, brightness and tint, black-and-white receivers could only use pure luminance, while color receivers also decoded chrominance. With 5 MHz bandwidth for luminance, only 1 MHz bandwidth for chrominance and in comparison an infinitesi- mally small bandwidth for the accompanying sound, the technicians of NTSC just succeeded in compressing complete color television programs into a VHF or UHF channel. In contrast to radio signals, therefore, television signals never corresponded to analog vibrations, but rather they were extremely complex assemblages. Like a spelled- out sentence, they were composed of various different elements and they adhered to the appropriate rules of syntax; you could even say they had their own electronic punctuation marks, which naturally consisted of synchronization signals.
Howeve! ; the complex syntax of the NTSC signal did not get throngh to the receivers at all. As a result of phase shifts along the transmission path, the acronym NTSC was popularly known as "Never The Same Color. " Due to the fact that they were not se1? - regulating, it was constantly necessary to readjust the tints by hand. Two European world war engineers, Henri de France in France and Walter Bruch in West Germany, set out to correct this flaw. They both kept the color stable using a classic trick of all telecommuni- cations since Shannon: they did not immediately relay the received signal to a line on the television screen, but rather they first stored the line in an electronic buffer memory. With the reception of the next line one twenty-fifth of a second later, the stored signal and the new signal could then mathematically correct themselves so that the tonal values were finally stabilized. What eluded stabilization, of course, was the world market. Even today, the world of color television (a
220
? ? ? ? OPTiCAL MEDIA
world that has only existed since the development 01 modern tele- communications) is divided between tbree different standards: NTSC for North America and Japan, SECAM for France and a vanishing Eastern bloc, and finally PAL for the laughing "rest of the television world" (Faulstich, 1979, p. 93).
The same competition also flared up around the storability of television images. In the first 30 years, there was no possible way of stormg television images anywhere other than on Edison's old- fashIOned film. It was not until after AEG and BASF developed a hIgh-frequency and thus an extremely high-fidelity magnetic audio- tape during World War II, which set new quality standards for Greater German Radio, radio espionage and later also the field of computers, that it was also possible to conceive of an analog optical storage device. AMPEX produced the first professional videotape in the USA in 1958, shortly before BASF, which at least allowed insti- tutions to partly abandon film, which was the production standard at that time. But because the bandwidth of video so dramatically or rather quadratically exceeded the bandwidth of audio, video devices did not become truly mobile until the rise of Japan as the leading elec- tronic power. Sony's first video recorders were actually not designed for household use, but rather for the surveillance of shopping centers, prisons, and other centers of power, but through the misuse of army equipment users themselves also succeeded in mutating into television reporters and cutters. Television has since become a closed system that can process, store, and transmit data at the same time and thus allows every possible trick or manipulation, like film or music elec- tronics. And every video clip shows how far the tricks of music and optics have surpassed the speed of film. The pleasure afforded by this technology should not allow two things to be forgotten: the television
always also remains a form of worldwide surveillance through spy satellites, and even as a closed information system it still represents a generalized assault on other optical media.
Before I discuss this notion of television as an assault on other optical media, I would like to make one additional point about so-called video art, which usually identifies itself as explicitly non- commercial television with explicitly bad image quality (although this bad image quality is almost perfectly suited to today's television stan- dard). Norbert Bolz recently found the only possible answer to the question of why video art presents images that are worse than those of television: the teacher of Nam June Paik, the world's leading video art installer, not to say artist, was a certain Karl Otto Glitz, who was stationed in Wehrmacht-occupied Norway during World War II and
221
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
who was ordered by his officers to investigate interference images on radar screens. To accomplish this goal, Giitz recorded the rather noisy medium of the radar screen with the equally noisy medium of film, and he discovered something like form metamorphoses or structural progressions in this multiplied noise. Nam June Paik's video art, this aesthetic of interference that is deliberately inferior to the television standard, can thus once again be defined as a misuse of army equipment (Bolz, 1993, p. 164).
A closed electronic system like today's color television can hardly bear to be next to closed electrical-mechanical systems like film, especially when the image quality and the level of fascination associ- ated with film exceeds that of television by a few decades. Marshall McLuhan described this difference in quality with the attributes hot and cool. Film is a hot medium because its widescreen illusions result in a decrease in the spectator's own activity, while television is a cool medium because it only supplies a moire pattern comprised of pixels that the audience must first decode back into shapes again in an active and almost tactile way. As the analyst of a historical condition, McLuhan is absolutely right as always, but unfortunately he characterizes this distinction as a natural difference between both of these media. Apparently, even media theorists do not sufficiently realize that perceptible and aesthetic properties are always only dependent variables of technical feasibility, and they are therefore blown away by new technical developments. It is well known, for example, that tubes were replaced by tiny transistors in 1949, which in turn were replaced by integrated circuits in 1965. This simple space-saving silicon technology, which was originally developed for American intercontinental ballistic missiles, has since revolutionized all electronics, including entertainment electronics. Consequently, in the most recent escalation, television can join in the attack on all 35 mm film standards.
This began, unfortunately or naturally, neither in the USA nor in Europe, where companies like AT&T, Philips or Siemens have been resting on their old TV laurels until only recently. In Japan, on the other hand, a collaboration between Sony, the company that created Walkmans and video recorders, and Miti, the notorious Ministry for Technology and Industry, already set the new television standard a decade ago: High-Definition Television or HDTV. The explicit purpose of this development, which is already being employed by Japan's national television, was to abolish what McLuhan called the coolness of the medium and replace it with so-called telepresence. To begin with, telepresence means widening the practically square
222
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
picture size so that it fills both eyes or at least engages them like a wide screen film, and the television thus loses its peep show character. Second, however, telepresence also means increasing the number of individual pixels beyond this growth in the picture size, thus con- siderably decreasing the necessary distance between the chair and the television. In other words, the eyes are permitted much closer to the screen without being bothered by moire effects or violations of the sampling theorem, which were common up to now. The images falling on the retina occupy a considerably larger angle of vision, and telepresence can thus be described as an mvasion or conquest of the retina through an artificial paradise.
This artificial paradise has aesthetic consequences, but its techni- cal consequences are far more significant. According to Simmering's hypothesis, HDTV ensures above all that no longer only the faces of family members and politicians will fill the screen in close-up, unlike the current television standard. A simulated intimacy, which was simply the effect of technical handicaps, could be replaced with a total intimacy that is entirely like film. The aesthetic consequence would be a revolution in programs, but the technical consequence would be a competition to rival the current production standard of 35 mm film for films as well as professional television plays. Because the as yet undiscussed electronic processing of images is infi- nitely more effective and infinitely cheaper than film editing and film montage, this equalization would also mean the end of celluloid. Film would become the big screen projection of HDTV tapes, while televi- sion would become the close viewing of those same tapes. This would be a radical standardization and reduction of manufacturing costs, but it would also cost billions of dollars to replace all the television and film systems on the planet, which means that it will pass to the Japanese electronics industry. None of the optical media standards up to now would satisfy the requirements of HDTV. It is precisely for this reason that the system will defy all European and American opposition, and it is precisely for this reason that I have warned the film and television scholars among you from the very beginning not to pin your occupational hopes on celluloid.
The aesthetic of HDTV is therefore clear, but the technology poses nothing but problems. A single HDTV transmitter with 1,125 lines, a frame rate of 60 Hz, a luminance signal of 20 MHz, a chro- minance signal of 7 MHz and CD quality stereo sound requires a channel capacity, as you can easily calculate, of roughly 30 MHz. In other words, even under the conditions of UHF and VHF, this single transmitter would use the entire frequency spectrum of its
223
? OPTICAL MEDIA
reception area. However, because Japanese companies like Sony are not a direct continuation of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, as the Japanese empire built them up to be during World War II, they show democratic mercy. They compromise the HDTV signal before it is emitted through a mathematical algorithm that is called MUSE of all things. When you hear this word, though, please don't think of the Greek muses of poetry, music, historv, and the arts in general, which have been overcome, but rather think about the sampling theorem created by the AT&T engineers Nyquist and Shannon. The acronym MUSE stands for Multiple Sub-Nyquist Encoding (Simmering, 1989, p. 76), and using mathematical tricks it reduces the television channel bandwidth from 30 MHz to a tolerable 7 MHz. Sony's muse thus enables the broadcast of HDTV programs from conventional radio transmitters without limiting each recep- tion area to just a single transmitter. 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
? 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.