No More Learning

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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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,
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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.
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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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