In his discourse-generating publication Cybernetics (1948), Norbert Wiener
provocatively declared that information is neither matter nor energy. Translated into
the question of material tradition in culture, this means that archives no longer
collect the carriers as storage media of inscriptions but simply the information itself.
To which degree does the authority of an archival record still depend on its material
physical embodiment? Is it no longer important by which carrier one generation
passes on its information to the next?
For the oldest analogue signal-based medium in the technical sense, photography, in
1859 Oliver Wendell Holmes pointed to the fact that this symbolic trade of media
and material was introduced by photography: "From now on, form is separated from
material. In fact, the material in visible objects is no longer of great use, except when
being used as a model from which the form is constituted. Give us a couple of
negatives of an object worth seeing that's all we need. Then tear the object down
or set it on fire if you will the result of this development will be such a massive
collection of forms that it will have to be arranged into categories and placed in great
libraries." (Kemp, 1980, p. 121)
Is there (in the name of information) a transcendence of media-material in
photography, undoing historicity? Transcendence of materiality is a cultural effort
well known from religious practice (e. g. the art of orthodox icon painting in
Russia). In medieval Europe, light in cathedrals was meant to transcend the material
boundaries of architecture. With photographic emanations, light itself becomes a
"historiographical" index (or even media-phenomenologically transcends history
by its affect of immediacy on the human temporal sense: preserving the past as
present). But still this is not immaterial but bound to a chemical storage medium.
Temporal transcendence of materiality is a faculty of operative media technologies.
Once the signals which are chemically fixed (photography), mechanically engraved
(phonograph) or magnetically embedded (magnetophon, videotape) on a material
carrier have been transformed into digital, immaterial information, they can be
(virtually lossless) "migrated" from one storage computing system to another.
Permanence and archival endurance is not achieved in the traditional way anymore
(which has been monumental fixation, stasis so far), but by dynamic refreshing
- the "enduring ephemeral" (Chun, 2001, p. 184-203).
Material entropy
Let us apply the notion of "media materialism" not just in a neo-Marxist sense but
in its pure physical meaning. "Tradition" on the very material level is the ability, f. e.
of chemical polymers, to retain the "memory" of their formal juncture. But
magnetic tape in audiovisual archives is a fragile medium; the "Vinegar Syndrome"
(the chemical disintegration of the carrier material) cannot be counter-chemically
stopped, just slowed down. On the other hand, the structure of the containing
archive is negentropic: a symbolic order. Both converge in so-called "digitisation",
where the media carrier in its physical entropy no longer counts, but the content
(signal) as information, stored in the symbolic (binary) code.
wolfgang ernst technologies of tradition: between symbolic and material
(micro-)transmission
The microchemical analysis of such "endangered" material, by Fourier Transform
Spectrography, is a very close, truly media-archaeological reading of such archival
media materialities. Such microtechnologies are at work in what discourse
emphatically calls "cultural heritage" embodied as material tradition. When the
notion of "the material" becomes dynamic itself - as identified by Henri Bergson6 -,
historicism is cut short to the atomic level. Contemporary with Albert Einstein's
development of relativity theory, around 1900 Henri Bergson elaborated his
philosophy upon the physical insight into the essentially oscillating nature of
"material" elements (electrons, atoms); as such, materiality itself is in micro
motion already. This becomes evident in electronic music. What used to be an
essential element in music composition, the tone, turned out to be a microtemporal
event in itself - the tone as a frequency event.7 With electronic signal processing, the
traditionally separated categories of durable materiality versus immaterial time-
based performance collapses.
Negentropic information of matter
Material media have their individual entropy, characteristic probabilities of physical
endurance - Eigenzeit. The physical media differ from the software-based media by
embodying fundamentally different temporal regimes.
Physical (entropic) decay of cultural materialities from the past may be
diagrammatically registered and presented like a signal, that is: as a continuous
function of the time axis (e. g. a building, slowly degrading into a ruin or finally a
heap of bricks). The alternative temporality is discrete, a sudden change of state
which then remains invariant over a long period of time (interval) - close to PCM in
digital data transmission (based on impulses rather than on continuous signals).
This results in a dramatic increase of data compression, since only the changes
(between two states) have to be coded. Thus, the physical time axis is being replaced
by coded time. Transmission itself (in its traditional sense) runs out, becoming a
mere function of mathematised (rather than materially transmissional) signal
processing, achieving real-time effects by compression algorithms (Siegert, 2003,
p. 285). Compressed time takes place when digital imagery is being transmissed,
notably in compression algorithms as defined by The Moving Picture Expert Group
(MPEG standards for streaming digital video), whether recorded - from the archive
- or in "live" transmission (Richardson, 2010).
For the longest time in human history, the notion of media-based transmission was
bound to the material carrier; tradition thus appeared as a kind of generalised
mailing service not for the conquering of space but of temporal distance. This has
changed in the époque of symbolic information processing. Leon Battista Alberti in
the Renaissance, in his treatise De statua, already proposed a procedure for the
lossless transmission of three-dimensional objects by digitalisation. Once a human
body or an artefactual device has been subdivided into a grid of discrete points, the
position of each one of these points can be precisely indicated by a system of spatial
coordinates. Such an alphanumerical list enables the original to be copied and
equiprimordially be regenerated ad infinitum, be it in distant places or in future
archives in liquid times
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6 Bergson's concept of matter has been re-interpreted for the electronic image by Lazzarato, 2002
7 See Stockhausen, 1963: "Die Trennung 'akustischer Vorordnungen' im Material und 'musikalischer
Ordnungen' mit diesem Material müfête dann aufgehoben werden." (p. 214)
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