times (Carpo, 1998). Such a procedure avoids the distortions which happen in the
act of manual copying, resulting in a model for lossless, negentropic tradition by
means of coding the image, that is: its informatisation. From that practice results an
almost ahistorical form of tradition, which manifests itself not only in the current
age of born-digital records and is known from the archival rescuing projects of
digitising endangered historic manuscripts, but turns out to be the essence of
communication engineering.
Informational historicism: Data-archaeological reconstruction
The Frauenkirche cathedral in Dresden from the Baroque times endured more or less
unchanged into the twentieth century, as documented in countless paintings,
engravings and photographs). After the great fire in Dresden in February 1945,
resulting from the serious bombarding of the city by British airplanes in World War
II, the building (with a slight delay of two days after the actual bombardment fire)
collapsed (having been burned from the inside), from then on remains more or less
unchanged as an almost defigurated heap of stones. Nowadays, with the aid of
computing, the cathedral has been reconstructed out of the (available) original
stones, reversing the collapse which happened after the Dresden bombardment - a
negentropic violation of the second law of thermodynamics defining entropy which
provides the scientific explanation for the notion of a time arrow. Informational
aesthetics informs matter itself.
The historicity of "materiality" in the age of information technology
No cultural artefact can be reduced to sheer materiality but rather needs to be
differentiated into physis and logos - the very meaning and double-bind of "techno/
logy", known since the Aristotelian distinction between logos and physis.
Logos is expressed in symbols, which as cultural engineering is linked to alphabetic
writing. In contrast to the orally transmitted tradition, "writing yields a
'transpersonal memory'. Historically it has facilitated abstract thought, giving rise
to science and mathematics, and freed thought from the subjective realm"
(Heyer, 1995, p. xvii) - a structural, symbolic regime, close (but not yet completely,
that is: automatically emancipated) to a non-human agency (as described by Bruno
Latour). In the époque when Charles Babbage extended his arithmetical Difference
Engine to a storage-programmable, thus algorithmic Analytical Engine, it was G. W.
F. Hegel who opposed the idea that the act and procedures of thought might be (as
expressed later in Boole's Laws of Thought) performed by a logical machine rather
than by «working through» in philosophical terms. Likewise, Hegel differentiated
memory (Gedachtnis) as cold mechanical storage (such as library systems) from the
interiorisation as remembering (Erinnerung) which corresponds with historical
imagination.
Within the digital computer, calculation and intelligence converge: the
mechanisation of spirit and the spiritualisation of matter coincide (Kittler, 1989, p.
30f). When the computer is seen disintegrated in an electronic waste deposit, it is
indistinguishable from other fragments of ("analogue") electronics. Its specificity is
not in its hardware materiality, but in its algorithms (which might be performed in
wolfgang ernst technologies of tradition: between symbolic and material
(micro-)transmission
organic matters as well, such as the DNA computer). If future archaeologists will
discover strange artefacts within the ruins of our present, these will obviously be
interpreted as primarily electronic devices, and they probably miss the essence of
computers as symbolic machines.
Software: Towards a new meta-physics of preservation?
For a long time, memory correlated with monumentality. The endurance of a
traditional "archival" record (document) used to depend on its material storage
medium, with the option of "migrating" symbols as information from one carrier
medium to another. The Roman poet Horatius derived his post-mortal optimism
from this:
"Exegi monumentum aere perennius
Regalique sita pyramidum altius,
Quod non imber edax, non aquilo impotens
Possit diruere aut innumerabilis
Annorum series et fuga temporum."
(Horatius)
Medieval monks copying an ancient manuscript for tradition either involuntarily
(carelessness) or involuntarily (the desire to correct the source) made mistakes
(Nita, 1998, p. 402). Still, the symbolical code can be transmitted with a high degree
of fidelity in copying, regardless the material support. Thus, the symbolic code (like
the genetic code), especially the phonetic alphabet, is mostly invariant towards
historical, i. e. entropic time. Digital data is just a special case of such alphabets.
Documentary science has developed the notion of "logical preservation" (Marker,
1998, p. 296). But any information must take place in or on a material support
which introduces another, different tempor(e)ality. Does the concept of
"information" (which is measured by the binary digit) dispense with the material
link? To what extend is software independent of the carrier used for transport?
(Swade, 1998, p. 195). In order to be executable, any algorithm has to take place in
matter - even if it is just paper. The metonomy which takes the Floppy Disc as a
material support for the software itself is a hint to the material link.
If past information is not just functionally emulated but actually simulated, its
temporal (entropic) behaviour must be archived as well - like the scratch, the noise
of an ancient Edison phonographic cylinder when being digitised. One method is
known from computing as physical modelling.
A piece of software is a set of formal instructions, or, algorithms. "It doesn't matter
at all which particular sign system is used as long as it is a code, whether digital zeros
and ones, the Latin alphabet, Morse code or, like in a processor chip, an exactly
defined set of registers controlling discrete currents of electricity." (Cramer, 2002).
Suddenly, hardware itself can turn out to act as software.
archives in liquid times
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"I have created a monument more lasting than bronze, And higher than the royal site of the pyramids,
Which neither harsh rains nor the wild North wind Can erode, nor the countless succession of years And
the flight of the seasons" http://home.golden.net/~eloker/horace.htm
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