Is algorithmic knowledge better preserved when transmitted by an exclusive expert group (software "priests", according to the monopolistic Egyptian tradition of knowledge transfer) than by printed publications? The Department of Computing and Control of the National Museum of Science and Industry in London, faced the challenge of the preservation of software as museum object. Software is a new kind of cultural artefact: it is not a material object anymore, but rather an executable file which unfolds only when being processed (a truly processual time object). A computer as hardware can be traditionally displayed as an immobile object, but its time-critical and bit-critical processes are never in stasis, just like frequency-based acoustics (sonic evidence in museums) need performance in time to take place - different from visual evidence which persists in space. Software belongs to the class of generic objects media. "One bit wrong and the system crashes"; therefore "in archaeological terms the operational continuity of contemporary culture cannot be assured" (Swade, 1992, p. 208f) as soon as the material embodiment in which such a software must take place in order to actually run is not available anymore. The solution to this material dilemma lies in transforming the material aspect of computer culture itself into software, that is: emulating past hardware digitally. Suddenly cultural tradition turns out to be an operation of dematerialisation (German Verundinglichung), "logical replication as distinct from physical replication" (Swade, 1992, p. 209). In fact, operational media actually transcend material "things". The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins transformed the notion of the "gene" into the "meme" as an agency of cultural transmission, turning humans themselves into channels of knowledge transfer. (Dawkins, 1989). Information thereby replicates in the very act of communication over time and space - up to the World Wide Web and the "viral" media sphere of today. Archaeology versus history It is not by coincidence that one of the first sciences in the humanities department which applied computing has been archaeology. This is not by chance but reveals as structural affinity. Archaeology, especially (appropriately so-called) prehistorical archaeology, deals with pure material data, no narratives (textual tradition) like the classics in Greek and Roman philology. In many ways, archaeology is close to mathematics. Epistemologically, this becomes clear with Michel Foucault's discourse analysis in terms of propositional logic (Kusch, 1989). As opposed to figurative, narrative (hi)storytelling, archaeological processing of past data concentrates on what used to be familiar as "antiquarian" modes of representation under the auspices of digital computing (Ginouvès, Sorbets, 1978). This leads to diagrams (with the prefix indicating a temporal vector) instead of historiography. The implosion of the narrative frame has consequences on the form of representation of the past. Instead of being governed by the apparently seamless and unbroken literary text, figurated and effected by rhetorical moves and dramatic emplotment, modular writing is governed by the non-discursive logistics of vector wolfgang ernst technologies of tradition: between symbolic and material (micro-)transmission fields, graphically expressed by means of marks of the directing codes <Steuerzeichen>: networking rather than narrating the evidence. Hermeneutics itself becomes algorithmic: "Archaeological data consists of recorded observations. These might be measurements of the size of a hand axe, the stratigraphical relationship between two layers or the geographical location of a site <»Ephesos»>. Whilst archaeological data is frequently numeric, it can equally well be non-numeric, such as the name of the material or colour of an object. It also comprises visual data, such as photographs, plans or maps. Data processing is the name given to the manipulation of data to produce a more useful form, which we shall call information. The sequence of operations required to perform a specific task is known as an algorithm." (Richards, Ryan, 1985, p. 1f) Let us distinguish diagrammatic archaeography from more interpretative archaeology in a narrower sense (Moberg, 1971, p. 533). The philological practice of constructing genealogical filiations of manuscript tradition in the form of stemmata applies a diagrammatic method. On the other side, there is data processing as archaeology. Media archaeology is not just a way of remembering "dead media", but rather a mathematical aesthetics; modelling, statistics and especially cluster analysis (e. g. for the distribution of objects in a grave field) is one the fields where archaeology made use of data processing with electronic computers. All of a sudden, the memory of material culture becomes related to mathematics instead of belle lettres. Mathematical methods (like stochastics in "cluster analysis" of graveyards, f. e.) are being applied in archaeology. "Writing vs. Time": Lossless tradition, message or noise? In every act of cultural transmission, there is a symbolical (code) level on the one hand which is time-invariant, and an entropic, temporally decaying ("historical") physical real(ity) on the other. Let us take as an example for symbolical tradition the transmission of Euclid's Elementa from Greek antiquity to the European Renaissance via Arabic translation (intermediation). Here, the name (the medium) is the message: Elementa is the name for letters (the ancient Greek alphabet) and numbers, which serve as the concrete symbolic medium of transmission. The subject of this work, mathematical geometry, itself claims metahistorical truth (the Platonic anamnetic knowledge), while the physical embodiment of this symbolic knowledge, f. e. ancient book rolls, are subject to decay. Techno-implicit knowledge8 traverses cultural history according to temporal laws of its own - it is self-repetitive, close the model of "memetics" (a kind of cultural memory gene, as defined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawson). Let us look closely at a painting which sums up these conflicting energies of tradition: Anton Raphael Mengs' painting Allegory of History (1772/73) on the ceiling of the Stanza dei Papiri. It links the Vatican Library with the Vatican archives in liquid times 148 8 Different from Michael Polanyi's notion of "implicit knowledge": see Polanyi, 1958. 149

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Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 2017 | | pagina 76