vol.7#1 The I/O issue

anyMeta 4.19.48 - Atom module 0.3.2 2013-05-21T14:24:59+02:00 http://www.mediamatic.net/feed/atom/5876/nl vol.7#1 The I/O issue http://www.mediamatic.net/id/8635 2010-07-12T10:37:54+02:00 Virtual Voices (1) Mimesis

Het is opvallend dat de digitale mediatechnologieën die nu ontwikkeld worden vaak een nabootsend karakter hebben. Misschien zal straks de twintigste eeuw geboekstaafd staan als de eeuw van de abstractie, en de nu op handen zijnde eeuwwisseling als het moment van de terugkeer naar een mimetische esthetiek. De nabootsing van de natuur is weer een alom nagestreefd artistiek ideaal.

<div style="position: relative;" class="ui_animateFigureCaption"><a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/153769/en/wolfgang-von-kempelen-speaking-machine-virtual"> <img src="http://fast.mediamatic.nl/f/sjnh/image/573/153769-248-400.jpg" height="400" width="248" alt="Wolfgang von Kempelen “speaking machine” - Virtual Voices (1)" title="Wolfgang von Kempelen “speaking machine” - Virtual Voices (1)" playable="1"/> </a><div class="caption clearfix"><div class="caption-wrap"><a title="Vergroot afbeelding - Wolfgang von Kempelen “speaking machine” - Virtual Voices (1) - Mediamatic.net" href="/153769/en/wolfgang-von-kempelen-speaking-machine-virtual">Wolfgang von Kempelen “speaking machine” - Virtual Voices (1)</a> - published in Mediamatic Magazine Vol. 7#1 (1992)</div></div></div> Soms gaat het daarbij om nabootsing, niet van hoe de dingen eruit zien, maar van de processen die het leven, het lichaam en de geest constitueren. Mimesis heet dan artificial life, robotica, of artificial intelligence. In andere gevallen gaat het om het klassieke ideaal van de perfecte simulatie van de oppervlakte van de dingen. Dan heet het ray tracing, paintbox, digital photography, virtual reality. Muziek bevindt zich in het spanningsveld tussen mathematische abstractie en pure fysica. Nabootsing is daar niet aan de orde, zou je misschien denken, maar niets is minder waar. Na het mislukken van de 'echte' elektronische muziek, die met sinussen, blokgolven, ruis, en modulatoren geluidssculpturen bouwde waar niemand naar wil luisteren, is er nu een geweldige opbloei van digitale elektronische technologieën waarmee het geluid van conventionele instrumenten zeer gedetailleerd wordt gesimuleerd en oproepbaar gemaakt voor keyboards en computers met midi-interfaces. Een nabootsende technologie die door zijn toepassingsmogelijkheden nauw aansluit bij de muziek is de kunstmatige spraaksynthese. Maar door zijn relatie met de taal heeft dit medium toch ook weer een heel eigen karakter. Dit artikel is gewijd aan de geschiedenis, de techniek en de esthetiek van dit medium. <h3>Stem</h3> Taal is een kwestie van symbolen. Conceptualisering en abstractie van de menselijke ervaring. Muziek is een kwestie van fysica. Niet zozeer omdat muziek door middel van geluid gerealiseerd wordt, maar vooral omdat juist de structurele eigenschappen van muziek (zoals metrum, ritme, harmonie, melodie) uit fysische verschijnselen voortkomen. Tussen taal en geluid: het spreken. Tussen geest en materie: de stem. Roland Barthes: ''Listen to a Russian bass (...): something is there, manifest and persistent (you only hear that), which is past (or previous to) the meaning of the words, of their form (the litany), of the melisma, and even of the style of the performance: something which is directly the singer's body, brought by one and the same movement to your ear from the depth of the body's cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilage, and from the depths of the Slavonic language, as if a single skin lined the performer's inner flesh and the music he sings.'' <h5>1 Roland Barthes 'Le Grain de la Voix', in: L'obvie et l'obtus, Paris 1982 (English translation: 'The Grain of the Voice', in: The Responsibility of Forms. Critical essays on Music, Art and Representation. New York 1985, pp. 269/270)</h5> <h3>Namaken/Voorspiegelen</h3> In de stemnabootsingstechnologie kunnen twee benaderingswijzen worden onderscheiden: de genetische en de gennematische. De genetische benadering is gebaseerd op de imitatie van het ontstaansproces van de spraakklanken in de menselijke fysiologie. De gennematische is gebaseerd op de analyse van de spraakklanken zelf en reconstrueert die klanken zonder daarbij acht te slaan op de manier waarop het menselijk lichaam ze voortbrengt. In de achttiende eeuw reeds werden er sprekende machines geconstrueerd volgens het genetische principe: de hardware van strottenhoofd en mondholte werd in een gestileerde versie nagebouwd. Naarmate zo'n mechanisch systeem meer lijkt op het geïmiteerde voorbeeld, vertonen de geluiden die het produceert, zoals je zou verwachten, een betere gelijkenis met menselijke spraakklanken. In de twintigste eeuw zien we een heel andere benadering: digitale technologie die de vorm van geluidssignalen uitrekent en dan via luidsprekers ten gehore brengt. De stem wordt nu niet nagemaakt maar voorgespiegeld. Het algoritme tovert aan de luisteraar signalen voor die het beeld oproepen van een lichamelijk proces dat er niet geweest is. De achttiende-eeuwse automaat is een mechanisch lichaam, een uurwerk dat zich de eigenschappen van het leven aanmatigt. In de twintigste-eeuwse computersimulatie wordt de mechanica abstract, lost de machine zich op in de wiskunde. Het lichaam is verdwenen. <h3>Namaken</h3> De impuls van de klassieke beeldhouwkunst: niet afbeelden, maar namaken. Een driedimensionaal model op ware grootte is geen model, maar een kopie, een duplicaat. De Griekse beelden waren gepolychromeerd. In de mythologie waren de beste beeldhouwers vaak in staat om evenbeelden van het menselijk lichaam te maken die niet alleen perfect gelijkend waren, maar die ook konden spreken, en zich op een natuurlijke manier bewegen. In de Chinese en de Germaanse mythologie vinden we soortgelijke verhalen: timmerlui en zilversmeden die verraderlijk verleidelijke vrouwelijke automaten bouwen. De essentiële stap op de weg van mythe naar technologie wordt gezet in de zeventiende eeuw. De gedachte dat levende organismen functioneren volgens de wetten der natuurkunde, en daarom in principe gesimuleerd kunnen worden door middel van mechanische constructies, is dan niet langer een vaag, verontrustend vermoeden, maar een wetenschappelijke hypothese. In het begin van de zeventiende eeuw bedacht Descartes dat dieren eigenlijk machines zijn. Thomas Hobbes: Nature, the art by which God hath made and governs the world, is by the art of man, as in many other things, in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in the principal part within; why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings; and the joints but so many wheels giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the artificer? <h5>2 Thomas Hobbes Leviathan 1651 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex 1968)</h5> In de loop van de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw is er een opleving in het bouwen van automaten die lichamelijke functies van mens of dier nabootsen: de ontwikkeling van de uurwerktechnologie maakt het mogelijk om veel getrouwere nabootsingen te realiseren dan voorheen; en de theorieën van de Cartesianen verlenen aan zulke ondernemingen een filosofisch cachet. Zo maakt men poppen die lopen, fluiten, trommelen, spreken, en schrijven; vogels die fladderen, tsjilpen, eten, drinken en schijten. Er is een curieuze overeenkomst tussen deze automatenbouwerij en de huidige Kunstmatige Intelligentie. Ook toen werden de grenzen van de meest geavanceerde technologieën van het moment verlegd met als doel om de uiterlijke verschijningsvorm van bepaalde aspecten van het menselijk gedrag na te bootsen; en ook toen resulteerde dat in producten die alom belangstelling wekten, omdat ze niet alleen als technologische experimenten konden worden beschouwd, maar ook als biologische modellen, als filosofische existentiebewijzen, als kunst, of als amusement. Dit wordt goed geïllustreerd door de carrière van Jacques de Vaucanson, een van de beroemdste achttiende-eeuwse automatenbouwers. Zijn automaten waren vermakelijke en verbazingwekkende tentoonstellingsattracties, maar tegelijk werden hun mechanismen in ernstige wetenschappelijke geschriften uiteengezet –niet alleen door de ontwerper maar ook door Diderot en D'Alembert in hun Encyclopédie. De productie van de automaten had interessante technologische spin-offs; uiteindelijk werd De Vaucanson een innoverend organisator in de textielindustrie, die de toen meest geavanceerde fabriek bouwde voor het spinnen van zijde; de techniek van zijn automatische fluitspeler gebruikte hij voor het ontwerp van het eerste programmeerbare weefgetouw, dat later de grondslag zou vormen voor het werk van Jacquard. <h3>L' Homme Machine</h3> Mensen worden door Descartes nadrukkelijk uitgezonderd van zijn redeneringen over het mechanische karakter der dieren. Hij associeert mechanica met gevoelloosheid en met de afwezigheid van bewustzijn. Hij heeft er blijkbaar geen moeite mee om dieren aldus te beschouwen, maar dat mensen gevoelloze machines zouden zijn vindt hij problematischer. Een belangrijk Cartesiaans argument tegen de mechaniseerbaarheid van de mens wordt door de filosoof Cordemoy geformuleerd aan de hand van het idee van een automatische spraakmachine: ... hoewel ik duidelijk inzie dat een puur mechanisch apparaat enkele woorden zou kunnen uitbrengen, weet ik tegelijk dat de veren die de lucht verdelen of de buizen openen waaruit de stemmen komen, een bepaalde onderlinge ordening vertonen die ze nimmer zouden kunnen veranderen. Zodat vanaf het moment dat de eerste stem klinkt de stemmen die er gewoonlijk op volgen eveneens noodzakelijk moeten volgen – als de machine tenminste nog van lucht is voorzien. Daarentegen hebben de woorden die ik door lichamen als het mijne hoor uitbrengen zelden dezelfde volgorde. <h5>3 G. de Cordemoy Discours physique de la parole Paris, 1666</h5> De rijkdom van de taal hangt in deze opvatting samen met het typisch menselijke vermogen van de vrije wil, dat intrinsiek onverenigbaar is met de rigiditeit van een uurwerk. Om de vrije wil te verantwoorden, voorziet Descartes het (op zichzelf wel mechanische) menselijk lichaam van een interface naar de onsterfelijke ziel. Dit interface zetelt volgens hem in de pijnappelklier – een kliertje in de hypothalamus, waarvan de lichamelijke functie niet duidelijk is. Een eeuw na Descartes wordt de gedachte om ook mensen als machines te beschouwen toch expliciet verdedigd. In L'Homme machine stelt La Mettrie dat ''alle vermogens van de ziel in zodanige mate afhankelijk zijn van de juiste organisatie van het brein en van het gehele lichaam, dat zij blijkbaar niets anders zijn dan die organisatie zelf. In die opvatting is er een materiële identiteit tussen lichaam en ziel, en is daarmee de noodzaak voor een mind-body-interface'' verdwenen. Tussen mens en dier bestaan slechts graduele verschillen. De Cartesiaanse argumenten die betrekking hebben op het mechanische karakter van het dier zijn nu onmiddellijk op de mens van toepassing, maar veranderen tegelijk diepgaand van betekenis. Mechanica staat niet meer gelijk met onbewustheid: het bewustzijn zelf is mechanisch. <h5>4 Julien Offray de la Mettrie: L' Homme machine. Leyden 1748</h5> Als de meer ambitieuze automatenbouwers op dat moment hun onderzoeksagenda geïnspireerd zouden hebben op het standpunt van La Mettrie, dan zouden ze zoiets als de huidige Kunstmatige Intelligentie uitgevonden hebben: een discipline gericht op het creëren van feitelijke demonstraties van gemechaniseerde mentale processen. Maar daar was de uurwerktechnologie niet geschikt voor. Daarom heeft die stap moeten wachten tot het midden van de twintigste eeuw, toen de elektronische computer beschikbaar kwam. De toenmalige plausibiliteit van het argument van Cordemoy hangt hiermee samen: niemand kon de vrijwel onbeperkte schakelflexibiliteit voorzien die geïntroduceerd zou worden door Von Neumanns stored program computer. Software is mechanica die zich wel dynamisch kan reconfigureren. Programma's zijn virtuele uurwerken met zelfmodificerende en zelfuitbreidende vermogens. Hoewel die vermogens in principe beperkt worden door de eindigheid van de apparatuur waarop de programma's geïmplementeerd zijn, kunnen we in de praktijk die beperkingen vaak negeren. Vergeleken met het uurwerk realiseert de computer een kwalitatief superieure complexiteit en flexibiliteit. Met deze uitvinding achter ons, kunnen we nooit meer de pretentie hebben om eens en voor al de grenzen van het mechaniseerbare te overzien. <h3>Talking Heads</h3> De eerste serieuze spraakmachines werden ontwikkeld door achttiende-eeuwse automatenbouwers die zich bezighielden met mechanische simulaties van de lichamelijke functies van mens en dier. In deze periode wordt het spraakgeluid nog niet als iets zelfstandigs beschouwd dat men kan analyseren en reconstrueren. Spraaksimulatie is nabootsing van het spreken. Er wordt een kunstmatig lichaam gebouwd dat lucht kan uitblazen en op die manier de lucht in trilling kan brengen. De natuurgetrouwheid van de aldus gegenereerde kunstmatige spraak hangt af van de nauwkeurigheid waarmee de relevante eigenschappen van het menselijk lichaam gedupliceerd zijn. <div style="position: relative;" class="ui_animateFigureCaption"><a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/153770/en/abbé-mical-s-tetes-parlantes-virtual-voices-1"> <img src="http://fast.mediamatic.nl/f/sjnh/image/113/153770-247-400.jpg" height="400" width="247" alt="Abbé Mical's Tetes Parlantes - Virtual Voices (1)" title="Abbé Mical's Tetes Parlantes - Virtual Voices (1)" playable="1"/> </a><div class="caption clearfix"><div class="caption-wrap"><a title="Vergroot afbeelding - Abbé Mical's Tetes Parlantes - Virtual Voices (1) - Mediamatic.net" href="/153770/en/abbé-mical-s-tetes-parlantes-virtual-voices-1">Abbé Mical's Tetes Parlantes - Virtual Voices (1)</a> - published in Mediamatic Magazine Vol. 7#1</div></div></div> Net als mensen, hebben deze machines 'stembanden' die in trilling gebracht worden door er lucht doorheen te persen. Hoe de menselijke stembanden precies werken was toen nog niet bekend. Als imitatie ervan gebruikte men het principe van een harmonium: de luchtweg wordt afgesloten door een buigzame metalen tong, die bij overdruk beweegt om de lucht door te laten en die aldus in trilling raakt. De tong werd vaak met leer bekleed om de hoge tonen wat te dempen. Net als bij een tongenorgel wordt deze trilling dan overgenomen door de lucht in een resonantieholte – die in dit geval zo goed mogelijk lijkt op de menselijke mondholte. Afhankelijk van de exacte vorm (van de stand van de mond, dus) ontstaan er verschillende klinkers. Afhankelijk van de manier waarop de luchtstroom gestart of gestopt, of bemoeilijkt wordt door vernauwing van de uitstroomopening, ontstaan er verschillende medeklinkers. Zoals Cordemoy al beredeneerd had, waren zelfstandig functionerende machines van dit soort altijd beperkt tot het uitbrengen van een eindig repertoire van teksten; en omdat de spraaksimulatie helemaal niet zo eenvoudig bleek, ging het in de praktijk zelfs om beperkte aantallen woorden of zinnen, die in de machine gehardwired werden. Om die reden werden de spraakmachines vaak vormgegeven als instrumenten - machines die in principe alle geluiden kunnen genereren die nodig zijn om willekeurige teksten uit te spreken, maar die, om een gegeven tekst ook inderdaad uit te spreken, wel een technicus nodig hebben die beslist welke geluiden er op welk moment voortgebracht moeten worden. De oplossing van Descartes, zou je kunnen zeggen: een domme machine wordt aangedreven door het menselijk bewustzijn; een lichaam bestuurd door een geest. Wolfgang von Kempelen, bij voorbeeld, construeerde in 1778 een machine die de werking van de mondholte op directe wijze imiteert. Door middel van een blaasbalg perst men lucht via 'stembanden' door een resonantieholte, die met de beide handen gemoduleerd wordt. Door met de linkerhand de vorm van de resonantieholte te veranderen kan men verschillende klinkers creëren; de medeklinkers ontstaan, als deze holte met de rechterhand op verschillende manieren geopend of gesloten wordt. Een long- en stembandprothese, die het mogelijk maakt om de handen als mond te gebruiken. Technologische perversie van het spreken. Het 'klinkerorgel'. <h5>5 This is a relatively recent machine (built at the Institute of Phonetic Sciences of the University of Amsterdam), but its method of operation definitely belongs to the eighteenth-century tradition.</h5> Hetzelfde principe, maar nu: een carrousel vol verschillende klankholtes. Een waaier van klinkers. Een laboratoriumapparaat dat door een technicus bediend wordt, via knoppen, wielen, voetpedalen. Als gevolg van de handelingen van de technicus gaat de trillende lucht naar de ene dan wel de andere resonantieholte en wordt zo'n holte zus dan wel zo geopend of gesloten. Op die manier realiseert de technicus door afzonderlijke opeenvolgende ingrepen één voor één de elementen van de uit te spreken taaluiting. Het menselijk spreken is een continu proces. Bij deze mechanische simulatie ontbreekt die continuïteit. We horen fonologie: de discrete combinatoriek van de taalwetenschap. Joop van Brakel over het 'klinkerorgel': De taal valt in betekenisloze brokstukken uiteen. Slapstick, vrolijkheid, muziek. De taal wordt weer dierlijk. Gekakel, geblaat, geblaf. (There once was a time when all speech was song.) Het klinkerorgel heeft ingenieuze 'kunstmatige stembanden'. Een holle cilinder met een sleuf erin draait voortdurend rond binnen een andere holle cilinder met een sleuf erin. Het resultaat: een sleufvormige opening gaat voortdurend open en dicht. Daar wordt de lucht doorheen geperst. Als door dit procédé de lucht aan het trillen gebracht wordt zonder dat er een 'kunstmatige mondholte' is aangesloten waarin de lucht gaat resoneren, dan hoor je: een scheet. Is dat het geluid dat aan alle spreken ten grondslag ligt? Andere spraakmachines scheppen een nog duidelijkere afstand tussen de bedienende technicus en de materiële productie van het geluid: ze plaatsen er een keyboard-interface tussen. Tot deze categorie behoren de Têtes Parlantes van Abbé Mical (1783) en de Euphonis van Joseph Faber (1840). Spreekmachines voor kermisachtige voorstellingen. De ontwerper was tevens uitvoerend technicus. En variétéartiest, buikspreker: hij voert een pop ten tonele en probeert de illusie te scheppen dat die echt praat. Het laboratoriumapparaat is hier tot een instrument geworden, met een interface dat de virtuoze uitvoerder in staat moet stellen om een natuurlijk klinkende dynamiek en timing aan de mechanische spraakuitingen op te leggen en om de beperkingen van de technologie zo goed mogelijk te compenseren. Zo schrijft een tijdgenoot van Mical, naar aanleiding van diens Têtes Parlantes: Met enige oefening en handigheid zal men met de vingers kunnen spreken zoals met de tong, en zal men aan de taal van de hoofden de snelheid, de rust, en kortom alle eigenschappen kunnen verlenen die een taal kan hebben die niet door de hartstochten bezield wordt. <div style="position: relative;" class="ui_animateFigureCaption"><a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/153765/en/poyet-louis-kratzenstein-s-resonators-virtual"> <img src="http://fast.mediamatic.nl/f/sjnh/image/633/153765-400-122.jpg" height="122" width="400" alt="Poyet, Louis. Kratzenstein's resonators - Virtual Voices (1)" title="Poyet, Louis. Kratzenstein's resonators - Virtual Voices (1)" playable="1"/> </a><div class="caption clearfix"><div class="caption-wrap"><a title="Vergroot afbeelding - Poyet, Louis. Kratzenstein's resonators - Virtual Voices (1) - Mediamatic.net" href="/153765/en/poyet-louis-kratzenstein-s-resonators-virtual">Poyet, Louis. Kratzenstein's resonators - Virtual Voices (1)</a> - published in Mediamatic Magazine Vol. 7#1 (1992)</div></div></div> <h5>6 Avec un peu d'habitude et d'habileté, on pourra parler avec les toigts comme avec la langue et on pourra donner au langage des têtes la rapidité, le repos et toute la physionomie enfin que peut avoir une langue qui n'est point animée par les passions. From a letter by Antoine de Rivarol, 1783 (Oeuvres complètes de Rivarol, Part III, Paris 1808, p. 207) See: Jens-Peter Köster Historische Entwicklung von Syntheseapparaten zur Erzeugung statischer and Vokalartiger Signale nebst Untersuchungen zur Synthese deutscher Vokale.(Historical development of synthesis machines for generating static and vowel-like signals and research into the synthesis of German vowels) Hamburg 1973, p. 85. On p. 95, Köster also quotes another part of this letter: If these heads were multiplied in Europe, they would raise terror in all those Swiss and Gascon language teachers whose influence has infected all countries and who disfigure our language for the peoples who love it. Köster comments: Here lie the roots of the use of technological tools in foreign language teaching.</h5> Op het toetsenbord van de Têtes Parlantes brengt men een tekst ten gehore zoals men een muzikale partituur speelt op een piano. Zie voor het vervolg van deze tekst: <a href="/cwolk/view/4232" title="Virtual Voices (2)">Virtual Voices (2)</a> Virtual Voices (1) Mimesis

The new digital media technologies, which are now being developed, are often imitative technologies. Future generations may end up viewing the twentieth century as the century of abstraction, and the now imminent turn of the century as the moment of a return to a mimetic aesthetics. The imitation of nature is once again a widely pursued artistic ideal. Sometimes this concerns the imitation, not of the way things look, but of the processes that constitute life, body, or mind.

<div style="position: relative;" class="ui_animateFigureCaption"><a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/153769/en/wolfgang-von-kempelen-speaking-machine-virtual"> <img src="http://fast.mediamatic.nl/f/sjnh/image/573/153769-248-400.jpg" height="400" width="248" alt="Wolfgang von Kempelen “speaking machine” - Virtual Voices (1)" title="Wolfgang von Kempelen “speaking machine” - Virtual Voices (1)" playable="1"/> </a><div class="caption clearfix"><div class="caption-wrap"><a title="Vergroot afbeelding - Wolfgang von Kempelen “speaking machine” - Virtual Voices (1) - Mediamatic.net" href="/153769/en/wolfgang-von-kempelen-speaking-machine-virtual">Wolfgang von Kempelen “speaking machine” - Virtual Voices (1)</a> - published in Mediamatic Magazine Vol. 7#1 (1992)</div></div></div> Mimesis is then called artificial life, robotics, or artificial intelligence. But in other cases, it concerns the classical ideal of the perfect simulation of the surface of things. Then it is called ray tracing, paintbox, digital photography, virtual reality. Music exists between the poles of mathematical abstraction and pure physics. Imitation is not an issue there, one might think, but nothing could be further from the truth. After the failure of 'real' electronic music, which used sinusoids, square waves, noise and modulators to build sound sculptures that people don't particularly want to listen to, there is now an avalanche of digital electronic technologies that simulate the sounds of conventional instruments in great detail, and make them accessible for keyboards and computers with midi interfaces. Artificial speech synthesis is an imitative technology, which is closely connected with music. However, its relation with language also lends this medium an entirely unique character. This article explores the history, the techniques and the aesthetics of this medium. <h3>Voice</h3> Language is a matter of symbols. The conceptualization and abstraction of human experience. Music is a matter of physics – not so much because music is usually realized by means of sound, but rather because precisely the structural properties of music (such as metre, rhythm, harmony, melody) are based on physical phenomena. Between language and sound: speech. Between mind and matter: the voice. Roland Barthes: ''Listen to a Russian bass (...): something is there, manifest and persistent (you only hear that), which is past (or previous to) the meaning of the words, of their form (the litany), of the melisma, and even of the style of the performance: something which is directly the singer's body, brought by one and the same movement to your ear from the depth of the body's cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilage, and from the depths of the Slavonic language, as if a single skin lined the performer's inner flesh and the music he sings.'' <h5>1 Roland Barthes 'Le Grain de la Voix', in: L'obvie et l'obtus, Paris 1982 (English translation: 'The Grain of the Voice', in: The Responsibility of Forms. Critical essays on Music, Art and Representation. New York 1985, pp. 269/270)</h5> <h3>To Copy / To Fake</h3> Within the technology of voice imitation, two approaches are usually distinguished: the genetic approach and the gennematic one. The genetic method imitates the physiological processes that generate speech sounds in the human body. The gennematic method is based on the analysis of the speech sounds themselves, and reconstructs these sounds without considering the way in which the human body produces them. The speaking machines of the eighteenth-century were based on the genetic principle: the hardware of the larynx and the oral cavity was reconstructed in a stylized way. If such an imitation is faithful enough, the sounds it generates resemble the sounds of human speech. In the twentieth century, we see an entirely different approach: digital technology which calculates the shapes of sound signals and then uses loudspeakers to make them audible. The voice is no longer imitated, but its output is faked. The algorithm computes signals that evoke the image of a physical process that never occurred. The eighteenth-century automaton is a mechanical body, a piece of clockwork claiming the qualities of life. In twentieth-century computer simulation, the mechanics is abstract, the machine dissolves into mathematics. The body has disappeared. <h3>To copy</h3> The impulse of classical sculpture was not representation, but imitation. A life-size, coloured, three-dimensional model is not a model, but a copy. The master sculptors of classical mythology even managed to duplicate the human body in sculptures that did not only show perfect likeness, but that could also speak and move naturally. In Chinese and Germanic mythology, carpenters and silversmiths displayed similar skills, building treacherously seductive female automata. The essential step on the road from myth to technology was taken in the seventeenth century. The idea that living organisms function according to the laws of physics, and could in principle be simulated by means of mechanical constructions, is then no longer a vague, alarming suspicion, but a scientific hypothesis. In the early seventeenth-century, Descartes presented the thesis that animals are in fact machines. Thomas Hobbes: Nature, the art by which God hath made and governs the world, is by the art of man, as in many other things, in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in the principal part within; why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings; and the joints but so many wheels giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the artificer? <h5>2 Thomas Hobbes Leviathan 1651 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex 1968)</h5> In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the construction of automata which imitate bodily functions of man or animal was extremely popular: the development of clockwork technology had made it possible to realize much better imitations than before; and the theories of the Cartesians lent a philosophical interest to such enterprises. Thus, there were dolls that could walk or talk, write letters, or play the flute; birds that could flap their wings, tweet, eat, drink and shit. There is a curious similarity between this kind of automaton building and present-day Artificial Intelligence. In those days, too, the capacities of the most advanced technologies of the moment were exploited with the goal of imitating the outward appearance of certain aspects of human behaviour; then, too, this resulted in products which aroused everybody's interest, because they could be regarded as technological experiments, as biological models, as philosophical existence proofs, as art, or as entertainment. This is illustrated by the career of Jacques de Vaucanson, one of the most well-known automaton builders of the eighteenth-century. His automata were amusing and astonishing exhibits in popular fairs, while their mechanisms were published in learned scientific articles - by the designer himself, and also by Diderot and D'Alembert in their Encyclopédie. The production of the automata also generated interesting technological spin-offs. Eventually, Vaucanson became an innovative organizer in the textile industry, and built the most advanced silk-spinning factory of that time. He used the technology of his automatic flute player for the design of the first programmable loom, which would later become the basis for Jacquard's work. <h3>L'Homme Machine</h3> Human beings are emphatically excluded from Descartes' reasoning about the mechanical character of animals. He links mechanism with the absence of emotions and the absence of consciousness. Apparently he has no difficulty in viewing animals in this way, but that people could be machines is more of a problem. The Cartesian philosopher Cordemoy formulates the argument against the mechanizability of humans in terms of the idea of an automatic speech machine: ...although I see clearly that a purely mechanical apparatus could utter a few words, I know at the same time that the springs which distribute the air or open the tubes that let out the voices display a certain order between each other, which they could never change. So that, from the moment the first voice sounds, the voices that usually follow must necessarily follow as well – that is, if the machine still has sufficient air. Contrarily, the words which I hear being uttered by bodies such as mine, are rarely pronounced in the same order. <h5>3 G. de Cordemoy Discours physique de la parole Paris, 1666</h5> From this point of view, the richness of language is connected with the typically human capacity of free will, which is intrinsically incompatible with the rigidity of a clockwork. To account for free will, Descartes provides the - otherwise mechanical - human body with an interface to the immortal soul. He situates this interface in the pineal gland – a small gland with an unknown function, located in the hypothalamus. A hundred years after Descartes, the idea that human beings are machines too was explicitly defended after all. In L'Homme machine, La Mettrie argues that ''all capacities of the soul are to such an extent dependent on the right organization of the brain and the entire body, that apparently they are nothing but this organization itself. In this theory, there is a material identity between body and soul; therefore, the necessity of a mind-body-interface''has disappeared. Between man and animal, there are only differences in degree. The Cartesian arguments concerning the mechanical character of animals now apply directly to human beings, but at the same time their meaning changes profoundly. Mechanism no longer implies non-consciousness: consciousness itself is mechanical. <h5>4 Julien Offray de la Mettrie: L' Homme machine.Leyden 1748</h5> If the more ambitious automaton builders of this period had based their research programmes on La Mettrie's viewpoint, they would have invented something like today's Artificial Intelligence: a discipline aimed at creating actual demonstrations of mechanized mental processes. But clockwork technology was not suitable for such a purpose. Therefore, this step could not be made until the middle of the twentieth century, when the electronic computer became available. This is also why Cordemoy's argument was so plausible in his days. No one could foresee the virtually unlimited switching flexibility, which would be introduced by Von Neumann's stored program computer. Software is mechanics, which is capable of dynamic reconfiguration. Programs are virtual clockworks with self-modifying and self-extending capacities. Although these capacities are limited by the finiteness of the hardware on which the programs are implemented, in practice we can often ignore these limitations. Compared to a clockwork, the computer realizes a qualitatively superior complexity and flexibility. With this invention behind us, we must now forever view the limits of the mechanizable as unknown and open-ended. <h3>Talking Heads</h3> The first serious speech machines were developed by eighteenth-century automaton builders who were engaged in mechanical simulation of the bodily functions of man and beast. At this time, the sound of speech was not yet viewed as a phenomenon which could be analyzed and reconstructed. Speech simulation was imitation of the act of speaking. Artificial bodies were created, which could blow out air and thereby make the air vibrate; the fidelity of the artificial speech generated in this way depended on the accuracy with which the relevant features of the human body were reproduced. Like human beings, these machines had 'vocal cords', which vibrate when air is forced through. The precise functioning of the human vocal cords was not yet known at this time. To imitate them, the machine-builders used the principle of the harmonium: an air tube is closed off by a flexible metal tongue, which moves under pressure to let the air through and is consequently set into vibration. The tongue was often covered in leather to dim the high tones slightly. As with a reed organ, this vibration was then conveyed to the air via a resonance chamber – which in this case was made to resemble the human mouth as much as possible. Depending on the exact shape of the resonance chamber (that is, the position of the mouth), various vowels could be generated. Depending on the way in which the air stream was started or stopped, or obstructed by constricting the outlet, various consonants could be formed. <div style="position: relative;" class="ui_animateFigureCaption"><a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/153770/en/abbé-mical-s-tetes-parlantes-virtual-voices-1"> <img src="http://fast.mediamatic.nl/f/sjnh/image/113/153770-247-400.jpg" height="400" width="247" alt="Abbé Mical's Tetes Parlantes - Virtual Voices (1)" title="Abbé Mical's Tetes Parlantes - Virtual Voices (1)" playable="1"/> </a><div class="caption clearfix"><div class="caption-wrap"><a title="Vergroot afbeelding - Abbé Mical's Tetes Parlantes - Virtual Voices (1) - Mediamatic.net" href="/153770/en/abbé-mical-s-tetes-parlantes-virtual-voices-1">Abbé Mical's Tetes Parlantes - Virtual Voices (1)</a> - published in Mediamatic Magazine Vol. 7#1</div></div></div> As Cordemoy had argued already, independently functioning machines of this kind could only deliver a limited repertoire of texts. Because speech simulation proved far from easy, in practice this came down to rather small numbers of words or sentences, which would be hardwired into the machine. For this reason, speech machines were often designed as instruments instead – machines which could generate all the sounds that are needed to pronounce any given text, but which could only pronounce an actual text if operated by a technical expert who determined which sounds were produced at which moment. Descartes' solution, one might say: a mechanical machine driven by human consciousness; a body controlled by a mind. In 1778, for example, Wolfgang Von Kempelen designed a machine, which directly imitated the functioning of the oral cavity. The operator squeezes a pair of bellows to press the air, via 'vocal cords', into a resonance chamber, which he modulates with both hands. The various vowels are created by changing the shape of the resonance chamber with one hand; the consonants are produced as the other hand opens or closes this chamber in various ways. A lung and vocal-cord prosthesis, which makes it possible to use the hands as a mouth. Technological perversion of speech. The 'vowel organ'. <h5>5 This is a relatively recent machine (built at the Institute of Phonetic Sciences of the University of Amsterdam), but its method of operation definitely belongs to the eighteenth-century tradition.</h5> The same principle, but in this case it is a carrousel of different sound cavities; a fan of vowels. A laboratory instrument operated by a technician by means of switches, wheels, foot pedals. As a result of the technician's actions the vibrating air is sent to one resonance chamber or another and such a chamber is opened or closed in a variety of ways. Thus, by a succession of separate interventions, the technician realizes, one by one, the phonetic elements of the language expression to be pronounced. Human speech is a continuous process. In this mechanical simulation, there is no such continuity. What we hear is phonology: the discrete combinatorics of linguistics. Joop van Brakel on the 'vowel organ': language shattered into meaningless fragments. Slapstick, merriment, music. Language regressing to animal sounds. Cackling, bleating, barking. (There once was a time when all speech was song.) The vowel organ has ingenious 'artificial vocal cords'. A hollow cylinder with a slit in it continually rotates within another hollow cylinder, also with a slit in it. The result: a slit-shaped opening is opened and closed continually. The air is pressed through this opening. If we use this technique to set the air in motion without providing a connection to an 'artificial oral cavity' in which the air can resonate, what you hear is a fart. Is that the sound that underlies all speaking? Other speech machines create an even greater separation between the operating technician and the material production of sound: they insert a keyboard-interface. Abbé Mical's Têtes Parlantes (1783) and Joseph Faber's Euphonis (1840) belong in this category. Speech machines for entertainment. The designer also acted as operating technician and as variety artist, ventriloquist: he puts a puppet on stage and tries to create the illusion that it really speaks. Here, the laboratory apparatus has become a musical instrument, with an interface which enables the virtuoso performer to add natural dynamics and timing to the mechanical speech utterances, and to compensate as much as possible for the limitations of technology. Thus, one of Mical's contemporaries writes about the Têtes Parlantes:// With a little practice and agility, we will be able to speak with the fingers as with the tongue, and we will be able to give the language of the heads the speed, the calm, and in short all the qualities that a language can possess which is not animated by passions. <div style="position: relative;" class="ui_animateFigureCaption"><a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/153765/en/poyet-louis-kratzenstein-s-resonators-virtual"> <img src="http://fast.mediamatic.nl/f/sjnh/image/633/153765-400-122.jpg" height="122" width="400" alt="Poyet, Louis. Kratzenstein's resonators - Virtual Voices (1)" title="Poyet, Louis. Kratzenstein's resonators - Virtual Voices (1)" playable="1"/> </a><div class="caption clearfix"><div class="caption-wrap"><a title="Vergroot afbeelding - Poyet, Louis. Kratzenstein's resonators - Virtual Voices (1) - Mediamatic.net" href="/153765/en/poyet-louis-kratzenstein-s-resonators-virtual">Poyet, Louis. Kratzenstein's resonators - Virtual Voices (1)</a> - published in Mediamatic Magazine Vol. 7#1 (1992)</div></div></div> <h5>6 Avec un peu d'habitude et d'habileté, on pourra parler avec les toigts comme avec la langue, et on pourra donner au langage des têtes la rapidité, le repos et toute la physionomie enfin que peut avoir une langue qui n'est point animée par les passions. From a letter by Antoine de Rivarol, 1783 ( Oeuvres complètes de Rivarol, Part III, Paris 1808, p. 207) See: Jens-Peter Köster Historische Entwicklung von Syntheseapparaten zur Erzeugung statischer and Vokalartiger Signale nebst Untersuchungen zur Synthese deutscher Vokale. (Historical development of synthesis machines for generating static and vowel-like signals and research into the synthesis of German vowels) Hamburg 1973, p. 85. On p. 95, Köster also quotes another part of this letter: If these heads were multiplied in Europe, they would raise terror in all those Swiss and Gascon language teachers, whose influence has infected all countries and who disfigure our language for the peoples who love it. Köster comments: Here lie the roots of the use of technological tools in foreign language teaching.''</h5> On the keyboard of the Têtes Parlantes, you present a text as you would play a musical score on a piano. See for continuation of this text: ''<a href="/cwolk/view/4229" title="Virtual Voices (2)">Virtual Voices (2)</a> Mediamatic Magazine vol.7#1 Remko Scha http://www.mediamatic.net/id/869 d d ARTICLE publication 1 http://www.mediamatic.net/id/8340 2010-06-29T09:59:23+02:00 Virtual Voices (2) Mimesis

Soft Machines

Alexander Graham Bell staat op een keerpunt in de geschiedenis van de spraaksynthese. De achttiende-eeuwse technologie heeft hij nog heel bewust meegemaakt. In zijn kinderjaren werd hij, samen met zijn broertje, door zijn vader meegenomen naar een tentoonstelling waar een replica van een spreekmachine van Von Kempelen te zien was. Thuisgekomen, namen de jongens toen zelf ook de bouw van zo'n machine ter hand. Zoals bekend vond Bell jaren later de telefoon uit en introduceerde hij daarmee de technologie die voor de toekomst van de geluidsverwerking bepalend zou zijn: de representatie van geluid door middel van elektrische signalen. Voordien had hij ook al een gedetailleerd ontwerp gemaakt (dat nooit geïmplementeerd werd) van een mechanische Vocoder. Maar Bells grappigste bijdrage aan de kunstmatige spraaksynthese vinden we in een andere anekdote over zijn jonge jaren. Bell's youthful interest in speech production also led him to experiment with his pet Skye terrier. He taught the dog to sit up on his hind legs and growl continuously. At the same time, Bell manipulated the dog's vocal tract by hand. The dog's repertoire of sounds finally consisted of the vowels /a/ and /u/, the diphtong /ou/ and the syllables /ma/ and /ga/. His greatest linguistic accomplishment consisted of the sentence, How are you Grandmamma ? The dog apparently started taking a 'bread and butter' interest in the project and would try to talk by himself. But on his own, he could never do better than the usual growl. <h5>7 James L. Flanagan Speech Analysis Synthesis and Perception, second edition, Berlin 1972, pp. 206/207.</h5> Een soortgelijke techniek, die wat meer in de cyberpunksfeer terechtkomt, hebben we te danken aan Johannes Müller, de grondlegger van de moderne fysiologie. Seine Arbeitsweise ist deutlich durch die Hinwendung zum Experiment am lebenden und toten Objekt gekennzeichnet. In Fortsetzung der Versuche von Liskovius, der 1814 als erster am Leichenkehlkopf Brust- und Falsettstimme erzeugte, schnitt Müller einer Leiche den Kopf so ab, daß der gesamte Stimmapparat und ein Teil der Trachea erhalten blieben. Durch anblasen des Leichenkehlkopfes erzeugte Müller der menschlichen Sprache sehr ähnliche Vokalklänge. Bei passiver Bewegung der Lippen gelangen ihm sogar einige Konsonanten. <h5>8 Köster, op.cit., p. 149</h5> <div style="position: relative;" class="ui_animateFigureCaption"><a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/153772/en/hermann-helmholtz-s-synthesis-machine-virtual"> <img src="http://fast.mediamatic.nl/f/sjnh/image/144/153772-400-206.jpg" height="206" width="400" alt="Hermann Helmholtz's synthesis machine - Virtual Voices (2)" title="Hermann Helmholtz's synthesis machine - Virtual Voices (2)" playable="1"/> </a><div class="caption clearfix"><div class="caption-wrap"><a title="Vergroot afbeelding - Hermann Helmholtz's synthesis machine - Virtual Voices (2) - Mediamatic.net" href="/153772/en/hermann-helmholtz-s-synthesis-machine-virtual">Hermann Helmholtz's synthesis machine - Virtual Voices (2)</a> - published in Mediamatic Magazine Vol. 7#1 (1992)</div></div></div> <h3>Voorspiegelen</h3> Hermann Helmholtz was een leerling van deze zelfde Müller. Maar zijn werk op het gebied van de spraaksynthese is meer akoestisch dan fysiologisch georiënteerd. De bestudering van het verschijnsel geluid is in de tweede helft van de negentiende eeuw zover gevorderd dat men kan proberen om menselijke spraakklanken in elementaire componenten te ontleden. Bij de klinkersynthese bootst Helmholtz niet het menselijk lichaam na, maar stelt de klanken samen uit elementaire, sinusvormige componenten. De synthesemachine bestaat uit een batterij stemvorken voorzien van resonantiekamers met frequenties in harmonische verhoudingen. Aangedreven door elektromagneten, trillen de stemvorken met volmaakte regelmaat in hun grondfrequenties. De volumes van de bijdragen van de verschillende stemvorken kunnen gevarieerd worden door het gedeeltelijk openen dan wel sluiten van hun resonantiekamers. Zo kunnen klanken met diverse spectra worden samengesteld, die gelijkenis vertonen met verschillende klinkers: Aa, Oo, Uu, Ie, Ee, Oe, Ah, Oh, Uh... <div style="position: relative;" class="ui_animateFigureCaption"><a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/153777/en/dectalk-virtual-voices-2"> <img src="http://fast.mediamatic.nl/f/sjnh/image/083/153777-263-400.jpg" height="400" width="263" alt="Dectalk - Virtual Voices (2)" title="Dectalk - Virtual Voices (2)" playable="1"/> </a><div class="caption clearfix"><div class="caption-wrap"><a title="Vergroot afbeelding - Dectalk - Virtual Voices (2) - Mediamatic.net" href="/153777/en/dectalk-virtual-voices-2">Dectalk - Virtual Voices (2)</a> - published in Mediamatic Magazine Vol. 7#1 (1992)</div></div></div> Hetzelfde syntheseprocédé kan nog makkelijker worden toegepast met de sindsdien ontwikkelde elektronische technologie. De cruciale uitvinding die de ontwikkeling van de geluidselektronica mogelijk heeft gemaakt was de luidspreker:// de general purpose geluidsvoortbrenger die de geluidstrillingen van willekeurige gebeurtenissen kan nabootsen zonder ook maar iets //van de materiële structuur van die gebeurtenissen te hoeven dupliceren. De luidspreker zet willekeurige elektrische signalen om in materiële geluidsgolven. Dat creëert de mogelijkheid om elektrische signalen te genereren en te manipuleren als modellen van geluidsgolven. In de elektronische technologie gebeurt dat met weerstanden, condensatoren, inductiespoelen, radiobuizen, transistoren: objecten met een bepaald elektrisch gedrag worden tot schakelingen samengesteld die de gewenste elektrische golfpatronen genereren. De twee benaderingen die we bij de mechanische geluidssynthese gezien hebben, zijn allebei ook toepasbaar in de elektronica. De structuur en de componenten van een mechanisch systeem dat het menselijk strottenhoofd nabootst kunnen systematisch naar het elektronisch domein vertaald worden; dat levert dan inderdaad een schakeling op met een uitgangssignaal dat overeenkomt met het spraakgeluid dat het mechanische model voortbrengt. Simulatie in de stijl van Helmholtz is al heel erg eenvoudig: vervang zijn stemvorken door sinusgeneratoren en zijn instelbare resonantieholtes door potentiometers. De elektronische simulatie heeft een materiële vorm: een schakeling bestaande uit aanwijsbare componenten en navolgbare verbindingen. Maar op het oog gebeurt er niets meer. Het uurwerk staat stil. Het uurwerk denkt. De structuur van de schakeling komt overeen met de mathematische analyse van een fysisch proces dat geluid voortbrengt. De schakeling is een gematerialiseerd diagram. Aan een printplaat kan je dat zien. <h5>9 Cf. Dick Raaijmakers 'De kunst van het machine lezen' (The art of machine reading), Raster 6, 1978, pp. 6-53</h5> De computer is de volgende stap in de ontwikkeling naar een steeds abstractere simulatie. De hardware heeft nu helemaal niets meer te maken met de fysica die de luisteraar voorgetoverd moet worden. De hardware heeft zelfs een structuur die wezenlijk incompatibel is met de oorsprong van de muziek. Een rekenmachine 'rekent' inderdaad: manipuleert discrete symbolen. Muziek, daarentegen, komt voort uit de resonantie van continue systemen. De digitale geluidssimulatie is twee slagen verwijderd van echt geluid: het elektrische signaal dat de luidspreker gaat aandrijven wordt in het computergeheugen gerepresenteerd als een sequentie van discrete symbolen, die het amplitudeverloop in de tijd, in discrete stapjes verdeeld, weergeven. Zo wordt zelfs de continuïteit van het elektrische signaal gefaked. De operaties op de symbolisch gerepresenteerde signalen komen grotendeels overeen met de werking van de componenten uit elektronische schakelingen – maar omdat deze operaties nu ook symbolisch gerepresenteerd zijn (als software op de computer staan), kunnen ze met een oneindige flexibiliteit, in alle mogelijke combinaties en volgordes, worden toegepast. Cordemoys onmogelijkheid is bewaarheid: de levenloze materie heeft zich aan de rigiditeit van het uurwerk ontworsteld. De flexibele machine, die alles kan, is tegelijk de raadselachtige machine, waaraan we niets kunnen aflezen. De machine is onbeweeglijk, zodat we niets zien gebeuren. Maar ook de bedradingstructuur van de componenten zegt niets over de functies die er verricht worden. Die structuur zegt alleen: hier wordt gerekend. De flexibiliteit van het softwaremedium is vrijwel totaal. Alle mathematisch beschrijfbare operaties kunnen geïmplementeerd worden. Zelfs het feit dat de uitvoering van elke operatie een kort, maar niet oneindig kort stukje tijd kost, en dat zeer complexe samenstellingen van operaties daarom toch lang kunnen gaan duren, is nauwelijks een beperking meer. Dit praktische probleem wordt opgelost door de vlsi-technologie: voor deelprocessen die te langzaam gaan kunnen vaak chips gebakken worden: grootschalig geïntegreerde elektronische hardware, die minder wendbaar is dan software, maar wel heel erg snel. Alles wat je kunt bedenken kan je met software doen. Dat is wat er interessant is aan ai en andere experimentele takken van de computerwetenschap: je loopt tegen de grenzen aan van wat we kunnen bedenken. De geluidssynthese is daar een typisch voorbeeld van: de huidige synthesizers hebben een geweldige klankrijkdom, maar de geluidsimitaties van bestaande instrumenten klinken nog steeds gestileerd. In de gevallen dat ze natuurlijk klinken, komt dat omdat er niet gesynthetiseerd wordt op basis van een structurele analyse, maar op basis van samples. Dan wordt er niet een geluid nagebootst, maar er wordt een tevoren geregistreerd geluid gereproduceerd. De best klinkende synthesizers hebben veel gemeen met taperecorders. Digitale mellotrons. De geluidsregistratie met de grootste nauwkeurigheid is tegenwoordig de digitale geluidsregistratie. De representatie van hifi geluid in computationeel verwerkbare vorm is dus goed in orde. De beperkingen van de digitale geluidssynthese zijn uitsluitend de beperkingen van ons begrip van de psychologie van geluidsstructuur. <div style="position: relative;" class="ui_animateFigureCaption"><a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/153771/en/poyet-louis-kratzenstein-s-resonators-virtual"> <img src="http://fast.mediamatic.nl/f/sjnh/image/400/153771-308-400.jpg" height="400" width="308" alt="Poyet, Louis. Kratzenstein's resonators - Virtual Voices (2)" title="Poyet, Louis. Kratzenstein's resonators - Virtual Voices (2)" playable="1"/> </a><div class="caption clearfix"><div class="caption-wrap"><a title="Vergroot afbeelding - Poyet, Louis. Kratzenstein's resonators - Virtual Voices (2) - Mediamatic.net" href="/153771/en/poyet-louis-kratzenstein-s-resonators-virtual">Poyet, Louis. Kratzenstein's resonators - Virtual Voices (2)</a> - published in Mediamatic Magazine Vol. 7#1 (1992)</div></div></div> <h3>Platonic People</h3> De eerste elektronische spraaksynthesesystemen waren door hun gebrekkige verstaanbaarheid slechts beperkt toepasbaar. Je kon ze bijvoorbeeld geen complexe tekst met een niet voor de hand liggende inhoud laten zeggen, als je wilde dat die tekst ook begrepen zou worden. En niemand kon de output van deze systemen verwarren met de spraak van een menselijk persoon. De stem komt voort uit het metalen, hoekig bewegende lichaam van de prototypische robot. Wat we horen is een machine, die zich op een onhandige mechanische manier toch van de menselijke communicatiemiddelen bedient. Een geluid dat morbide associaties oproept over de mogelijkheden en de gevaren van de technologie, en over de aard van de menselijke identiteit. De huidige state-of-the-art programma's beginnen langzamerhand een heel ander karakter te krijgen. Een typisch voorbeeld is dectalk. <h5>10 dectalk was developed by Digital Equipment on the basis of mitalk. See: Jonathan Allen, M. Sharon Hunnicutt and Dennis Klatt'' From text to speech:</h5> The MITalk system,'' Cambridge University Press, 1987 Dit programma verwerkelijkt de stoutste dromen van Abbé Mical. Têtes parlantes: niet één, niet twee, maar negen verschillende, die ook nog weer allemaal gemodificeerd en geïnterpoleerd kunnen worden. Het dectalk manual presenteert hun portretten en noemt ze met name: ''Rough Rita, Frail Frank, Whispering Wendy, Huge Harry, Kit the Kid, Perfect Paul, Beautiful Betty, Uppity Ursula, en Doctor Dennis. De hoofdrolspelers in een comic strip versie van Peyton Place.'' De input voor programma's als dectalk bestaat uit discrete symbolen. Het programma verwerkt files waarin sequenties van fonemen opgeslagen zijn. Er is dus geen menselijke beheersing van timing en dynamiek, zoals bij de achttiende-eeuwse machines die via een toetsenbord bediend werden. Toch, en zelfs mede daardoor, heeft de output een grotere continuïteit. De software bevat niet alleen modellen van de signalen die behoren bij de afzonderlijke fonemen, maar ook procedures die de opeenvolgende signalen naadloos aan elkaar passen. De hedendaagse synthetische stemmen zijn goed verstaanbaar. En door een nauwkeurigere beheersing van het spectrum van de klinkers is het nadrukkelijk robotachtige karakter ervan verdwenen. In plaats daarvan: een sonoriteit die slechts onmenselijk is door zijn gelijkmatigheid. <h5>Speech technologists are doing their best to imitate human limitations and imperfections. Allen et al. (op.cit.), for example: Some additional pauses are introduced in longer phrases and slow speaking rate so that the talker does not seem to have an inhuman supply of breath.</h5> dectalk's standaardstem, Perfect Paul, is een abstract klinkende, nieuwslezerachtige stem. Geen machine, geen mens. Daarmee is een nieuw medium ontstaan. Tot nu toe was het niet mogelijk om naar een tekst te luisteren zonder naar iemands lichaam te luisteren. De eigenstandige tekst, onafhankelijk van het menselijk lichaam, was altijd de gedrukte tekst. Voor het eerst heeft nu de taal een geluid dat onafhankelijk is van het lichaam - een geluid dat rechtstreeks voortkomt uit het taalkundig systeem, uit syntaxis en fonemen. De volgende stap in deze ontwikkeling wordt ingeluid door andere dectalk-stemmen, zoals Whispering Wendy en Huge Harry. Die zijn persoonlijker, maar net zo gelijkmatig en onverstoorbaar. Rimpelloze continuïteit. Air brush pin-ups. Platonische lichamen. Whispering Wendy heeft een hese stem die tegelijk heel zuiver en helder is - en klein, met weinig substantie, zoals de zangstem van Marilyn Monroe, of die van Brigitte Bardot. De suggestie van een zacht, elastisch, gewichtloos lichaam. Huge Harry is de macho tegenhanger van Whispering Wendy. Zijn stem is zwaar en bronstig. Nog geen Elvis Presley, maar het gaat de goede kant op. Het synthetisch lichaam is al lang een erotisch ideaal. Carter Ratcliff zegt bijvoorbeeld over het gebruik van klassieke standbeelden in de modefotografie van de dertiger jaren:'' The forms of high fashion assume the look of the statuesque, the hallowed, the classical. Living flesh has the smoothness, the soft luster of ancient marble. Stone, it almost seems, is as supple as flesh. Hoyningen-Huene makes an equation between living and not living bodies, and the equation enchants, for in his photographs the bodies that do not live are not dead. They are statues. His imagery argues that in the realm of fashion there is no death. To enter the fashionable instant is to live forever. '' <h5>12 Carter Ratcliff, 'Out of Time', Artforum International 30, September 1991, pp. 112-117</h5> De toekomst van digitale beeld- en geluidsimulatie: de gladde koelte van het standbeeld in een natuurlijk bewegend lichaam, in een sensueel modulerende stem. Robotporno is het ideaal waarheen de technologie zich nu langzaam maar zeker ontwikkelt - een ideaal dat door live-performers als Prince en Michael Jackson al anticiperend nagebootst wordt. Toen Andy Warhol de commerciële telefoonseks bedacht, suggereerde hij in één moeite door dat dat dan ook het best met robots zou kunnen:// A robot computer to answer the phone, that would be great. It would do the job without emotion. // <h5>13 Ultra Violet Famous for 15 minutes. My years with Andy Warhol New York 1990, p. 163</h5> <h3>Nawoord van Ultra Violet</h3> ''I think back to one of Andy's earliest paintings, compelling in its simplicity - a starkly black-and-white six-foot-high Coca-Cola bottle, painted in oil on canvas in 1960. I think of the paintings of clean, shiny Campbell soup cans, the young, unlined, fresh-scrubbed faces of Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Onassis, Ingrid Bergman, so many others. Then gradually I began to grasp what Andy was trying to say with all his babble about machines and sex. Where sex has turned repulsive and inhuman, machine sex beckons alluringly. Only in telephone sex, robot sex, computer sex, is there escape from ugliness and cruelty. Machine sex is the only kind left that is uncontaminated, antiseptic, clean, even a little mysterious. (...) Yes, here is still another of the endless paradoxes Andy strews along our paths. In sex, as in art, (...) he reinvents shining, pristine, early morning purity. His kind, of course: on the surface, no deeper. '' <h5>14 Ultra Violet, Op. cit., pp. 165/166</h5> Virtual Voices (2) Mimesis

Soft Machines

Alexander Graham Bell stands at a turning point in the history of speech synthesis. When he was young, his father took him and his younger brother to an exhibition where they saw a replica of one of Von Kempelen's speech machines. Back home, the boys proceeded to build a similar speaking machine themselves. When, several years later, Bell invented the telephone, he introduced the technique that would determine the future of sound processing: the representation of sounds by means of electric signals. Bell also produced a detailed design that never got implemented, for a device that would have been a mechanical Vocoder. But his most curious contribution to artificial speech synthesis was another early feat. Bell's youthful interest in speech production also led him to experiment with his pet Skye terrier. He taught the dog to sit up on his hind legs and growl continuously. At the same time, Bell manipulated the dog's vocal tract by hand. The dog's repertoire of sounds finally consisted of the vowels /a/ and /u/, the diphthong /ou/ and the syllables /ma/ and /ga/. His greatest linguistic accomplishment consisted of the sentence, How are you Grandmamma? The dog apparently started taking a 'bread and butter' interest in the project and would try to talk by himself. But on his own, he could never do better than the usual growl. <h5>7 James L. Flanagan Speech Analysis Synthesis and Perception, second edition, Berlin 1972, pp. 206/207.</h5> A related technology, with a cyberpunk slant, is due to Johannes Müller, the father of modern physiology. His working method is clearly characterized by his orientation toward experiments on living or dead objects. Continuing the efforts of Liskovius, who in 1814 was the first to generate chest- and head-voice from the larynx of a corpse, he cut off the head of a corpse in such a way that the entire vocal apparatus and part of the tracheae were preserved. By blowing air into the larynx of the corpse, Müller produced vocalic sounds, which closely resembled human speech. By moving the lips, he even managed to generate some consonants. <h5>8 Köster, op.cit., p. 149</h5> <div style="position: relative;" class="ui_animateFigureCaption"><a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/153772/en/hermann-helmholtz-s-synthesis-machine-virtual"> <img src="http://fast.mediamatic.nl/f/sjnh/image/144/153772-400-206.jpg" height="206" width="400" alt="Hermann Helmholtz's synthesis machine - Virtual Voices (2)" title="Hermann Helmholtz's synthesis machine - Virtual Voices (2)" playable="1"/> </a><div class="caption clearfix"><div class="caption-wrap"><a title="Vergroot afbeelding - Hermann Helmholtz's synthesis machine - Virtual Voices (2) - Mediamatic.net" href="/153772/en/hermann-helmholtz-s-synthesis-machine-virtual">Hermann Helmholtz's synthesis machine - Virtual Voices (2)</a> - published in Mediamatic Magazine Vol. 7#1 (1992)</div></div></div> <h3>To Fake</h3> Hermann Helmholtz was a pupil of that same Müller. But his work in the field of speech synthesis was less physiologically and more acoustically oriented. In the second half of the nineteenth century, research into the phenomenon of sound had reached the stage where one could attempt to analyse the sounds of human speech into elementary components. To synthesize vowels, Helmholtz did not imitate the human body, but built up the sounds from elementary, sinus-shaped components. His synthesis machine consists of a battery of tuning forks equipped with resonance chambers, with frequencies in harmonious proportions. Driven by electromagnets, the tuning forks vibrate with perfect regularity in their basic frequencies. The volumes of the contributions from the different tuning forks can be varied by partly opening or closing their resonance chambers. Thus, sounds with different spectrums can be composed, which bear resemblance to various vowels: Oo, Ee, Ah, Oh, Uh, Ih... <div style="position: relative;" class="ui_animateFigureCaption"><a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/153777/en/dectalk-virtual-voices-2"> <img src="http://fast.mediamatic.nl/f/sjnh/image/083/153777-263-400.jpg" height="400" width="263" alt="Dectalk - Virtual Voices (2)" title="Dectalk - Virtual Voices (2)" playable="1"/> </a><div class="caption clearfix"><div class="caption-wrap"><a title="Vergroot afbeelding - Dectalk - Virtual Voices (2) - Mediamatic.net" href="/153777/en/dectalk-virtual-voices-2">Dectalk - Virtual Voices (2)</a> - published in Mediamatic Magazine Vol. 7#1 (1992)</div></div></div> The same method of synthesis can be applied even more easily with modern electronic technology - a technology which was developed for the reproduction and transmission of sound. The crucial invention, which made electronic sound generation possible, was the loudspeaker: the general-purpose sound producer, which can replicate the sound of an arbitrary event, without having to mimic its material structure. The loudspeaker transforms arbitrary electric signals into material sound waves. This creates the possibility of treating electric signals as modelsof sound waves. In electronic technology, this is done by means of resistors, induction coils, radio tubes, transistors. Objects with a specific electronic behaviour are combined into circuits which generate the desired output patterns. The two kinds of approach mentioned above in connection with mechanical sound synthesis can be applied in electronics as well. The structure and the components of a mechanical system that imitates the human larynx can systematically be transposed to the electronic domain; this will indeed result in a circuit with an output signal that corresponds to the vocal sound produced by the mechanical model. Translating Helmholtz' approach to the electronic realm is even simpler: replace his tuning forks with sine wave generators, and his adjustable resonance chambers with potentiometers. Electronic simulation has a material form: a circuit consisting of identifiable components and connections. But on the outside, nothing seems to be happening. The clockwork stands still. It thinks. The structure of the circuit corresponds to the mathematical analysis of a physical sound-generating process. The circuit is a materialized diagram. A print board actually looks like that. <h5>9 Cf. Dick Raaijmakers 'De kunst van het machine lezen' (The art of machine reading), Raster 6, 1978, pp. 6-53</h5> The computer is the next step in the development towards an increasingly abstract simulation. The hardware no longer has anything in common with the physics conjured up for the listener. The hardware even has a structure which is essentially incompatible with the origins of music. A computer really 'computes': it manipulates discrete symbols. Music, on the other hand, is generated by the resonance of continuous systems. Digital sound simulation is two steps away from real sound: the electric signal driving the loudspeaker is represented in the computer as a sequence of discrete symbols that represent the amplitude variation in time, split up into small discrete steps. Thus, even the continuity of the electric signal is faked. The operations on the symbolically represented signals largely correspond to the functioning of the components from electronic circuits – but because these operations are now symbolically represented as well (installed as software in the computer), they can be applied with infinite flexibility, in every imaginable combination and sequence. Cordemoy's impossibility has come true: lifeless matter has escaped the rigidity of the clockwork. The flexible machine which can do anything is at the same time the enigmatic machine which shows nothing. The machine is motionless, so that we do not see anything happening. But neither does the wiring structure of the components reveal anything about the functions performed. This structure only says: calculations in progress. The flexibility of the software medium is virtually complete. All operations, which can be described mathematically, can be implemented. Even the fact that the execution of each operation takes a short, but not infinitely short, moment of time, and that very complex combinations of operations can therefore take a long time, is hardly a limitation anymore. This practical problem is solved by vlsi (custom-built chip) technology. It is often possible to develop special chips for sub-processes which take too much time: large-scale integrated electronic hardware, which is less flexible than software, but extremely fast. Everything you can imagine you can do with software. That is what's interesting about ai and other experimental branches of computer science: we discover the limits of what we can imagine. Sound synthesis is a typical example of this: modern synthesizers can produce a tremendous richness of sound, but imitations of existing instruments still sound stylized. Where they do sound natural, this is because they are not synthesized on the basis of structural analysis, but on the basis of samples. In that case there is no imitation, but reproduction of a previously recorded sound. The best sounding synthesizers have a great deal in common with tape recorders. They are digital mellotrons. Digital sound registration technology is now the technology with the highest accuracy. The basic methods of digital sound representation are thus completely adequate. The limitations of digital sound synthesis are solely due to the limitations of our understanding of the psychological structure of sound. <div style="position: relative;" class="ui_animateFigureCaption"><a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/153771/en/poyet-louis-kratzenstein-s-resonators-virtual"> <img src="http://fast.mediamatic.nl/f/sjnh/image/400/153771-308-400.jpg" height="400" width="308" alt="Poyet, Louis. Kratzenstein's resonators - Virtual Voices (2)" title="Poyet, Louis. Kratzenstein's resonators - Virtual Voices (2)" playable="1"/> </a><div class="caption clearfix"><div class="caption-wrap"><a title="Vergroot afbeelding - Poyet, Louis. Kratzenstein's resonators - Virtual Voices (2) - Mediamatic.net" href="/153771/en/poyet-louis-kratzenstein-s-resonators-virtual">Poyet, Louis. Kratzenstein's resonators - Virtual Voices (2)</a> - published in Mediamatic Magazine Vol. 7#1 (1992)</div></div></div> <h3>Platonic People</h3> Because their speech was barely intelligible, there was not much use for the first electronic speech-synthesis systems. For example, you could not make them speak a complex text with unpredictable contents if you wanted the text to be understood by an audience. These systems also sounded distinctly inhuman. The voice appears to be generated by an alien body which is not flesh and blood – by the angular movements of the metal components of the prototypical robot. What you hear is a machine which, in its awkward mechanical way, tries to use the human means of communication. This behaviour evokes disturbing questions about the possibilities and the dangers of technology, about mind and matter, and the nature of human identity. But current state-of-the-art software is different. A typical example is dectalk. <h5>10 dectalk was developed by Digital Equipment on the basis of mitalk. See: Jonathan Allen, M. Sharon Hunnicutt and Dennis Klatt From text to speech: The MITalk system, Cambridge University Press, 1987</h5> This program is the realization of Abbé Mical's wildest dreams. //Têtes parlantes:// not one, not two, but nine different ones; and all of them can moreover be modified and interpolated. The dectalk manual presents their portraits and gives them names:// Rough Rita, Frail Frank, Whispering Wendy, Huge Harry, Kit the Kid, Perfect Paul, Beautiful Betty, Uppity Ursula, and Doctor Dennis.// Protagonists of a comic strip version of Peyton Place. The input for programs such as dectalk consists of discrete symbols. The program processes files that consist of sequences of phonemes. So there is no human control of timing and dynamics as with the eighteenth-century machines which were operated by means of a keyboard. In spite and even partly because of this, the output has greater continuity. The software does not only contain models of the signals that correspond to the individual phonemes, but also procedures for merging the successive signals seamlessly together. Modern synthetic voices are perfectly intelligible. And because of a more accurate control of the spectrum of vowels, the distinctively metallic quality of the sound has disappeared. But nevertheless, no one would confuse their output with human speech. The synthetic voice is still inhuman, if only because of its uniformity. <h5>11 Speech technologists are doing their best to imitate human limitations and imperfections. Allen et al. (op.cit.), for example: Some additional pauses are introduced in longer phrases and slow speaking rate so that the talker does not seem to have an inhuman supply of breath.</h5> dectalk's standard voice, Perfect Paul, is an abstract sounding voice, that of a newsreader. Neither machine, nor human being. This marks the birth of a new medium. Up until now, you could not listen to a text without listening to someone's body. The independent text, independent of the human body, was always the printed text. For the first time, language now has a sound independent of the body – a sound that directly emanates from the linguistic system, from syntax and phonemes. The next step in this development is foreshadowed by other dectalk voices, such as Whispering Wendy and Huge Harry. These are more personal, but just as equable and imperturbable, smooth and continuous. Airbrush pinups. Platonic bodies. Whispering Wendy's voice has a pure, clear sound, with very little substance – like Marilyn Monroe's singing voice or Brigitte Bardot's. The suggestion of a soft, supple, weightless body. Huge Harry is Wendy's macho counterpart. His voice is heavy and lustful. Not Elvis Presley yet, but not bad for a beginner. The synthetic body has already become an erotic ideal. Look, for instance, at the use of classical statues in thirties' fashion photography: ''The forms of high fashion assume the look of the statuesque, the hallowed, the classical. Living flesh has the smoothness, the soft luster of ancient marble. Stone, it almost seems, is as supple as flesh. Hoyingen-Huene makes an equation between living and not living bodies, and the equation enchants, for in his photographs the bodies that do not live are not dead. They are statues. His imagery argues that in the realm of fashion there is no death. To enter the fashionable instant is to live forever.'' <h5>12 Carter Ratcliff, 'Out of Time', Artforum International 30, September 1991, pp. 112-117</h5> The future of digital image- and sound-simulation: the smooth coolness of the statue in a naturally moving body, in a sensually modulating voice. Technology is heading slowly but surely toward increasingly perfect robot-porn. Live performers like Prince and Michael Jackson are already beginning to dissolve into their computer-animated images. When Andy Warhol invented commercial telephone sex, he suggested in the same breath that it could best be done by robots:// A robot-computer to answer the phone, that would be great. It would do the job without emotion. // <h5>13 Ultra Violet Famous for 15 minutes. My years with Andy Warhol New York 1990, p. 163</h5> <h3>Epilogue by Ultra Violet</h3> ''I think back to one of Andy's earliest paintings, compelling in its simplicity - a starkly black-and-white six-foot-high Coca-Cola bottle, painted in oil on canvas in 1960. I think of the paintings of clean, shiny Campbell soup cans, the young, unlined, fresh-scrubbed faces of Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Onassis, Ingrid Bergman, so many others. Then gradually I begin to grasp what Andy was trying to say with all his babble about machines and sex. Where sex has turned repulsive and inhuman, machine sex beckons alluringly. Only in telephone sex, robot sex, computer sex is there escape from ugliness and cruelty. Machine sex is the only kind left that is uncontaminated, antiseptic, clean, even a little mysterious (...). Yes, here is still another of the endless paradoxes Andy strews along our paths. In sex, as in art, (...) he reinvents shining, pristine, early morning purity. His kind, of course: on the surface, no deeper.'' <h5>14 Ultra Violet, Op. cit., pp. 165/166</h5> translation olivier/wylie/scha Mediamatic Magazine vol.7#1 Remko Scha http://www.mediamatic.net/id/869 d d ARTICLE publication 1 http://www.mediamatic.net/id/6325 2009-05-05T10:17:32+02:00 De Socialist en zijn Media

Wer spricht van Siegen? Überstehen ist alles.

Rainer Maria Rilke De socialist mag in zijn reële bestaansvorm van staatsbeambte pijlsnel achter de horizon zijn verdwenen, als potentiële gestalte heeft hij een ongekende toekomst voor zich. Het programmeren heeft hij met de paplepel ingegoten gekregen (al in 1830 verscheen de 1.0 versie van het socialisme-programma). Bij gebrek aan geschikte hardware zag hij zich 150 jaar lang verplicht om zijn program op de maatschappij te installeren. De sociale kwestie die hierdoor werd opgeroepen, veroorzaakte de reactie die leidde tot een uitbouw van het oorspronkelijk ontwerp en tot een formidabele hoeveelheid nieuwe applicaties. Bij iedere tegenslag produceerde de socialist een volgend plan en liet zich niet ontmoedigen door illegale kopieerders als spartakisten, revisionisten, leninisten en christen-socialisten. Toen Hitler en Stalin het socialisme koppelden aan incompatibele software als nationalisme en totalitarisme, stokte de ontwikkeling van linkse programmatuur voor lange tijd. Uit de veelvoud aan toepassingen overleefde alleen de dataopslag en het bestandsbeheer, waar het historisch socialisme een ware obsessie voor aan de dag legde. Denk aan de spreadsheets met de productiecijfers van de vijfjarenplannen, de kilometerslange dossiers van de inlichtingendiensten, de verzamelde redevoeringen der Leiders en de onafzienbare reeksen formulieren en aanvragen die bij het minste of geringste ingevuld moesten worden. Dit was een maatschappijformat dat vastliep in de papieren, een leviathan die niet meer viel te automatiseren. Zelfs de complete geheugenruimte van de wereld zou tekortschieten voor de data-overload die in de archieven stond opgetast. Toch stak de drang tot programmeren in de jaren tachtig weer de kop op in de figuur van Gorbatsjov. Die moest ontdekken dat hedendaagse sociale programma&#146;s op andere hardware draaien dan de maatschappij. Het plan is nu enkel nog promotiemateriaal dat een corporate image presenteert. Toen de investeerders daarop Gorbi&#146;s keten lieten doorlichten, was het afgelopen met de bankability van de Sovjet Groep. Maar met het verdwijnen van het communisme kreeg de socialist wel eindelijk de kans om z&#146;n programmeerlusten bot te vieren op de media waarin ze het beste tot hun recht komen: computergames, mediabanken en virtual realities. Het lessen trekken uit het verleden is in het Westen al geruime tijd afgevoerd van het rooster van de levensschool. De geschiedschrijving is voltooid, van nano- tot kosmisch niveau. Alle fenomenen en objecten zijn in een chronologie ingepast: dit loopt van de eerste attoseconde na de Big Bang, de sigaar, de bad- en slaapkamer, de anorexia, teddyberen, het sublieme, Middeleeuws eten en het strandbezoek tot het beeld van de vagina, de dood en de fijne neus van de avondmens. De complete historie is herbewerkt tot informatie en als zodanig actueel gemaakt. In de huidige geschiedschrijving staan de gemengde berichten naast de wereldpolitiek en de beursnoteringen: er zijn niet langer determinerende factoren (in onder- en bovenbouw) te onderscheiden, zoals het historisch-materialisme die nog kende. Informatie is uiteindelijk alleen maar informatie: het historisch bewustzijn van het Westen is zoekgeraakt door een te grote beschikbaarheid van het verleden. Informatie dringt nooit dieper door dan tot het werkgeheugen van de democratische burger. Alles kan vergeten worden, want de opslag is altijd gedelegeerd aan anderen (expert systems). Tot men onthutst moet constateren dat praktisch alle uitzendingen van Ja Zuster Nee Zuster zijn gewist. De socialist heeft een goede relatie met zijn eigen harde schijf. Net als de oud-marxisten heeft hij de harde leerschool doorlopen van een stalen mnemotechniek. History is voor hem niet een van de mogelijke aanklikgebieden, maar het domein waar het stuwende beginsel te vinden is dat aan recente data ten grondslag ligt. De socialist heeft zijn relatie met het verleden altijd als technische schakeling gelegd. Hij was van geboorte af niet zozeer revolutionair of ketter, maar een mediatechnicus. Boeken, pamfletten, kranten, stellingen, manifesten, interventies, polemiek en kritiek &#150; het socialisme was een literaire beweging die geloofde in de overtuigingskracht van het woord om de revolterende meute in de juiste richting te manoeuvreren. De woorden lagen voor de socialist niet ten grondslag aan de gebeurtenis, maar konden deze wel sturen doordat ze een onderscheid konden maken tussen de toevallige omstandigheden van de troebelen en de ijzeren dynamiek daarachter. De gebeurtenis is voor hem geen fait divers, maar voorteken. Doordat de socialist nooit bestanden wist en altijd geheugencapaciteit heeft voor meer informatie, is zijn toekomst geen onbeschreven blad en hoeft hij, anders dan de actuele westerse mens, niet telkens weer bij nul te beginnen. De westerling wordt al bij voorbaat moe van al het geduldige graaf- en zoekwerk dat verricht zou moeten worden. Voor de socialist zijn gebeurtenissen ingebed in een universum van oude en nieuwe schriftuur. Of een tekst nu voorwaarden of eindresultaten besprak, altijd resulteerde dit in nog meer tekst. Het doel was van het socialisme &eacute;&eacute;n enorme interactieve hypertekst te fabriceren. Men las elkaar grondig en schreef recensies van honderden pagina&#146;s. Het papier bevatte geen dode letters, maar prikkelde tot geschreven reacties. Herlezingen van verworpen auteurs waren altijd mogelijk, waarna de discussie met verve werd opengegooid en resulteerde in een nieuwe voorraad bulkteksten. Onafhankelijk van technologische innovaties en nieuwe media als fotografie, film en radio, ontwikkelde de socialist voortdurend nieuwe schakelingen, maar altijd uitsluitend binnen zijn eigen mediasysteem. Deze praktijk maakt hem tot ideale kandidaat voor beheer en uitbouw van cyberspace, dat zich ook afwendt van parallelle media en een rizoom aanlegt. De jaren tachtig hebben aangetoond dat het omscholen van schriftgeleerden tot programmeurs een relatief kleine stap is. De afwezigheid van illustraties in de soctekst vormt geen belemmering voor de intree van de socialist in het volgende beeldenrijk. Hij opereerde altijd al in een groter verband dan het afzonderlijke plaatje, want de maatschappij in 3d was zijn medium. Als opslagspecialist voorziet de socialist drie opties voor het behoud van het socialisme. Ten eerste zal de volledige teksteditie worden bezorgd op cd-rom. Maar de markt zit hier bepaald niet op te wachten, zeker nu de kapitaalschieters uit Moskou zijn vertrokken. De zuurhoudende teksttraditie verbruint en verbrokkelt onder de handen van wanhopige archivarissen. Alleen het Band Aid Concert Save the Archives kan nog voor de benodigde middelen zorgen. Nu het verderschrijven aan het socialistisch project langzaam wordt overgenomen door historici, die met de academische blik van de buitenstaander &#145;objectief&#146; oordelen, wordt de socialist tegen z&#146;n natuur in destructief en vernietigt zijn archief nu het nog kan. Terwijl de ex-socialisten hun fouten van vroeger opbiechten, ondernemen anderen pogingen het socialisme niet te laten verworden tot informatie. De soctekst gaat donkere tijden tegemoet van nostalgie en memoirigheid, terwijl de basisteksten hun mediale potenties kwijt zijn. Op de diskette van het socialisme is knop van write data naar read only geschoven. Opslag van het hele socialistische vertoog is niet alleen onhaalbaar, maar bovendien verwerpelijk. De tweede optie bestaat uit het scannen van het re&euml;el bestaande socialisme. De trend om alle kwaadaardige kanten van de twintigste eeuw in een museale context inzichtelijk te maken, zal de misdaden, leugens, wanprestaties en totale mislukkingen van het Oostblok alle (disk)ruimte geven. Tegelijk zal er een wereldwijde fascinatie ontstaan voor de vreemdheid van het feit dat er honderden miljoenen mensen decennia lang gedaan hebben of er een ander systeem mogelijk was dan democratie &amp; markteconomie. De esthetiek van het socialisme bestond erin dat het tussen een duidelijk begin- en eindpunt een volledig systeem van eigen producten, kunststijlen, mode en design wist te ontplooien, met een verbluffende eenvormigheid. Er zullen themaparken en sensorische ruimtes worden aangelegd om dit historische fenomeen navoelbaar te maken: een tocht langs instortende nieuwbouwwijken, consumentenrijen, blaffende agenten, verklikkers, militaire parades, ethische dissidenten. Het ascetische, modernistische non-design zal de cyclus van avant-garde, hype en duurzame modestijl doorlopen en het socialisme laten opgaan in de reeks van jaren vijftig, sixties, punk en eighties. Deze recycling gaat voorbij aan de grote mogelijkheden die de socialist voorziet. De derde optie namelijk is die van opslag en beheer van het socialisme als potentieel. Eindelijk is het medium binnen handbereik waarmee het socialisme gevestigd kan worden, zonder hinderlijke bijverschijnselen als politiek, management, milieu en militarisme. Het socialisme als model heeft het realiseren van de totale vrije tijd als inzet. De Sovjetstaten waren hierin een heel eind gekomen. Het arbeidersparadijs kende vele mogelijkheden om er even van tussen te gaan: wie naar z&#146;n werk ging om er te ontbijten in de volkskeuken, ging na de koffie wat vrienden opzoeken om een biertje te drinken en een bioscoopje te pikken. Het bestaan was van een relaxte ledigheid waarin de dialectiek van productie en consumptie was overstegen. De socialistische arbeidsmoraal is te begrijpen als vroege vorm van vr. Ook in het datamilieu valt niets te beleven en ontbreekt de warensfeer. De prestatiedwang kan daar prima omzeild worden (door te doen alsof je werkt). Het socialisme als vr-omgeving is een atopie waarin consequentieloos kan worden geacteerd of toegekeken. vr is voor de socialist geen archief of museum, maar parkeerplaats van een ideale samenleving in een periode waarin de Nieuwe Wereldorde een zelfde werkdwang oplegt aan de hele wereldbevolking. De socialist heeft begrepen dat je dit monopolie niet moet aanvechten, maar uitzitten. Hij zit niet te wachten op de Verelendung en het daarop volgende klassenbewustzijn, maar knutselt verder aan z&#146;n virtuele model, zoals hij vroeger aan zijn tekst-galaxy bleef schrijven. Tot het moment dat vr in de werkelijkheid implodeert. Dan is de socialist paraat. The Socialist's Media

Who speaks of victory? To survive is everything

Rainer Maria Rilke The socialist in his real form, that of a government official, may have disappeared over the horizon like a shot, but as a potential figure he can look forward to an unbelievable future. He was spoon-fed on programming (version 1.0 of the socialism program was out by 1830). Lacking suitable hardware, he was forced for 150 years to install his program in society. The social question this raised caused a reaction which led to an extension of the original design and a formidable number of new applications. With each setback the socialist produced a new plan, refusing to be daunted by illegal copiers like Spartacists, revisionists, Leninists and Christian socialists. When Hitler and Stalin coupled socialism with the incompatible software of nationalism and totalitarianism, the development of leftist programming stalled for quite a while. Of the many applications, only data storage and file management, for which historic socialism showed a true obsession, survived. Think of the spreadsheets with the production figures of the five-year plans, the intelligence services' miles of files, the Leaders' collected speeches, the endless series of forms and applications which had to be filled out at the drop of a hat. This was a social format that got entangled in papers, a Leviathan that was too big to be computerized. All the memory in the world wouldn't have held the data overload that was heaped in the archives. Yet the urge to program reared its head again in the 80s in the person of Gorbachev. He discovered that contemporary social programs require hardware other than society. The plan is now merely pr material which presents a corporate image. When the investors had Gorby&#146;s chain investigated, the bankability of the Soviet Group was finished. But with the disappearance of communism, the socialist finally got another chance to vent his programming lust in the media which do it the most justice: computer games, media banks and virtual realities. In the West, the School of Life took learning from the past off the syllabus along time ago. Historical writing is complete, on all levels, nano to cosmic. All phenomena and objects have been fitted into a chronology which runs from the first attosecond after the Big Bang, the cigar, the bathroom and bedroom, anorexia, teddy bears, the sublime, medieval cuisine and going to the beach to the image of the vagina, death and the subtle nose of the night owl. All of history is reprocessed into information and made into news. In contemporary historical writing, miscellany is next to world politics and the stock market quotations; determining factors (infrastructural or superstructural) as historical materialism knew them can no longer be distinguished. Information is ultimately just information; Western historical consciousness has been lost through the too great availability of the past. Information never penetrates deeper than the working memory of the democratic citizen. Everything can be forgotten, because storage is always left to others (expert systems). Until we are forced to admit disconcertedly that virtually all episodes of certain tv series have been erased. The socialist has a good relationship with his own hard disk. Like the ex-Marxists, he learned the hard way, with mnemonics of steel. To him, history isn't just one of many possible areas to click into, but the domain where the driving principles at the root of recent data can be found. The socialist's relationship with the past has always been a technical connection. From birth, he was not so much a revolutionary or a heretic, but a media engineer. Books, pamphlets, newspapers, proposals, manifestos, interventions, polemic and criticism; socialism was a literary movement that believed in the word's power of persuasion in manoeuvring the revolting horde in the right direction. For the socialist, the words did not underlie the event, but they could direct it so that it could discriminate between the chance circumstances of riots and the iron dynamics behind them. For him an event is not a fait divers, but an omen. Since the socialist never erases files and always has memory space for more information, his future is not a blank page, and unlike the modern Westerner, he need not start over and over again at 0. The Westerner is already tired before starting from all the patient digging and searching that needs to be done. For the socialist, events are imbedded in a universe of old and new writing. Whether a text discussed prerequisites or end results, it always resulted in yet more text. The goal was to fabricate one massive interactive hypertext out of socialism. Everyone read each other thoroughly and wrote reviews hundreds of pages long. Paper was not just a mass of dead letters, but a stimulus to written reactions. Rereadings of detestable authors were always possible, after which debate was energetically thrown wide open, resulting in a new supply of bulk text. Independent of technological innovations and new media like photography, film and radio, the socialist continually developed new connections, but always exclusively inside his own media system. This practice makes him an ideal candidate for the management and expansion of cyberspace, which also shirks parallel media and constructs rhizomes. The 1980s showed that retraining the scribes as programmers is a relatively small step. The absence of illustrations in soctext is no obstacle to the socialist's entering the new world of images. He was already operating in a larger context than the single picture all along, because 3-d society was his medium. As a storage specialist, the socialist has three options for the preservation of socialism. First, the complete text edition will be available on cd-rom. But the market is decidedly not waiting for this, especially now that the sugar daddies have left Moscow. The acidiferous text tradition is yellowing and crumbling in the hands of desperate archivists. Only a Band-Aid Save the Archives concert could yet provide the necessary resources. Now that further writing on the socialist project is slowly being taken over by historians, who judge 'objectively' with the outsider's academic eye, the socialist is becoming destructive against his nature and destroying his archive while he still can. As the ex-socialists own up to their past mistakes, others act in an attempt to prevent socialism degenerating into information. The soctext is approaching dark times of nostalgia and memoirs, while the basic texts have lost their medial potency. On the socialism diskette the tab has been moved from write data to read only. Storage of the entire socialist discourse is not only impracticable but objectionable. The second option consists of scanning existing socialism. With the trend of providing insight into every pernicious side of the twentieth century in a museum context, the crimes, lies, and total failures of the Eastern Bloc will get all the (disk) space they need. At the same time there will arise a worldwide fascination with the strangeness of the fact that for decades, hundreds of millions of people acted as though another system besides democracy &amp; market economy was possible. The aesthetics of socialism consisted of its managing, between definite beginning and end points, to develop a complete system of its own products, artistic styles, fashion and design with stunning simplicity. Theme parks and sensory spaces will be installed to make this historical phenomenon understandable: a tour past collapsing housing developments, consumer queues, barking police officers, informers, military parades, moral dissidents. Ascetic, modernist nondesign will be shown to pass through the cycle of avant-garde, hype and timeless styles, allowing socialism to fit into the 50s-60s-punk-80s series. This recycling will not address the great possibilities anticipated by the socialist. The third option is that of storing and managing socialism as a potential. Finally the medium is at hand with which socialism can be instituted without troublesome side effects like politics, management, environment and militarism. Socialism as a model is motivated by the realization of total free time. The Soviet states got quite a distance with this. The workers' paradise knew many opportunities for getting away: you went to work to have breakfast in the people's kitchen, and then after the coffee to find some friends to have a beer with and catch a movie. Existence was of a relaxed idleness in which the dialectic of production and consumption had been transcended. The socialist work ethic can be understood as an early form of vr. In the data environment too, there is nothing to do, and the aura of goods is missing. Pressure to perform can be easily got round (by acting like you're working). Socialism as a vr environment is an atopia where one may act or watch without consequence. For the socialist, vr is not an archive or museum, but a parking lot for an ideal society in a period when the New World Order is imposing the same pressure to work on the whole world population. The socialist understands that you musn't fight this monopoly, but wait it out. He does not wait on pauperization and the subsequent class consciousness; he just keeps tinkering with his virtual model, as he used to keep writing on his text galaxy. Until the moment when vr implodes in reality. Then the socialist will be ready. translation Laura Martz Mediamatic Magazine vol.7#1 Adilkno http://www.mediamatic.net/id/889 Bilwet http://www.mediamatic.net/id/919 d d ARTICLE publication 1 http://www.mediamatic.net/id/8686 2010-06-28T15:58:44+02:00 Famous Artists School, Famous Writer Tool of:Het verlangen naar een geconfigureerd systeem op de Apple en andere retorische overwegingen

In Mediamatic 6#1 deed Paul Groot verslag van zijn eerste ervaringen met een Wordprocessor en zijn strijd met de McHugh. Als een vervolg op die eerste indrukken recenseert hij hier MicroSofts Word5 voor Macintosh, spreekt hij over de Windows' cd-rom versie van Iconclas Browser (Iedere schrijver zijn eigen retoricus?) en onthult hij de achtergrond van enkele gedichten uit config. sys., de eerstdaags te verschijnen dichtbundel van zijn hand.

<h3>I</h3> De Word5 -gebruiker verwerkt teksten. Het is alsof hij een tekst schrijft die zich voornamelijk op voorwaarden van de programmeur laat verwezenlijken. De Word5gebruiker schrijft geen teksten, maar verdiept zich voornamelijk in de verwijzingen van het toetsenbord en de menu's. Hij is in eerste instantie de lezer van een programma. De afdaling in de diepere sferen van toetsenbord en menu's is onweerstaanbaar. Het ontwerpen en het redigeren van eigen teksten dwingen hem zich te onderwerpen aan de in de accessoires opgenomen stand-by syntaxis en commodity-semantiek, zich te onderwerpen aan de all-over greep op het materiaal. Want hoe kan hij zich onttrekken aan de elektronische verleidingen die hem met één toets in de Van Dale doen belanden, op een wijze die je tot nu toe alleen uit Alice in Wonderland meende te kennen? De tekstverwerker verving de Oost-Duitse typemachine, alleen nog met naald en draad aan de praat te houden, die z&#146;n ideologische overwicht vooral uitoefende in de onnodig veel energie vragende toetsenaanslag. De zwaarte van de lichtzinnigheid werd met Word5 in huis gehaald. En Word5 op Apple&#146;s PowerBook blijkt voor alles een feinmechaniker des geestes. Alleen een concertpianist of een schaakspeler kan de subtiele overschakelingen in het uitgebreide aanbod aan individuele keuzen werkelijk goed bespelen. Een elektronische klankkast, een strikt vastgelegd en consequent reagerend elektronisch brein met een gebruiksvriendelijke muis, een parasitaire manipulator die de dwingende commando&#146;s hapklaar maakt. Word5 is de voorlopige bekroning van de tekstverwerker als een manipulator, een aanrander, een vertegenwoordiger van de slechte smaak. De ideologie van het vrije woord ingepakt in de verantwoorde design van wordprocessing, waarbij aan de hand van de retorische commands en instructies de methoden van het litteraire schrijven worden getest. Famous Artists School werd Famous Writer Tools. <h3>II</h3> Er zit in iedere Word5 gebruiker een opponent opgesloten die zich de advocaat van de duivel waant. Hij kijkt op tegen de ms&nbsp;dos WordPerfect gebruiker, het natuurlijke tegenbeeld van Word5 op Apple Power Book. WordPerfect op ms&nbsp;dos is altijd voorbijgegaan aan de esthetische uitdagingen, de overgave van het woord aan het beeld heeft daar niet plaats gevonden. WordPerfect, als een ms&nbsp;dos tekensgestuurde methodiek verdient misschien uiteindelijk toch de voorkeur boven Word5. Word5&#146;s gui-design immers is de natuurlijke vijand van de ideale tekstverwerker doordat het navigeert op muiscommando&#146;s in plaats van op ingetypte coderingen. WordPerfect laat de algoritmische ordeningen, product van logica en wiskundige schoonheid daarentegen tekstueel oproepen. Als betrof het een partituur die je na enig oefenen als vanzelf afgaat, zoiets als een uitvoering van een impromptu van Chopin of een bagatelle van Satie. (Het ideale droombeeld: inzoomen van 1:1 tot 1:16, een naar alle kanten tot de 16de macht uit te breiden.) Wat WordPerfect in werkelijkheid dan wel niet geeft, ligt er in potentie in besloten. Wie alleen in asci files schrijft, zonder ooit de .bmp, cgm, .drw, .pcx, .pic, tiff, .wmf of een ander grafisch formaat te hebben gemengd, verstaat iets heel anders onder tekstverwerken dan de Word5er. Leesmethodes als die van Cortazar in Hinkelspel, waarin de hoofdstukken in een andere dan de gedrukte, in een eigen te bepalen volgorde gelezen worden, is hem een doorn in het oog. Er spreekt uit de structuur van Word5 ook wel verbondenheid met het karakteristieke tekstuele gegeven. Maar door de muisgestuurde bediening gijzelt en intimideert het verzamelde vernunft dat in het programma is samengebald, de gebruiker. <h3>III</h3> Over hoeveel jaar zal men Word5 als industrieel archeologisch kleinood koesteren? Word5 als een artistiek, een geestelijk cultureel product dat je net zo min als een blaassymfonie van Strawinksy &#145;verbeteren&#146; kan? Zoals de romankunst, als een negentiende-eeuwse uitvinding, of het sonnet, als een renaissancetechniek, in die beslissende perioden de klassieke voorbeelden voortbracht, wordt zo Word5 de meest kenmerkende tekstverwerker? Of hoort Word5 gewoon thuis in de reeks elkaar in de tijd opeenvolgende grafische technieken? Als er eenmaal een aansluiting mogelijk is tussen ons denken en wat we nu nog een computer noemen, zal de wordprocessor gewoon een oude in een lange rij zijn, of toch een genre op zich? Het is bijna een vervloeking! De ideologie van Word5 is die van de ggd (grootste gemene deler), met de muis als het instrument voor de analfabeten, de pen voor de iets te zakelijken en het toetsenbord, door zijn precieze en manifeste organisatie van handzettingen en tabulatuur, voor de dichters onder ons. Waarbij de veresthetisering via de outline je onmiddellijk in de sfeer van de retorica moet brengen. Een parcours dat zich via de commando&#146;s vertakt en verwijdt tot de fijngenuanceerde wortels met directe toegang tot spellingvoorschriften, freehand en al de andere parafernalia, en zo aan de klassieke voorschriften een nieuw hoofdstuk toevoegt. Wat werken in Word5 echter weer zo verleidelijk maakt is het ontbreken van een onderscheid tussen analyticus en producent, tussen schrijver en beheerder, tussen criticus en archivist. Je bent gelijktijdig typiste en archivaris, creative schrijver en retoricus. Het conflict tussen vorm en vent, tussen litterator en programmeur opgelost in een sfeer waarbij de formele traditie verdwijnt in het pathetische argument. De Word5retoricus is de narcissus onder de rederijkers. Indexen, voetnoten, glosseries, hij heeft zijn exegese voortdurend bij de hand. De &#145;brille&#146; van zijn teksten ligt nu vooral in de eigen design. Wie wordt niet bijna &#145;warm van afgunst&#146; op die tabulatuur van de computer. Als je eens z&oacute; rekenen en schrijven kon! De jaloezie die je Word5 toedraagt richt zich op de absolute superioriteit die hij stelt, de eisen die hij suggereert. Word5 gijzelt je, paait je en wil je doen geloven dat je teksten inderdaad die retorische en wetenschappelijke parafernalia behoeven die hij in huis heeft. Maar wat eist dat niet aan po&euml;tische beeldkracht! De gebruiker van Word zit in een val, hij weet zich gegijzeld in een hi&euml;rarchisch systeem, van de spellingscontrole tot aan de decimale boeksystematiek van Dewey. Wie eenmaal Word heeft geproefd weet dat hij niet langer een tekst intypt, maar zich tot een document met een isbn-nummer verplicht heeft. De notatie veroordeelt hem tot een producent van een reeks digitalen. Letters en woorden hebben, v&oacute;&oacute;r hun litteraire of associatieve betekenis, onmiddellijk al een tekstuele correlatie. Geen woord dat niet op zichzelf, of eenmaal in letters uiteengevallen een descriptieve betekenis heeft gekregen. De schrijver werkt zich diep in de boomstructuren. Hij categoriseert het geschrevene, bouwt een notatiesysteem op, indexeert zijn woordenschat met pre- en suffixen, en regelt de niveaus waar hij zich beweegt, hoe arbitrair ook. Een tekst, een hoofdstuk, een artikel manifesteert zich als een file; deze op zijn beurt is niet denkbaar zonder een achterliggende spreadsheet die op de belangrijke ogenblikken als helpschema geraadpleegd wordt. Microsoft heeft daarmee ideologisch de mestproducties van de gebruiker bepaald. De keuze van een letter, de interpuncties, de interlinies, de corpsgrootte wisselt al naar gelang de stemming. Een directe confrontatie op het scherm maakt het onmogelijk een tekst te schrijven die geen file is, niet doortrokken is van de plek in de hi&euml;rarchie van de projectmanager, die zich niet druk maakt over het aantal bits dat hij inneemt. En dit ondanks het bewustzijn dat er ondanks alle paniekzaaierij, in die schijnbaar totaal ordeloze anarchie zelden iets op je harde schijf verdwijnt. <h3>IV</h3> Toch kan en mag Word5 niet zomaar afgewezen worden als een mechanische uitwas. Want meer dan alleen retorisch van karakter, blijkt dit programma uiteindelijk zich over zichzelf te kunnen buigen, met als aan een narcistische spiegelbeeld herinnerende activiteiten. Schrijven betekent elektronische documenten genereren, een kwestie van hypertekstualisering, iconisering, outlining, indexering, algoritmische structuren, Boolean operating, rekenmachinaties. Instructies die onmiddellijk de rekenkundige en mechanische metafoor tonen. Hypertekst naar binnen geslagen. ''Blame it on Word5. '' En wat maakt de Word5gebruiker niet mee die onverwachts op de aangesloten Iconclas Browser belandt?.. Hij leest over een iconografische classificatie, met de systematische indeling van thema&#146;s, motieven en symbolen uit de kunstgeschiedenis en laat zich gaan in de gedetailleerd gecodeerde verzamelingen. Wie gewoon was systematisch kaartenbakken door te ploegen, beschikt nu over een iconografische ontsluiering van alle beelden en thema&#146;s uit de Westerse beeldende kunst op desktop. Niet langer classificeert hij uitvoerige beschrijvingen van de afzonderlijke afbeeldingen in woorden, maar hij laat zich systematisch verwijzen naar alfanumerieke codes en hi&euml;rarchisch geordende omschrijvingen. Negen hoofdthema&#146;s verdelen voor hem de beeldmotieven onder in een oneindig aantal trappen en subcategorie&euml;n. 23.000 beeldmotieven vindt hij erin terug. Hij leest dat het bedoeld is om niet al te grote, coherente verzamelingen te ontsluiten. De gebruiker daalt er in af en verdwijnt in een labyrintisch universum. Eindelijk is hij ontvlucht aan de kracht van de Graphic User Interface, een soort kindertekenboek met infantiele gebruiksvriendelijkheid, bedoeld voor tekstverwerkende &#145;tekstverwerkers&#146; die zich al bij voorbaat neerleggen bij de beperkingen van het eigen schrift. Nu heeft hij zich ingevochten in een verbaal systematische schema. De windows overwonnen, bekijkt hij de kunstgeschiedenis op tekstueel niveau. Hij navigeert in de negenvoudige boomstructuur, een tocht die hij, bijvoorbeeld, laat beginnen in de '' 2 natuur '' die hij voortzet in '' 20 &#145;natura&#146;'' <a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/id.php/allegorical">figure or scene</a> die hij afbuigt naar '' 26 meteorological phenomena'', om dan tenslotte, via de omwegen '' 26c winds 26c3 storm 26c35 whirlwind, cyclone, hurricane, typhoon, tornado '' te belanden in '' 26c352 cyclone at sea''. Iedere schrijver zijn eigen designer, maar ook zijn eigen retoricus. Hoe gevoelloos moet je zijn om niet iedere keer weer verbaasd te zijn zijn teksten, eenmaal teruggekeerd uit de eigen gefabriceerde '' 26c352 the eye of the cyclone '' in de prachtigste fonts gezet te zien. En hoe intelligent moet je niet zijn om niet aan die uitdaging van een kalligrafische allure ten onder te gaan? Wie kan zich nog voorstellen dat Wittgenstein de Tractatus Philosophicus en Spinoza de Ethica zonder Word5 hebben kunnen schrijven? Deze Hypertekst-communicatie met een buitenwereld blijkt ook geschikt voor een communicatie met het eigen brein. Een verbindingsstructuur van outlines, indexes, woordcounts toont een lay-out waarbij schrijven als tekstverwerken, intu&iuml;tie als organisatie wordt. De schrijver als publiek bij de productie van zijn eigen teksten <h3>V</h3> Zo dringen de computertalen door in het po&euml;tische Raum. config.sys.<a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/id.php/de">bundel</a> weerspiegelt de schoonheid van de computertalen in formuleringen die ontleend zijn aan algoritmen en wiskundige formules. Zoals Homeros in zijn Ilias &amp; Odyssee de lof bezingt van de Helden van Troje, zoals Hans Verhagen in zijn Rozen &amp; Motoren de nieuwe consumptiemaatschappij herkent, zoals Hans Faverey in Lichtval de invloed van het logisch positivisme weerspiegelt, zo vinden we hier in config.sys.<a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/id.php/de">bundel</a> lofzangen op de Computersprache. De gedichtenprocessor verwerkt een taal die zich nu pas voor het eerst van de idee van po&euml;zie bewust wordt. De Homerische vergelijking (in de Aanslag van Harry Mulisch vind je hem voor de laatste maal genoemd Het is net of hij wil zeggen, dat het hele bestaan een vergelijking is van een ander verhaal, en dat het er om gaat, dat andere verhaal te weten te komen) komt plotseling opnieuw tot leven en keert in config.sys.(de bundel) als resultaat van haar retorische proces zegvierend terug. De outline dwingt je naar de breedte en de diepte, laat je niveaus zien die je nog dieper (wijder, hoger) dan de klassieke vergelijkingen brengen. Bijvoorbeeld als de improvisatorisch gebruikte combinatie van find and change, gevolgd door systeemfout, de zorgvuldig in structuur gebrachte outlining in het ongerede brengt, als het oorspronkelijke algoritme verloren blijkt, als een verzameling ingenieuze macro&#146;s verdwenen is, als een merkwaardige indeling ontstaat, dan dringt de po&euml;tische plot zich op. config.sys. <a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/id.php/het">systeem</a> is ook een po&euml;zieanalyticus. Zet hem op Leopolds Cheops en zie wat er gebeurt. De po&euml;zie in config.sys.<a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/id.php/de">bundel</a> bevindt zich in een experimenteel stadium van ontwikkeling. Beelden die in een communicatie van machinetalen gebracht worden, vervolgens gedwongen worden te functioneren in een geestelijke ruimte die op meditatie en zelfreflectie gericht is, en zich dan weten aan te passen aan een narcistische zelfreflectie. Hoewel helemaal in tegenspraak met de communicatieve functie van de artifici&euml;le talen, kunnen deze formules geladen en beladen worden met een bewustzijn van het eigen verleden en de toekomst. De lege ruimte van het esthetische vacu&uuml;m volgepropt met weliswaar lege, maar toch significante betekenissen. config. syst. <a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/id.php/de">bundel</a> handelt over de structuur als de inhoud, een structuur als een inhoud in travestie, een inhoud die verdwijnt onder de tirannie van de vorm. Onttrokken aan de programmatuur van de software, is de logische opbouw van deze nieuw ontwikkelde retoriek in staat iedere beeldende suggestie om te zetten in een structurele abstractie. config. sys.<a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/id.php/de">bundel</a> is een met abstracte betekenissen gevuld po&euml;tisch mechaniek dat geen concrete inhoud kent. Als een spiegelbeeldige blackbox verwerkt het voornamelijk zelf voortgebrachte signalen die circuleren in netwerken en verzamelingen van eigen signatuur. Parallelgeschakeld aan de logica en de mathematica is het echter in staat verbindingen met andere po&euml;tische netwerken te leggen. Door middel van paradoxen, a-logische gedachtegangen en ongerijmde conclusies genereert het een eigen bindende structuur. CONFIG.SYS ^^ I. Jaloezie [input N X: = 0; for Y from 1 to N do X: = X+Y end; output X.] --------------------------------------------------- II. Co&iuml;tus [X = pos(0) (span(&#146;A&#146;) @N span(notany(&#145;AB&#146;)) <h1>pos(*(2 * N)) rpos(*N) span(&#145;B&#146;) rpos(0))</h1> L TEKST = input :f(EIND) TEKSTX :f(SLECHT) output = &#145;DE INVOER IS GOED&#146; :(L) SLECHT output = &#145;DE INVOER IS SLECHT&#146; :(L) EIND] ---------------------------------------------------------------- III. Uit zich voortgekomen [&#150; FIB N <a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/id.php/1">*</a> A&#168;11 <a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/id.php/2">*</a> &AElig;2 x N&gt;rA&#168;A, + G2 -A &#150;] ------------------------------------------- IV. Schildpad &nbsp; <a href="id.php/?-" href="id.php/o,o">DRUKPLAT(<a href="m,<a>*</a>,[[i,p,r">*</a>,o, <a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/id.php/l,o]],g">*</a>,X)</a> ------------------------------------------- V. Persoonsvormen [ZP = 90&#176; &#150; f; ZG = 90&#176; &#150; h; PG = 90&#176; &#150; ¶ &#150;PZG = 180&#176; &#150; a; &#150;ZPG = t ] ------------------------------------- VI. Vergetelheid kent geen tijd [type kleur = (blauw, rood, paars, bruin, geel); type kleurverzameling = set of kleur; type dag = 1..365 ] -------------------------------------- VII. Nu ik het raam open doe function signLoc charposition -- gives square upon&#172; character position global gridOriginH,gridOriginV,gridSize,&#172; gridColumns,gridRows,SignSquare,Signcenter put item 1 of charposition into charposH put item 2 of charposition into charposV put gridOriginH + (charposH) * gridSize into TopLeftH put gridOriginV + (charposV) * gridSize into TopLeftV put gridOriginH + (charposH+1) * gridSize into BottomRightH put gridOriginV + (charposV+1) * gridSize into BottomRightV put topLeftH &amp; "," &amp; TopLeftV &amp;"," &amp; BottomRight H &amp;","&amp;&#172; BottomRightV into SignSquare put (TopLeftH + (gridSize / 2)) &amp; "," &amp; (TopLeftV + &#172; (gridSize / 2)) into signCenter return signSquare^^ end signLoc Famous Artists School, Famous Writer Tool or: the hankering after a configurated system for the Apple and other rhetorical reflections

In Mediamatic 6#1, Paul Groot reported on his first experiences with a word processor and his struggle with the McHugh. As a sequel to these first impressions, he will review here MicroSoft's Word5 for Mackintosh, discuss the Windows' cd-rom version of Iconclas Browser (Is each writer his own rhetorician?) and reveal the background to some of the poems from config.sys., his own book of poetry which is soon to be published.

<h3>I</h3> The Word5 user processes texts. It is as if he writes a text whose realization primarily depends on the terms laid down by the programmer. The Word5 user does not write a text, but rather loses himself in the keyboard references and the menus. He is primarily the reader of a programme. It is irresistible to descend into the deeper spheres of keyboard and menus. The design and the editing of his own texts force him to submit to the stand-by syntax and commodity semantics included in the accessories, to resign himself to an overall grip on the material. Because how can he resist the electronic temptations of the keystroke which will land him in a major dictionary in a way he had always only thought possible in Alice in Wonderland? The word processor replaced the East German typewriter, still only kept in play with needle and thread, which had mainly exerted its ideological ascendancy in the unnecessary amount of energy it took to operate the keys. Word5 brought the weight of levity. And Word5 on Apple's PowerBook has proved to be, above all, a precision mechanic of the mind. Only a concert pianist or a chess player can really master the subtle switches in the extensive supply of individual choices. An electronic sound box, a stringently fixed and consistently reacting electronic brain with a user-friendly mouse, a parasitical manipulator to make the pressing commands easy to swallow. Word5 provisionally crowns the word processor as a manipulator, an assailant, a representative of bad taste. The ideology of the free word wrapped up in the rational design of word processing, testing the methods of literary writing with the help of rhetorical commands and instructions. Famous Artists School became Famous Writer Tools. <h3>II</h3> In every Word5 user, there is a hidden opponent who thinks of himself as the devil's advocate. He looks up to the user of the ms dos WordPerfect, the natural counterpart of the Word5 in Apple PowerBook. WordPerfect in ms dos has always ignored the aesthetic challenges, the submission of word to image has never happened there. WordPerfect, as an ms dos sign-controlled method, does perhaps in the end deserve preference over Word5. Word's gui (Graphical User Interface) design is in fact the natural enemy of the ideal word processor, in that it navigates according to mouse commands instead of typed codes. WordPerfect allows the algorithmic sequences - products of logic and mathematical beauty - to be recalled textually, as if it was a musical score which you can play by heart after a bit of practice, something like an impromptu by Chopin or one of Sati's bagatelles. (The ideal dream image: zoom in from 1:1 to 1:16, a ramification which can be extended to the power of 16 in all directions.) What WordPerfect does not give in reality, it holds in potentiality. Those who only write in asci files, and have never mixed the .bmp, cgm, .drw, .pcx, .pic, tiff, .wmf or other graphic formats, have a totally different idea of word processing than that of a Word5 user. Reading techniques such as Cortazars, in Hopscotch, in which the chapters are read in an order other than the printed one, an order determined by the reader himself, are a thorn in his flesh. However, the structure of Word5 also shows commitment to the characteristic textual principle. But because of the mouse-controlled operation, the user is fettered and intimidated by the compiled intelligence crowded into the programme. <h3>III</h3> How many years will it take before Word5 is cherished as a treasure of industrial archeology? As an artistic - even spiritual - cultural product which is as impossible to 'improve' as a wind symphony by Stravinsky? Will Word5 become the most characteristic word processor, in the same way as the art of novel writing, as a nineteenth-century invention, or the sonnet, as a renaissance technique, produced their classic examples during those decisive periods? Or is Word5 just part of the range of graphic techniques succeeding each other in time? Once it becomes possible to make a connection between our thinking and what we now still call a computer, will the word processor become just one of a long range of obsolete techniques or, after all, a genre in itself? It is almost a curse! The ideology of Word5 is that of the cd (common denominator). With the mouse as the instrument of the illiterates, the pen that of the overly-pragmatic and the keyboard, with the help of a precise and manifest organization of hand-composing and tablature, strictly for the poets among us, whereby the enhanced aesthetics of the outline should take you directly to the sphere of the rhetoric. This path branches off via the commands and drifts into the finely nuanced roots with immediate access to spelling checks, freehand and all the other paraphernalia, thus adding a new chapter to the classic rules. What, on the other hand, makes working in Word5 so alluring is the absence of a distinction between analyst and producer, between writer and operator, between critic and archivist. You are at the same time typist and archivist, creative writer and rhetorician. The conflict between form and fellow, between litterateur and programmer, is solved in an atmosphere where formal tradition vanishes into pathetic argument. The Word5 rhetorician is the Narcissus among his peers. Indexes, footnotes, glossaries; he always has his exegeses near at hand. The 'brilliance' of his texts now lies primarily in their design. Who would not turn green with envy at the computer's tablature? If only you could calculate and write as well as that! The envy you feel for Word5 is focused on the absolute superiority it presumes, the needs it suggests. Word5 fetters you, charms you, and lures you into believing that your texts do indeed need all that rhetorical and scientific paraphernalia it has to offer. But how much does this require in poetic powers of expression? The Word5 user is trapped, he knows he is caught in a hierarchical system, from the spelling check to Dewey's decimal book systematics. Those who have tasted the Word know that they are no longer just entering a text, but are also committing themselves to producing a document with an isbn number. The notation condemns them to be the producer of a range of digitals. Letters and words immediately have a textual correlation, before even assuming their literary or associative meaning. There is no word, either as such or broken down into letters, that does not assume a descriptive meaning. The writer probes deeply into tree diagrams. He categorizes what he has written, sets up a notation system, indexes his vocabulary with prefixes and suffixes, and arranges the levels on which he moves, however arbitrarily. A text, a chapter, an article, manifests itself as a file, which in turn is unthinkable without the background of a spreadsheet, to be consulted for support at essential moments. Thus, MicroSoft has ideologically determined the user's text productions. The choice of a letter, the punctuation, spacing, font, varies with the mood of the moment. A direct confrontation on the screen makes it impossible to write a text which is not a file, which is not permeated with the smell of the place in the hierarchy of the project manager, who does not worry about the number of bits it takes. And all this despite your awareness that, for all the scaremongering, in this seemingly orderless anarchy it rarely happens that something disappears from your hard disc. <h3>IV</h3> Still, Word5 cannot and should not be rejected as a mechanical protuberance just like that. Because, more than being only rhetorical in character, this programme eventually proves itself capable of self-perception, with activities reminiscent of a narcissistic reflection. Writing means generating electronic documents, a question of hyper-textualizing, iconizing, outlining, indexing, algorithmic structuring, Boolean operating, calculating machinations. Instructions which immediately show the mathematical and mechanical metaphor. Hypertext inverted. Blame it on Word5. And indeed, what adventures lie ahead of the Word5 user if he unexpectedly finds himself in the complementary Iconclas Browser?.. He will read about an Iconographic classification, with a systematic arrangement of themes, motifs and symbols from art history and will become immersed in the collections, coded in great detail. While he was used to plodding his way systematically through card-index systems, he now has, available on desk top, the iconographic unveiling of all images and themes from the Western visual arts. No longer does he classify extensive verbal descriptions of the individual representations; he lets himself be referred systematically to alphanumeric codes and hierarchically arranged descriptions. Nine main themes split up the image motifs into an infinite number of levels and sub-categories. There are 23,000 image motifs to be found. He reads that it is intended to disclose less extensive, but coherent collections. The user sinks into these and disappears into a labyrinthine universe. He has finally escaped from the power of the gui, a sort of children's drawing book with an infantile user-friendliness, meant for word processing 'word processors' who have unconditionally resigned themselves to the limitations of their own handwriting. Now he has penetrated a verbally systematic framework. The windows conquered, he explores art history at a textual level. He navigates the nine-fold tree diagram, a journey which he begins, for example in 2 nature continues in 20 'natura' <a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/id/allegorical">figure or scene</a> branches off to 26 meteorological phenomena, and finally, via the detours 26c winds 26c3 storm 26c35 whirlwind, cyclone, hurricane, typhoon, tornado ends up in 26c352 cyclone at sea. Each writer is not only his own designer, but also his own rhetorician. How insensitive could he be, not to be astonished, time and again, to see his texts set in the most beautiful fonts, returning from his self-produced 26c3523 the eye of the cyclone? And how intelligent do you have to be, not to succumb to this challenge of calligraphic allure? Who can still believe that Wittgenstein could have written the Tractatus Philosophicus, or Spinoza the Ethica without the help of Word5? This Hypertext communication with an outside world turns out to be suitable for communication with your own brain as well. A connective structure of outlines, indexes, word counts, displays a layout whereby writing turns into word processing, intuition into organization. The writer as the spectator at the production of his own texts. <h3>V</h3> And so the computer languages penetrate the poetic Space. config.sys. <a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/id/the">book</a> reflects the beauty of the computer languages in formulations based on algorithms and mathematical formulas. In the same way as Homer, in his Iliad and Odyssey, sings the praises of the Heroes of Troy, as contemporary poets recognize the modern consumer society or reflect the influence of logical positivism, so config.sys. <a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/id/the">book</a> sings the praises of the Computer Languages. The poem processor processes a language which now, for the first time, becomes aware of the concept of poetry. The Homeric simile (mentioned for the last time in Harry Mulish's The Assault: It is as if he wanted to say that the entire existence is a simile of another story, and that it is a question of finding out what that other story is about.) is suddenly revived and, as a result of its rhetorical process, returns victoriously in config.sys. <a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/id/the">book</a>. The outline forces you into the widths and the depths, shows you levels which take you even deeper (wider, higher) than the classical similes. For example, if the improvisatorily used combination of find and change, followed by a system error, upsets the carefully structured outline, if the original algorithm turns out to be lost, if a collection of ingenious macros disappears, if a strange layout emerges, then the poetic plot protrudes. config.sys. <a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/id/the">system</a> is a poetry analyst, too. Select Leopold's Cheops and see what happens. The poetry in config.sys. <a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/id/the">book</a> is at an experimental stage of development. Images which come into a communication of machine languages are subsequently forced to function within a mental space focused on meditation and self-reflection, and then adjust to a narcissistic self-reflection. Although in flat contradiction to the communicative function of the artificial languages, these formulas can be loaded and burdened with a consciousness of our own past and future. The empty space of the aesthetic vacuum crowded with, albeit empty, but still significant meanings. config.sys. <a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/id/the">book</a> deals with the structure as the content, a structure as a content in disguise, a content which disappears under the tyranny of the form. Isolated from the software programme, the logical construction of this newly developed rhetoric is able to transform every evocative suggestion into a structural abstraction. config.sys. <a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/id/the">book</a> is a poetic mechanism filled with abstract meanings, which has no concrete content. Like a mirror-image blackbox, it processes primarily self-produced signals which circulate in networks and self-made collections. However, in parallel with logic and mathematics, it is capable of communicating with other poetic networks. By means of paradoxes, a-logical reasoning and absurd conclusions, it generates a binding structure of its own. translation olivier/wylie <h6>CONFIG.SYS</h6> <div style="position: relative;" class="ui_animateFigureCaption"><a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/153763/en/untitled"> <img src="http://fast.mediamatic.nl/f/sjnh/image/665/153763-167-400.jpg" height="400" width="167" alt="Paul Groot 'CONFIG.SYS' -Mediamatic Magazine Vol. 7#1" title="Paul Groot 'CONFIG.SYS' -Mediamatic Magazine Vol. 7#1" playable="1"/> </a><div class="caption clearfix"><div class="caption-wrap">Paul Groot 'CONFIG.SYS' -Mediamatic Magazine Vol. 7#1</div></div></div> I. Envy [input N X: = 0; for Y from 1 to N do X: = X+Y end; output X.] --------------------------------------------------- II. Coitus [X = pos(0) (span('A') @N span(notany('AB')) pos(*(2 * N)) rpos(*N) span('B') rpos(0)) L TEXT = input :f(END) TEKSTX :f(BAD) output = 'THE ENTRY IS OK' :(L) BAD output = 'THE ENTRY IS BAD' :(L) END] ---------------------------------------------------------------- III. Self-generated [- FIB N <a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/id/1">*</a> A"11 <a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/id/2">*</a> AE 2 x N>r A"A, + G2 -A -] ------------------------------------------- IV. Tortoise <a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/id/?-">PRESS(</a><a href="m,<a>*</a>,[[i,p,r">*</a>,o, <a href="http://www.mediamatic.net/id/l,o]],g">*</a>,X) ------------------------------------------- V. Finite Forms [ZP = 90° -f; ZG = 90° -h; PG = 90° - ¶ -PZG = 180° - a; ZPG - t ] ------------------------------------- VI. Oblivion is for ever [type colour = (blue, red, purple, brown, yellow); type colour chart = set of colours; type day = 1..365 ] -------------------------------------- VII. Now that I open the window function signLoc charposition -- gives square upon character position global gridOriginH,gridOriginV,gridSize, gridColumns,gridRows,SignSquare,Signcenter put item 1 of charposition into charposH put item 2 of charposition into charposV put gridOriginH + (charposH) * gridSize into TopLeftH put gridOriginV + (charposV) * gridSize into TopLeftV put gridOriginH + (charposH+1) * gridSize into BottomRightH put gridOriginV + (charposV+1) * gridSize into BottomRightV put topLeftH & "," & TopLeftV &"," & BottomRight H &","& BottomRightV into SignSquare put (TopLeftH + (gridSize / 2)) &"," &(TopLeftV + & (gridSize / 2)) into signCenter return signSquare end signLoc Mediamatic Magazine Vol.7#1 Paul Groot http://www.mediamatic.net/id/838 d d ARTICLE publication 1 http://www.mediamatic.net/id/5775 2012-12-21T14:39:18+01:00 Hardware Software Wetware

In het digitale tijdperk is de mens volgens Bilwet niet langer individu, subject of ego, maar wetware, een 'natte hobbezak' die aan de machine hangt. Gekoppeld aan hard- en software gaat de geest op reis, terwijl het lichaam achterblijft. Maar Bilwet ziet hierin geen slaafse onderwerping aan de technologie: het al-te-menselijke kan altijd kortsluiting maken.

Wie het over Nieuwe Wereldorde wil hebben, maar de virtuele realiteit buiten beschouwing laat, doet er beter aan te zwijgen - Johan Sjerpstra. Het contact tussen het natte en het droge is een risicodragende aangelegenheid, vol van onvoorziene gevaren. In de praktijk variëren die van een glas dubbeldrank in de broodrooster, de vinger in het stopcontact, een gesprongen waterleiding, tot de zwellende passies die botsen op nuchter onbegrip. Het menselijk lichaam met zijn dunne vellen, harde botten en kleffe vochten kan redelijk goed gedefinieerd worden als een problematische waterhuishouding, waarvan de grenzen vloeiend zijn. Deze aquanomie wordt telkens opnieuw gemarkeerd door lappen stof en reukvlaggen, en voorzien van kleurstoffen en een aura van rammelende sociale codes. Deze dienen ertoe de persoonlijke overstromingen niet uit de hand te laten lopen en de ongelukjes te verhullen. Hoe dichter de Mensch de machines nadert, des te meer natte zones worden drooggelegd. Afhankelijk van de benadering van het lichaam door de techniek worden grenzen gelegd en erotische zones bepaald. Dit is af te lezen aan de modes van de kledij, de aankleding van de natte hobbezak die tegenwoordig als 'euroburger' keurig netjes ingepakt door het leven gaat. Deze zelfdenkende biopomp, die puffend en proestend heen en weer wordt geslingerd tussen nat en droog, los en vast, vluchtig en hard, roes en verstand, ruis en teken, zien we eind 20ste eeuw opeens werkzaam in de elektronische environment. De dampende en waterende factor Mensch stelt het machinepark voor schokkende effecten. Het onvermijdelijke contact tussen de natte vinger en het toetsenbord heeft een technologisch beschavingsoffensief opgeroepen. Meer en meer komt economie neer op een zo dicht mogelijke verweving van de sociale structuren met de elektronische circuits. Tot voor kort gaven de seksuele grenzen de gevarenzones aan. Daardoor was er ook sprake van een aparte heren- en damesmode. Deze noodzaak is verdwenen en dus grijpt de macht naar andere middelen om angsten en verlangens te stileren, terwijl de macht zelf ook van gedaante verandert. De fascistische macht was ooit een bolwerk van seksuele metaforen die herleid konden worden tot de vaste, eigen bodem en het stromende, zuivere bloed. De scheidingen op grond van sekse en ras waren bedoeld om de mengvormen te vernietigen en hadden dan ook politieke en militaire consequenties. <h3>Ruimtepak</h3> De hierop volgende antifascistische Koude Oorlog duurde lang genoeg om het racistische en seksistische denken dood te laten bloeden. De lichaamspolitiek uit dit inmiddels voorbije tijdvak werd gekenmerkt door conditionering van de lichamen op de nieuwe machines, die niet meer mechanisch maar elektronisch werden aangedreven. Zo leverde de ruimtevaart het basic model van de elektronische aankleding, die net als de macht zelf zowel z'n aantrekkelijke als afschrikwekkende kant heeft. De eerste astronauten waren dieren, beplakt met elektroden om de reacties van hun biologische waterhuishouding te registreren. Daartegenover schitterde en straalde het futuristische ruimtepak als proefmodel van de elektronische New Order. Het kosmisch kostuum doorstond met glans de nieuwe gevaarlijke condities, gaf handelingsvrijheid en bood bescherming, terwijl het tevens communicatie garandeerde. Dit vereiste een omscholing van het lichaam, dat niet langer onder het regime van de religie of de politiek, maar onder toezicht van de wetenschap kwam te staan. De buitenaardse ruimtevaart bleek geen uitvinding die na een ontwikkelingsfase voor de consumenten beschikbaar kwam. Het werd een experiment om onder extreme condities de reacties van het lichaam in elektronische toestand te testen. Ook hier was de aankleding niet alleen uiterlijk vertoon, maar tevens dressuur en maakte ze via de media aan de wereldbevolking duidelijk wat het betekent om aan de computer te hangen. Het buitengewone van deze bovenmenselijke prestatie in de buitenaardse ruimte overtuigde de achtergebleven mensheid van het doorslaand succes dat een verblijf in de elektronische ruimte kon opleveren. <h3>Datapak</h3> Na de explosie van de Challenger en het einde van de ruimtedroom is de weg vrijgemaakt om het ruimtepak in ordinaire massaproductie te nemen. Het is omgedoopt tot datapak, met als introductiestunt de zogenaamde datahandschoen. Deze ongemakkelijke outfit biedt de datawerker een fascinerend uitgaanskostuum, waarmee hij iedere lokaliteit met iedere identiteit kan bekleden. Zo maakt hij op een aangename en vrijblijvende wijze kennis met het nieuwe machtstype van de New Order. Deze heeft de volgende premissen: terwijl het woon-werkverkeer oplost en de nationale grenzen vervagen, betreden we een cleane, stofvrije, steriele, medicinale ruimte, die zijn eigen opvatting over vuil genereert. Analoog aan de gevaarlijke zones uit het tijdperk van de seksuele macht, gaat het nu om het uitbannen van bedreigingen die de elektronische conditie aantasten. Classics als verdovende drugs, zatmakende drank en verstikkende rooknevels verschijnen als hot items van de droogleggingspolitiek die de Nieuwe Orde wereldwijd doorvoert. Deze politiek vereist een strikt roesdieet wanneer je op wilt gaan in de hallucinogene dataspace. Anders verlies je de nodige concentratie en ga je ruis produceren. Nieuw aan de elektronische conditie is het stilzitten en de minimalisering van de biomechanische arbeid. Deze fundamentele wijziging in de humane waterconditie, die net als het Deltaplan slechts onder de verhoudingen van de Koude Oorlog gerealiseerd kon worden, veroorzaakt in de introductiefase van de digitale hegemonie een potentiële aanpassingsruis, die bestreden wordt door een aërodynamisch bewegingsprogramma. De citybike als modefiets is integraal onderdeel van het databeleid en wordt niet voor niets bereden door gezondheidsadepten in fluorescerende spacepakken. Anders dan de verkwistende yuppies uit de eighties, streeft de Euroburgerij van de nineties naar algehele matiging: zowel van het eigen voedsel- en mediadieet als van de overheidsuitgaven. De subsidiekraan is voor hen het zinnebeeld van verspilling, die in flagrante tegenspraak staat met hun recyclingwoede en rentabiliteitszin. Deze knusse cocooners genieten van de vrijheid om thuis te blijven en hun grootste zorg is het datadak boven hun hoofd. Vluchtelingen die niet in het bestand zijn op te sporen, moeten in hun eigen regio blijven en anders mogen de vn met hun ontwikkelingsleger daar een handje bij helpen. Als jullie geen humanitaire hulp willen, gaan we schieten. Achterliggende inzet van deze militaire ingrepen is het gezond maken van de globale verbindingen, die als een metastructuur de wereld omvatten. Om verder te kunnen expanderen en innoveren dienen de uitgeschakelde datalozen zich koest te houden en op hun plaats te blijven. Desnoods worden hun getto's in eigen stad en hun afgeschreven sociale woestijnen dichtgesmeerd met elektronische bewaking. <h3>Europeesch Waarmerk</h3> Hardware, software, wetware zijn de drie gedaantes waarin de mens/machine in het tijdperk van de Nieuwe Wereldorde verschijnt. Deze drie-eenheid bezit eigen geografische en historische coördinaten. De hardware waar wij al onze cultuur en communicatie op afspelen komt uit Japan. De programma's die het mogelijk maken dat wij al deze dierbare data kunnen lezen, zien en horen, komt uit de Verenigde Staten. De rol van Europa tenslotte is de benodigde culturele producten aan te leveren. De taak van wetware is het ophoesten van cultuur, om die op de Japanse hardware met behulp van de Amerikaanse software af te spelen. In deze internationale arbeidsdeling wordt van Europa verwacht dat zij het erfgoed van Bach en Beethoven goed beheert, het schilderwerk van Rembrandt en Van Gogh voortzet en de rode draad in de theatertraditie van Shakespeare tot Beckett naar de toekomst verlengt. Dat geldt evengoed voor de mediakunst die in de afgelopen decennia ontstaan is. De Europeanen moeten uitvinden wat voor moois er allemaal uit al die nieuwe apparaten getoverd kan worden. Uit het functioneel gebruik van de techniek valt namelijk weinig plezier te behalen. Er wordt pas kunst te voorschijn getoverd wanneer de apparaten aangesloten worden op de kunstgeschiedenis, op de filosofie en de literatuur en de typisch menselijke karaktertrekken, die tot Europeesch waarmerk zijn geworden. Dat is het lot dat de Europeanen, na zoveel miskleunen in deze 20ste eeuw, over zich hebben afgeroepen. Wetware geeft aan dat wij veroordeeld zijn tot het maken van cultuur, die zich van technische middelen bedient die anderen hebben ontworpen. Dit hoeft geen onderschikte positie te zijn. Integendeel: er wordt een hoop van ons verwacht! Wat is immers een laptopcomputer met een tekstverwerkingsprogramma zonder de mooie verhalen die daar op geschreven worden? Of de synthesizer zonder experimentele composities? <h3>Restant Mens</h3> Wetware is een lichaam dat aan machines hangt. Wetware geeft aan dat wij allang zijn aangesloten op de ons omringende machines, iets waar wij, zoals in het geval van de televisie, nog een hoop plezier aan beleven ook. De onderwerping aan de machine zoals Orwell die in 1984 voorspelde hoeft, als het aan de wetware ligt, niet zo dramatisch te worden voorgesteld. Ze hoeft niet te resulteren in slaafse onderwerping, want de wetware heeft een geheim wapen achter de hand: zijn menselijke, al te menselijke eigenschappen. De geuzennaam 'wetware' is een eerbetoon aan de knutselaar die er het beste van probeert te maken, maar altijd weer de instructies vergeet. De onvolkomenheden worden ingezet om de waardigheid te waarborgen. Door onkunde, sabotagedriften en een ongebreidelde creativiteit loopt de techniek altijd weer in het honderd en uit deze ongelukken spruiten de mooiste gedrochten voort, die na een esthetische behandeling moeiteloos tot kunst worden verklaard. Voor wetware is de gebruiker geen achterblijfsel of onderdrukt wezentje, maar een hobbyist-van-huis-uit, die alle oude en nieuwe media aan elkaar weet te knopen tot een personal reality, waarin de foutmelding aan het begin staat van een lange reeks daverende successen. Het begrip wetware is een uitvinding van Rudy Rucker. Hij vat wetware op als een verzameling innovaties op technologisch gebied. Zijn begrip van de wetware verwijst naar chips die in de hersenen worden geïmplanteerd, naar orgaantransplantaties of naar prothesen die lichaamsfuncties vervangen dan wel uitbreiden. Anders dan bij Rucker beschouwt Bilwet het idee wetware niet als een volgend stadium, dat na de revoluties op het vlak van de hard- en software nogmaals het wankele zelfbeeld omverwerpt, maar als een 'restant mens' dat achterblijft terwijl de extentions steeds verdere reizen maken. Het autonome individu dat zijn stromende angsten en verlangens in balans probeert te brengen, is aan het eind van de 20ste eeuw in de schaduw komen te staan van het technologisch imperatief. Het beheersen dan wel opengooien van de kanalen blijkt in hoge mate te worden gedicteerd door de beschikbare apparaten. De wetware is zich van deze afhankelijkheid bewust en ziet zich dan ook niet als een potentaat die over de machines heerst, maar als een waterig aanhangsel dat zich zo goed en kwaad als het gaat, dient aan te passen aan de digitale condities van het elektronisch dataverkeer. Het erkennen van het technisch a-priori dient niet te worden verward met de hype die telkens ontstaat wanneer een nieuw systeem op de markt komt. Door de roes die de nieuwe apparaten genereren ontstaat een amnesie die resulteert in de bekende wetmatigheid dat de korte-termijn-effecten van een technologie worden overschat, terwijl de lange-termijn-effecten over het hoofd worden gezien. Het is eigen aan de wetware zich te laten onderdompelen in een bubbelbad van simulacra, zodat hij/zij het zicht verliest op de militaire voorgeschiedenis van de communicatietechniek en op de snode plannen die technocraten en marketingdivisies uitbroeden. Wetware laat zich dus gemakkelijk fascineren en komt niet zo gauw met kritiek zodra zich iets nieuws aandient. Het is eerder zo dat men gewend is geraakt aan het voortdurend introduceren van nieuwe producten en technieken. Langzaam tekent zich een cyclus af: na een fase van geruchten en spectaculaire presentaties, volgt een kopgroep die met de gadgets mag pronken, terwijl de kritiek ruim baan krijgt. Pas daarna kan sprake zijn van maatschappelijke acceptatie en een markt die groot genoeg is om voor het kapitaal interessant te zijn. <h3>Virtual Reality</h3> De nieuwe technologie&euml;n presenteren zich listig in de gedaante van de mode om vervolgens in de vergetelheid te geraken. Recentelijk gebeurde dit met minitel, beeldtelefoons en mind machines. Op dit moment is het de beurt aan de 'virtual reality' om de technologische dromen van materiaal te voorzien. Voor de wetware is virtual reality tot nu toe niet meer dan een grote geruchtenstroom geweest. Al een paar jaar staat het globale dorp waar de techno-artiesten wonen op z'n kop: er zou iets groots staan te gebeuren... er zou een megasysteem op komst zijn dat alle mediaproducties die tot op heden zijn gefabriceerd nietig verklaart, in zich opneemt en als geen ander suckt aan de wetware. In de 'out of the body' experimenten, die in de hightech laboratoria worden gedaan, wordt vr beschreven als een doorway to other worlds. De afstand tussen ons en beeldscherm wordt nihil en we betreden een mental environment. vr is de ultimate human-computer interface (Rheingold) die alle lichaamsbewegingen in zich opneemt en niet enkel vraagt om behendige vingers die een toetsenbord kunnen bedienen. vr neemt (potentieel) het hele lichaam in beslag om de geest zo ver mogelijk te laten reizen. Terwijl alle zintuigen zich in opperste staat van opwinding bevinden en uitputtende expedities ondernemen, blijft het fysieke lichaam tegelijkertijd achter in de 'non virtual world'. Omdat alle vr-inspanningen gericht zijn op de verovering van het zesde continent, raakt hetgeen dat achterblijft even buiten zicht. Maar dan meldt de faktor-wetware zich en keert terug als 'human bug' in de eigen 'tele-existence'. Dit is het moment waarop de wetware als gedaante überhaupt verschijnt. Ondanks de hysterische verhalen over de ogenblikkelijke alomtegenwoordigheid van het zappende lichaam in de live-uitzending en het oplossen van de lokaliteit als natuurlijk milieu voor het ik-in-wording, staat de mediagebruiker nog altijd regelmatig op om een biertje te halen of te gaan pissen. Deze momenten van afwezigheid uit de media komen in het cyberspace-mythe niet voor. In feite is daarin het lichaam een verlaten station en staat leven gelijk aan datatief reizen en digitale onsterfelijkheid. Wetware vindt dit een fascinerende gedachte, maar moet daar erg om lachen, omdat er altijd iets tussenkomt. De natte Mensch herkent zichzelf voor het eerst als gelijkwaardige counterpartner van de immateriële sfeer. Het wetware-verhaal begint zodra duidelijk is dat de techniek niet zonder, maar ook niet met de mens kan. <h3>Cyberspace</h3> Na de presentatie van vr is een Babylonische spraakverwarring ontstaan over wat deze volgende technorevolutie teweeg zal brengen. De cyberpunkwereld die William Gibson al eerder had geschetst zou werkelijkheid worden, was het eerste bericht. De matrix &agrave; la Gibson, waarin men de meest intense hallucinaties opdoet, bleek in de daarop volgende berichten vooralsnog fictie te blijven: virtual reality in de kinderschoenen was niet meer dan een simpele computeranimatie van een gebouw of landschap, waarin men nogal schokkerig om zich heen zat te kijken. Maar zelfs deze ontnuchtering, die bleef voorbehouden aan een enkeling die de kans had gekregen de vr-helm op te zetten en de datahandschoen aan te trekken, kon de hype niet de kop indrukken. Doordat Gibson zich publiekelijk distantieerde van het evangelisatiewerk van Timothy Leary en andere electronic cowboys voor de vr-business, verhinderde hij op het nippertje dat zijn begrip 'cyberspace' aan diverse kermisattracties werd geplakt. Volgens Gibson is cyberspace eerder een neoruimte waarin zich sociale fictie over mens en machine afspeelt, dan de naam voor een nieuwe technologie. De eerste commerciële toepassingen waren gewoon veel te clean voor de soppende cyberpunks. Inmiddels werken de eerste vr-systemen op Wall Street, in de arcades van de amusementsindustrie, in geneeskundige laboratoria, architectenbureaus en bij de nasa. Dat zijn niet bepaald plaatsen waar techno-artiesten, hackers en cyberpunks toegang toe hebben. Voor wetware blijft vr daarom niet meer dan een vergankelijk item waarover spannende sciencefiction en zware boeken worden geschreven en kritische documentaires worden uitgezonden. De publieksmarkt is vooralsnog nergens te bekennen. Om de goegemeente gerust te stellen heeft John Barlow, de voorman van de consumentenbond Electronic Frontier Foundation, voorgesteld de definitie van vr op te rekken en wat dichter bij de mensen te brengen door het reeds bestaande elektronische dataverkeer ook te beschouwen als cyberspace. Hij probeert een juridische doorbraak te bereiken door deze nieuwe imaginaire zone vrij te verklaren van copyright. Aangezien volgens hem cyberspace transnationaal is, zou er een internationale grondwet voor de informatie opgesteld moeten worden. Nu de computerhackers in Amerika achterna gezeten worden door de cia en de fbi, fikse boetes moeten betalen en achter slot en grendel gaan, lijkt de verbinding met de wereld van virtual reality een aantrekkelijke mogelijkheid om de hackbeweging uit de repressieve hoek te halen. In zijn argumentatie gooit Barlow het op het fundamenteel onbegrip bij de autoriteiten over de technologische ontwikkelingen die gaande zijn. Grote namen uit de softwarewereld zouden de criminalisering een halt toe moeten roepen. Maar het is de vraag hoeveel we uit deze hoek kunnen verwachten. Het dromen over een grote coalitie tussen de opkomende vr-giganten en cyberpunks doet naïef aan. Zelfs binnen het kleine wereldje van de vr-pioniers woedt een ordinaire oorlog om het trademarken van de namen die aan de zelfgebouwde producten worden gegeven. Het grote geld en de militaire belangen verdwijnen bij de Electronic Frontier dan ook geruisloos op de achtergrond. <h3>Het Gebrek Mens</h3> Is het de taak van wetware om vr te vullen met Europeesch Kulturgut, zoals Jeffrey Shaw gedaan heeft in zijn Legible City, waarin hij de Nederlandse fiets via vr aansluit op de plattegrond van Europese steden als New York en Amsterdam? Deze klassieke wetwarestrategie maakt opnieuw van high tech kunst door het nieuwste medium kort te sluiten met een oubollig, ecologisch en zweterig verkeersmiddel. De continentale aanpak van techniek heeft altijd oog voor de lollige kanten van het Gebrek Mens. Want als de human bug niet met egards wordt behandeld, staan de emmers klaar om het nieuwe medium een beetje af te koelen. De gedrochten moeten niet als bedreiging van buitenaf worden begrepen, maar in de nieuwe ruimte aan het dansen worden gebracht. William Gibson vertaalde dit inzicht in zijn spreuk: There's weird shit happening in the matrix, en liet de Voodoo Loa te paard door cyberspace draven. Een realistischer aanpak is het idee van virtual seks: zowel safe als heel smerig. Je moet de pornografische dimensie van een medium vatten om er een succes van te kunnen maken. Zo moest de Nederlandse ptt constateren dat hun introductie van de teleconferentie een flop werd, totdat dezelfde technische schakeling via 06 als partylines de meest woeste fantasie&euml;n werkelijkheid liet worden. Ook bij virtual reality dook onmiddellijk de vraag op of het daar prettig seksen is en welke lichaamsdelen dan het aangenaamst geprikkeld worden. Wetware raakt niet opgewonden van een mooier design van het eigen cognitief cluster. Van belang is of er fouten kunnen worden gemaakt in virtual reality en wat voor Faustische en/of Dionysische kettingreacties deze veroorzaken. Cultuur is altijd het gevolg van verval, decadentie, onhandige manoeuvres en wanbegrip. Techniek moet zich daarbinnen nestelen en niet pretenderen er bovenuit te stijgen om het Hogere tevoorschijn te toveren. Pas dan kan een fusie tussen de wetware en z'n hard- en software tot stand komen. vol. 7#1 1/0 Issue Hardware Software Wetware

According to Adilkno, the human being is no longer an individual in the digital era, but wetware, a 'wet bag' hanging on the machine. Coupled to hard- and software, the mind voyages while the body remains behind. But Adilkno perceives no slavish subjection to technology: the all-too-human can always short-circuit.

If someone wants to talk about a New World Order without taking virtual reality into consideration, they'd better keep quiet. John Sasher Contact between the wet and the dry is a risky business, fraught with dangers. In practice these vary from a glass of juice in the toaster, a finger in an electric socket, a burst water main, to the collision of swelling passions with sober incomprehension. With its thin skin, hard bones and sticky fluids, the human body can be reasonably well defined as a problematic water management system whose boundaries are fluid. This aquanomy is marked again and again by pieces of cloth and scent markers as well as equipped with colorants and an aura of ramshackle social codes. These serve to prevent personal overflows from getting out of hand and to cover up little accidents. The closer we get to machines, the more wet zones are reclaimed. Depending on how technology approaches the body, boundaries are laid and erotic zones defined. Shifts may be read through clothing fashions, the dress of the poor wet slob who these days goes through life neatly and properly swaddled as a 'Euro-citizen'. At the end of the 20th century we see this thinking bio-pump being slung back and forth, panting and spluttering, between wet and dry, loose and fixed, fleeting and firm, intoxication and reason, static and signal, suddenly functional in the electronic environment. The watering and steaming Mensch factor has shocking effects on the machinery. The unavoidable contact between the wet finger and the keyboard has sparked a technological civilisation offensive. Economy comes down more and more to the tightest possible interweave between social structures and electronic circuits. Until recently, sexual boundaries marked the danger zones. Because of this there had to be, for example, separate ladies' and gentlemen's fashion. This necessity has disappeared, and power is reaching for other means of styling fears and desires, while changing form itself. Fascist power was once a bulwark of sexual metaphors, which could be reduced to one's own firm soil and pure, flowing blood. Divisions on grounds of sex and race were intended to destroy hybrids, and had political and military consequences. <h3>Space Suit</h3> The antifascist Cold War, which followed, lasted long enough for racist and sexist thinking to bleed to death. The body politics of this era, now over, were characterised by the conditioning of the body to the new machines, which were no longer driven mechanically but electronically. Space travel furnished the basic model for electronic clothing, which, like power itself, has its attractive side as well as its frightening one. The first astronauts were animals, plastered with electrodes to register the reactions of the biological water management system. The futuristic spacesuit, in contrast, glittered and shone as a prototype of the electronic New Order. The cosmic costume withstood the new dangerous conditions and came out shining, offered freedom of movement, provided protection, and guaranteed communication besides. This required a retraining of the body, which no longer came under the regime of religion or politics, but under the supervision of science. Extraterrestrial space travel, it turned out, was not an invention, which would become available to the consumer after a developmental phase, but an experiment to test the body's reactions in an electronic situation under extreme conditions. Here, too, the clothing was not only outward show but also dressage, and made it clear to the world population via the media what it means to be connected to a computer. The extraordinary quality of this superhuman performance in extraterrestrial space convinced humanity, the folks left at home, of the resounding success such a sojourn into electronic space could have. <h3>Data Suit</h3> After the explosion of the Challenger and the end of the dream of space, the way was made clear for ordinary mass production of the spacesuit. It has been redubbed the datasuit, with an introductory offer known as the dataglove. This awkward outfit provides the data worker with a fascinating going-out costume, with which he can dress up any location with any identity. It lets him get acquainted in a pleasant and noncommittal way with the new power type of the New Order. The premises of this are as follows: as commuter traffic dissolves and national borders blur, we are entering a clean, dust-free, sterile, medicinal space, which generates its own conception of dirt. Analogous to the danger zones in the era of sexual power, the thing now is the banishment of threats to the electronic condition. Classics like narcotic drugs, stupefying liquors and suffocating hazes of smoke appear as hot items in the reclamation politics which are spreading the New Order world-wide. This politics demands a strict anti-intoxication diet, if you want to ascend into hallucinogenic dataspace. Otherwise you'll lose the necessary concentration, and produce static. What's new about the electronic condition is the sitting still and the minimalization of biomechanical labour. This fundamental modification in the human water condition, which just like the Delta Plan could only have been realised under Cold War relations, causes a potential adjustment static in the introductory phase of digital hegemony, which is combatted by an aerodynamic exercise program. The motorised Citybike as a fashion is an integral component of data policy, and isn't ridden by health devotees in fluorescent spacesuits for nothing. Unlike the profligate yuppies of the 80s, the Euro-citizens of the 90s strive for total moderation: of their own nutritional and media diet as well as in government spending. To them, the subsidy tap symbolises waste, in flagrant contradiction to their recycling mania and investment sense. These cosy cocooners enjoy the freedom to stay at home and their greatest concern is the data roof over their heads. Refugees, who can't be traced in the files, are supposed to stay in their own area, otherwise the un and the ec with their developmental armies will lend them a helping hand. If you people don't want any humanitarian aid, we'll shoot. The underlying motive for this military intervention is making global connections, which span the globe like a metastructure, healthy. To facilitate further expansion and innovation, those who are switched-off and dataless must keep quiet and stay in their own places. If necessary their ghettos and their written-off social wastelands are sealed shut by electronic security. <h3>European Hallmarks</h3> Hardware, software, wetware are the three forms which the human/machine can take in the era of the New World Order. This trinity possesses its own geographical and historical coordinates. The hardware on which we play out all our culture and communication comes from Japan. The programs which make it possible for us to read, see and hear all this precious data come from the United States. And finally, the role of Europe is to deliver the necessary cultural products for shipment. Wetware's task is to cough up culture, which will be run on the Japanese hardware with the help of American software. In this international division of labour, what is expected of Europe is that she properly administer the legacy of Bach and Beethoven, maintain the paintings of Rembrandt and Van Gogh, and extend the Shakespeare-through-Beckett theatre tradition into the future. This is just as true for the media art, which has appeared over the last few decades. The Europeans must figure out what things of beauty can be coaxed out of all this new equipment, for there is little pleasure to be derived from the functional use of the technology. Art is only charmed into being when the equipment is connected to the history of art, to philosophy and literature and those typically human character traits, which have become European hallmarks. This is the lot which the Europeans, after so many blunders in this twentieth century, have called down upon themselves. Wetware means that we are condemned to making culture, which avails itself of technical tools, which have been designed by others. This need not be a subordinate position. On the contrary: a great deal is expected of us! What, after all, is a laptop computer with a word-processing program without all the wonderful stories that are written on it? Or a synthesiser without experimental compositions? <h3>Human Remnant</h3> Wetware is a body attached to machines. Wetware means that we have long been connected to the machines surrounding us; something which, as in the case of television, affords us a great deal of pleasure. If it's up to wetware, submission to the machines, as predicted by Orwell's 1984, need not be so dramatically represented. It need not result in slavish submission, for wetware has a secret weapon up its sleeve: its (all too) human traits. The nickname 'wetware' is a homage to the do-it-yourselfer who tries to make the best of things but always forgets the instructions. Flaws are deployed to safeguard dignity. Through ignorance, the urge to sabotage, and unbridled creativity, technology always goes haywire; from these accidents the most beautiful freaks spring forth, and after aesthetic treatment are effortlessly declared art. To wetware the user is not a remnant or something suppressed, but a born hobbyist who can hook together any old or new media into a personal reality, where an error message is at the beginning of a long series of resounding successes. The term wetware was coined by Rudy Rucker. He defines it as a collection of technological innovations: chips, which are implanted in the brain, organ transplants and prostheses that replace or extend bodily functions. Unlike Rucker, Adilkno considers the wetware idea not as a following phase to upset the wobbly self-image yet again after the revolutions in hard- and software, but as the 'human remnant' who stays behind as the extensions go on longer and longer trips. At the end of the twentieth century, the autonomous individual trying to bring his gushing fears and desires into balance has come to stand in the shadow of the technological imperative. Managing or throwing open the channels appears to be dictated to a high degree on the available equipment. Wetware is conscious of this dependence and thus sees itself not as a potentate that rules over the machines, but as a watery appendage that must adjust as well as it can to the digital conditions of electronic data traffic. Acknowledgement of the technological a priori should not be confused with the hype, which always arises when a new system comes on the market. The buzz generated by the new equipment creates an amnesia that results in a familiar pattern: the short-term effects of a technology are overestimated, while the long-term effects are given short shrift. It is characteristic of wetware to soak in a bubble bath of simulacra, and lose sight of the military prehistory of communications technology and of the nefarious plans being hatched by technocrats and marketing divisions. Wetware lets itself be easily fascinated and is not so quick to criticise when something new presents itself. We have become accustomed to the continual introduction of new products and techniques. A cycle is slowly becoming apparent: after a phase of rumours and spectacular presentations, the first lucky few get to show off the gadgets, and critics have a free-for-all. Only then can there be acceptance by society and a market large enough for capital to be interested. <h3>Virtual Reality</h3> The new technologies cunningly present themselves in the form of fashion and then fade into obscurity. This has recently happened with Minitel, videophones and mind machines. At the moment it is 'virtual reality's' turn to make technological dreams material. Until now vr has been no more than one big flood of rumours for wetware. The global village where the techno-artists live has been turned upside down for a few years now: something big was supposed to happen...a megasystem was on its way that would nullify and engulf all media productions manufactured up to now, and suckle on wetware like no other medium before. In the 'out-of-body' experiments conducted in high-tech laboratories, vr has been described as a doorway to other worlds. The distance between us and the screen becomes nil and we enter a 'mental environment.' vr is the ultimate human-computer interface (Rheingold) which encompasses all bodily movements and requires not even fingers nimble enough to operate a keyboard. vr (potentially) takes possession of the whole body in order to let the mind travel as far as possible. While all the senses, in the maximum state of titillation, are undertaking exhausting expeditions, the physical body remains behind in the 'non-virtual world'. Because all vr efforts are focused on the conquest of the sixth continent, the part that stays behind is temporarily overlooked. But then the wetware factor reports back and returns to its own 'tele-existence' as a 'human bug'. This is the instant at which wetware actually takes on form. Despite hysterical stories of the instantaneous omnipresence of the zapping body in the live broadcast and the dissolution of locality as a natural milieu for the process of ego formation, the media user still stands up at regular intervals to grab a beer or take a piss. These moments of absence from the media do not occur in the cyberspace myth. In it, the body is in fact an abandoned station, and life is tantamount to data travel and digital immortality. Wetware finds this a fascinating thought, but laughs loudly, because something always gets in the way. The wet Mensch recognises himself for the first time as an equal counterpartner to the immaterial sphere. The wetware story begins as soon as it is clear that technology cannot live with or without the human. <h3>Cyberspace</h3> After the presentation of vr, a Babylonian misunderstanding arose over what the consequences of this next techno-revolution would be. The first report: that the cyberpunk world portrayed by William Gibson would come true. Succeeding reports told us that the matrix &agrave; la Gibson, where the most intense hallucinations could be had, was still fiction: virtual reality in its infancy was nothing but a simple computer animation of a building or landscape in which you could rather jerkily look around. But even this disillusionment, which was reserved for the few who had got the chance to wear the vr helmet and the dataglove, could not squelch the hype. By publicly distancing himself from the evangelising of Timothy Leary and other electronic cowboys of the vr business, Gibson narrowly prevented his term 'cyberspace' from being tacked onto assorted carnival attractions. By Gibson's definition, cyberspace is more a neo-space where social fiction about human and machine unfolds than the name of a new technology. The first commercial applications were simply much too clean for the sopping cyberpunks. The first vr systems are already in operation on Wall Street, in the arcades of the amusement industry, in medical laboratories, in architects' offices and at nasa. These are not especially places where techno-artists, hackers and cyberpunks tend to have admittance. Thus, for wetware vr remains no more than a fleeting item about which exciting science fiction and hefty volumes are written and critical documentaries are aired. So far the public market is nowhere to be found. To reassure the folks in the street, John Barlow, head of the consumers' association Electronic Frontier Foundation, has proposed to stretch the definition of vr and bring it closer to the people by defining already existing electronic data traffic as part of cyberspace. He is trying to achieve a legal breakthrough by declaring this new imaginary zone free from copyright. Since, according to him, cyberspace is transnational, an international constitution for information ought to be drawn up. Now that computer hackers in the United States are followed by the cia and the fbi, are slapped with hefty fines and are getting locked up, association with the world of virtual reality looks like an attractive option for hauling the hacking movement out of a repressive corner. Barlow's reasoning blames the problem on a fundamental lack of understanding about the current technological developments on the part of the authorities. Big names from the software world ought to call a halt to criminalization. But the question is how much we can expect from their end. Dreams of a great coalition between the upcoming vr giants and cyberpunks seem a bit naive. Even inside the small world of the vr pioneers, a tacky war is raging over copyrighting of the names given to the home-made projects. On the Electronic Frontier, big capital and military interests silently recede into the background. <h3>Human Flaw</h3> Is it wetware's task to fill vr with European Kulturgut, as Jeffrey Shaw has done in his Legible City, where he connects the Dutch bicycle to the city maps of European cities like New York and Amsterdam via vr? This classic wetware strategy turns high-tech into art again by splicing the newest medium to a quaint, ecological and sweaty means of transport. The continental approach to technology always has an eye for the funny sides of the Human Flaw. For if the human bug is not treated with respect, the buckets are poised ready to cool off the new medium. The new monsters must not be understood as a threat from outside, but made to dance in the new space. William Gibson articulated this insight in the phrase, There's weird shit happening in the matrix, and had Voodoo Loa trot through cyberspace on a horse. A more realistic approach is the idea of virtual sex: safe as well as filthy. You have to understand the pornographic dimension of a medium to be able to make it a success. The Dutch telephone company had to conclude that its introduction of the teleconference was a flop, until this same switchboard connection on the 06-'partylines' made the wildest fantasies reality. The question immediately popped up in virtual reality too: was sex good there, and which body parts get the nicest stimulation? Wetware won't get excited about a slicker design for the personal cognitive cluster. What's important is whether mistakes can be made in virtual reality and what kind of Faustian and/or Dionysian chain reactions they cause. Culture is always the consequence of decline, decadence, clumsy manoeuvres and misconceptions. Technology must establish itself inside it, and not make out to rise above it in order to magically evoke the Higher. Only then can there be a fusion between wetware and its hard- and software. translation LAURA MARTZ Mediamatic Magazine Vol.7#1 Adilkno http://www.mediamatic.net/id/889 Bilwet http://www.mediamatic.net/id/919 ARTICLE publication 1 http://www.mediamatic.net/id/5776 2009-05-05T12:36:21+02:00 Writing the Mind

As its name suggests, Artificial Intelligence, has the goal of creating machines that can be said to be intelligent. There has, however, been a distinct lack of success in the area of recent years. We are certainly a long way from the grand promises that were made some time ago. In his 1982 book, 'The Thinking Computer', Jastrow claims that in five or six years - by 1988 or thereabouts - portable, quasi-human brains (...) will be commonplace. They will be an intelligent electronic race, working as partners with the human race (...) little electronic friends that can solve all your problems. Well, four years beyond this deadline we are still waiting, and we seem little closer than we were a decade ago. Indeed, if anything we are further away - aware of the magnitude of the problems.

There are, however, glimmers of hope on the horizon, a way forward. Recent writers, such as Bolter in his Writing Space, have argued that computing is a way of writing. This idea, not surprisingly, has its origins in hypertext, the use of computers to create interactive, non-linear text systems, but it can be generalised to all computing. ai has failed to recognise or acknowledge its real origins and hence grasp its future. I want to claim that it applies to ai more than any other aspect of computing- ai is in fact an extension of writing - a grammatology of reasoning. My own search in this area began many years ago when I was working within the traditional ai paradigm. Concerns about both the technical possibility and the desirability of such a project soon began to arise. I happened upon an article by a major ai researcher, Mark Stefik, in which he argued that ai should change its goals and try to create a Knowledge Medium, a means of communicating knowledge between people. The revised aim being to create intelligent people rather than intelligent machines. He used a number of metaphors to state his case, but one that he missed was the very one he was using to communicate with his audience - the written word. This observation prompted an investigation into writing, which threw up a number of interesting parallels between ai and writing. <h2>Yesterday</h2> Artificial intelligence is a curious beast. Many a popular text on the subject will begin with an introductory chapter on the sources of man's desire to create a being in his image. We read of the splendid robots of the Illiad, the Golem created by the Rabbi of Prague, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It is strange that a subject seeking to be a science and based on logic should appeal to such mythical beginnings. The history of writing, too, is full of stories that ascribe its invention to the divine, a gift from the gods. This belief is particularly strong in cultures in which writing was restricted to a special class or caste of priests. The ancient Near East, where normally only the priest class could write, abounds with mythical stories about the creation of the first writing. In Greece, however, where writing was widespread - such myths are lacking. They knew where it came from and had no need for such stories. Like the ancient Greeks, ai should acknowledge its true roots in the technologies of the word: writing and print. It may be less exciting in the first instance, but the potential is far greater. One only needs look at the significance and value of the written word to our culture. It is not for nothing that it has been called The Great Invention. Even the claim to independent intelligence has remarkable precursors. Among non-literate cultures, writing created a great deal of astonishment. For them, as Gelb has put it a book is a living being which can speak. There are many stories of autonomous intelligence being attributed to the text. In one case a native messenger refused to carry a written message, as he was afraid it would speak to him. A native Australian stole some tobacco from a package, which he was carrying with an accompanying letter, and was completely astonished that the recipient caught him, despite having hidden the letter in a tree trunk during the theft so that it could not see him. No one today would say that a text was alive, except in the poetic sense. I strongly suspect that in few years we, too, will look upon the reaction to ai programs with similar amusement. But the desire to anthropomorphise is strong (and profitable) as Disney discovered, and may take some time to decline. Of course, the true beginnings of writing have little do with any of the mythical beliefs, or the creation of a new intelligence. Recent work by Schmandt-Besserat indicates that we should look to counting stones that were used for trading purposes. That is, initially the push for the development of writing was from accountancy. As Bottero (in Goody) has remarked, Mesopotamian civilisation was quickly caught up in a widespread economy, which made necessary the meticulous control of infinite movements, infinitely complicated, of the goods produced and circulated. It was to accomplish this task that writing was developed: indeed for several centuries, this was virtually its only use. Likewise, ai, through its roots in computing history, is the son of the accounting and banking software so pervasive today. As writing sought through myth to elevate itself beyond the mundane, although this was actually achieved through literature, so ai must abandon its own myths and accept that it is a form of writing. Recently it has become noticeable that as the creation of interesting conversational partners has proved so difficult, ai has ironically returned to accounting - but without looking to its potential future, as a writing, that this implies. Consider the comment of the director of one ai company who considers that the big question in knowledge based systems (the primary form of ai system) is - can the customer develop the applications he needs to realise more efficient operation of his business? Well, if that is still the big question, no wonder the interest in ai is dwindling. Can you imagine anyone saying that the big issue in literary theory is the content of bank statements? Writing and ai have also shared denunciations. Despite the high status it holds today, writing has not always been considered as benevolent. Writing, Plato has Socrates saying, is inhuman, pretending to establish external to the human that which can only really exist within it. It will destroy memory, making one rely upon external means and thus weaken the mind. Similar complaints followed the development of print. Hieronimo Sqarfiafico, as early as 1477, argued that the abundance of books makes men less studious, presumably, as one would not have to learn everything but could turn to references. ai too has had its share of critics, often on the grounds that if we can get the machine to give us the answers, our own intellects will diminish. If this technology is going to take over much of our intellectual work, what remains? The critics seem to have a case. The trade magazine Electronics has put the case for ai thus: the computerised expert or advisor is always alert, is never under the weather or temperamental, can work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and cannot accept a better offer from a business competitor. Little wonder that the public get concerned. But Plato's worries were unfounded. In fact, writing engenders understanding by virtue of the possibility of exploration and re-examination that it affords. As Goody has remarked, when an utterance is put in writing it can be inspected in much greater detail, its parts as well as its whole, backwards as well as forwards, out of context as well as in its setting; in other words it can be subjected to quite a different kind of scrutiny and critique than is possible with a purely verbal communication. It is easier to recognise contradictions in the word set down, rather than in the constant flow of conversation. The invention of print continued this process, allowing the reader to consult and compare many different texts. Similarly, one of the unexplored side effects of ai comes from that area known as expert systems. In these, one tries to elicit the reasoning employed by an expert in some subject. This is then formalised and implemented within the computer. It has been observed that this very process aids the expert's understanding of their own reasoning, leading to a refinement of that knowledge. Some years ago I worked on a conventional ai project, designing a system to simulate the reasoning of an economist. Certainly, I would say that the most significant result that came from the project was not a working system, but myself having an understanding of economics, and the economist too found the process of trying to 'externalise' his reasoning helped him in his subsequent work. More concretely, Musen and his colleagues, while designing a system for the handling of cancer treatment, found many logical inconsistencies in the original printed material, materials that have since been improved. <h2>Today</h2> Maybe these parallels are more than coincidence, and ai is a form of writing. The techniques of ai have the potential to be employed as a Typography of Thought, allowing an author to 'write down' their thoughts. Just as conventional writing expresses what can be said, so this new form of writing can express what can be thought. It is dynamic and runs on a computer but, unlike the pretences of ai, I make no claim that this new system is thought, anymore than text is voice. Thus, a computer procedure for metaphorical reasoning can be considered not as a simulation for human metaphorical reasoning, but as a sTimulation for it. The written letter b does not simulate the sound but, through convention, stimulates us into saying it. We have conventionalised symbols for certain families of sound, and it not difficult to image creating an alphabet of reasoning. This cognitive alphabet would allow the expression of many forms of reasoning that ai has uncovered and implemented: causal, metaphorical and diagnostic to name a few. These can be assembled by an author to express an argument or narrative. This new form of writing is unlike conventional writing in that it will be dynamic, allowing the reader to explore the implications of the line of thought. Like Derrida';s Machine Programmatrice, we can read the range of possible meanings within the text, seizing the text's various resources and bend them to our own purposes. This is possible because the computer allows the reader to edit and run the text in a way that the static manuscript or printed text does not easily permit. The question-answer tradition within ai is subverted and employed to allow an author to create a text. The author asks questions of his own models to create the desired appropriate response. We thus have a simple implementation of the notion of the problematological approach to text proposed by Meyer. The reader is now in a position to edit the questions and can generate (as the text can be run like a computer program) their own answers, addressing their own concerns. The value of the comparison with writing is that it gives us some guidelines for designing such a cognitive alphabet and using it to create Running Texts (so called because they are texts that can be run). Specifically, in the first instance, significant advantage was gained when the written symbols came to be associated with the existing practice - speech. Havelock notes the original problem with a writing that is ideographic: The shapes were used to symbolise (...) mental acts directly. They went straight to psychological processes in the brain. In a sense they were too ambitious. They were not content to deal solely with phonetic (...) finally came the systems that sought only this limited aim, of copying linguistic noises. The attempt to bypass speech and directly represent the world was attempted in seventeenth century Europe. Some of the best minds worked on the Universal Language Project (described in detail by Slaughter) which, despite much effort, failed. It is noticeable that traditional ai continues this approach, designing knowledge representation languages that are 'deeper'; than external language expression. The lesson is surely that just as writing used speech as a crutch, so any Running Text system should represent existing practice - conventional text - to carry it through the initial process of development. The output from the executable processes should be tied to, and interpret, everyday text. Once conventionalized, just as conventional writing has left the bosom of 'mother speech', Running Texts will emerge with their own expressive form - a poetics of reasoning. <h2>Tomorrow</h2> Should such Running Texts become widespread, this conversion of ai to a communicative medium would raise a new set of questions. Conventionally, arguments about the social impact of ai are predicated on the goal of creating intelligent machines. Should such systems have rights? Could they be held responsible for any mistakes? The new questions follow from the notion of ai as one of many media we might use, a knowledge medium. It is certainly the case that our media seem to infect our minds. A film student of Salomon relates how their daydreaming is influenced by movies (...) I have observed third person narration, flashbacks, zooms, slow-motion emphasis of action, audience viewing, re-takes, 'voice of conscience', multipersonality dialogue, background music (...) I fear that there is very little original style to my daydreaming. It is all influenced by celluloid. One might say that the computer is somehow different. Being a calculating device, could a computer really get into our minds? But even the simple abacus exhibits such effects. It is a technology of the intellect. It has been observed that certain users of the abacus exhibit finger movements when doing mental arithmetic. When prevented from moving their fingers, performance in this mental task fell significantly. They seem to be in the process of internalizing the functionality of the abacus into their cognitive apparatus. There is also little disagreement that writing and print have changed both our psychology and our culture, although we may debate details. Ong has gone so far as to argue that literate people are beings whose thought processes grow not only from their own natural powers, but also from their restructuring through the technologies of writing. Indeed, for him, all major advances in consciousness depend on technological transformations of the word. Bolter has also made the point that writing gives the writer an awareness of himself that is beyond that given by speech; ''the technology of writing is customarily regarded as the creation of the human mind, possibly its greatest creation. In fact, it is the other way around: the mind is the creation of writing. It is an interesting thought that by viewing ai as a medium to be used by people, ai may achieve that final goal which has proved so illusive. If a technology can truly infect those who use it frequently, artificial intelligence could arise. We would be that artificial intelligence, our cognitive apparatus restructured through the use of this technology. Other impacts of writing were more social than individual. The concretisation of language through writing and printing produce consequences that were inconceivable with a purely verbal form of language. For example, once printers knew that each page on a large print run would be the same, they began to produce indexes. Indeed having a large library as printing facilitated made its almost imperative. But suddenly ideas became objects that could be located spatially in the text (within the volume), not a loose bundle of sounds lost forever. As locatable entities, authors sought copyright over their words, and citation became standard. Equally, in Running Texts ways-of-thinking become like printed words; we can inspect them, index them, give them to others. The potential of taking such an approach is suddenly problematic. What might an index of ways-of-thinking look like? How would I cite an extract from a Running Text? How would an author claim copyright over such material, allowing for its infinitely editable nature? We should also be concerned with the pressure to standardize. Spellings and grammatical forms converged due to print. Will ai do the same to 'thought'? It is not difficult to imagine a dictionary of thought patterns, citing their first use by the great and the good. The lesson from both writing and music notation is that, initially at least, the original practice - the oral tradition - becomes reduced in status. The established authorities use standardised notation to encourage standardised performance. It would be a tragedy to see the primacy of individual thought diminished. <h2>Post-Script</h2> Compare the public perceptions of the two technologies under discussion, ai and writing, as commonly seen through film. In Kubrick's 2001 the intelligent computer Hal is the source of all that goes wrong. In contrast, in the film version of Fahrenheit 451 books are seen as containers of all that is great in human culture - something for dictators to destroy and for liberators to preserve. The public perception of what ai tries to undertake suffers from this problem. But the solution is not, as one all too often sees, to try change of interface colour or improve the verbal output of computer systems to make them more personable. To do so is like arguing that the best way to encourage greater interest in nature is to improve the typography of signposts on public footpaths. No, a leap of perception of the natural world had to occur, equally the ai community and its potential users must view ai in a new light. It is this prospect that using ai as a communicative and expressive medium provides. Too often sci-fi presents us with images of a dead society survived only by its computing machine, the assumption (either explicit or implicit) being that the computers contributed to the decline. But if we find a ruined city with written records we do not (unlike Plato) think that the speakers of this city were in some way destroyed by the documents. On the contrary, we think that their speech was more appreciated, amplified by their writing. So Running Texts, the knowledge medium, might amplify our thoughts into new directions, facilitating the human dialogue between authors and readers that is a prerequisite for rational human progress. The alternative, the classic ai position of mythic intelligent machines can only contribute to a concentration of authority in those who create such systems - systems that give answers - over those who are supposed to use them. We must return authority, authorship, to the human who creates such Texts, and who can then be called to account. The question now becomes not is this computer behaving intelligently? any more than we would ask is this book behaving intelligently? What one should rightly be asking is ''is the author behaving intelligently? '' Only yesterday I watched a television preview of the new film based on Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Unable to speak due to motor-neurone disease, Professor Hawking must write his words into a computer and the machine - in a voice that seems to come from science fiction - speaks to us. A typical ai project, but the author of the words is a human, a remarkable human, and they carry his humanity with them. What machine could have so much to say? <h5>References:</h5> - David Bolter Writing Space: the Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991 - J. Gelb The Study of Writing University of Chicago Press, 1963 - Jack Goody The Logic of Writing and the Organisation of Society, Cambridge University Press, 1986 - E. Havelock The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences, Princeton University Press, 1982 - Michel Meyer Meaning and Reading Pragmatica &amp; Beyond IV: 3, John Benjamins Pub, 1983 - Musen et al Knowledge Engineering for a Clinical Trial Advice System: Uncovering Errors in Protocol Specification Report Number ksl-85-51, Medical Computer Science Group, Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Stanford University, 1985 - Walter Ong 'Interfaces of the Word Cornell&' University Press, 1977 - Gavriel Salomon 'The Use of Visual Media in the Service of Enriching Mental Thought Processes', Media, Knowledge and Power, Boyd-Barrett and Braham (eds). Croom Helm, 1987, pp. 251-265 - Denise Schmandt-Besserat &#145;From Tokens to tablets: A Re-evaluation of the So-called &#145;Numerical tablets&#146;&#146;, Visible Language, xv, 4, Autumn 1981, pp. 321-344 - Mark Stefik &#145;The Next Knowledge Medium&#146;, The ai Magazine, Vol. 7, No. 1. Spring 1986 Mediamatic Magazine Vol.7#1 Avon Huxor http://www.mediamatic.net/id/933 d d ARTICLE publication 1 http://www.mediamatic.net/id/8664 2009-05-06T15:12:10+02:00 De Archeologie van de Computer Assemblage De 'Ars Combinatoria' van de Berlijnse filosoof-technicus Werner K

De West-Berlijnse filosoof en programmeur Werner Künzel heeft het ambitieuze plan opgevat een genealogie van de computertheorie te ontwikkelen, geschreven vanuit 'de geest van de filosofie'. In de vijf boeken die tot nu toe verschenen, behandelt hij Founding Fathers als Lullus, Leibniz, Kircher en Babbage. De wortels van de high tech gaan volgens hem terug tot in de Middeleeuwen.

De West-Berlijnse filosoof en programmeur Werner Künzel heeft het ambitieuze plan opgevat een genealogie van de computertheorie te ontwikkelen, geschreven vanuit 'de geest van de filosofie'. In de vijf boeken die tot nu toe verschenen, behandelt hij Founding Fathers als Lullus, Leibniz, Kircher en Babbage. De wortels van de high tech gaan volgens hem terug tot in de Middeleeuwen. In een opgewekte, heldere stijl gaat de tekstarcheoloog K&uuml;nzel de polemiek aan met degenen die geloven dat de computer pas midden 20ste eeuw ten tonele verscheen en het pre-elektronisch tijdperk afdoen als barbarij. K&uuml;nzel: De computertheorie is tegenwoordig zo succesvol dat ze haar eigen geschiedenis niet nodig schijnt te hebben. Toch gaat er iets verloren. Dat kan je goed illustreren aan de hand van de kunstmatige intelligentie. Het onderzoek hiernaar is begonnen in de 19de eeuw en via de filosofie en de psychologie in technologisch vaarwater terechtgekomen. Intelligentie lijkt daarmee een technisch vraagstuk te zijn geworden, terwijl je het ook interdisciplinair zou kunnen behandelen. De archeologisch graafwerkzaamheden van K&uuml;nzel zijn dan ook grensvervagend. Hij richt zich zowel tot de filosofen als de soft- en hardwarebouwers. Nadat Werner K&uuml;nzel overdag heeft lesgegeven bij Siemens, duikt hij 's avonds met een enorme bevlogenheid in de boeken om de &#145;geheime oorsprong&#146; van de computer bloot te leggen. Toen z&#146;n proefschrift over Foucault en Hegel af was, liet hij zich omscholen tot programmeur. Een verwijzing in een Amerikaans boek bracht hem op het spoor van de dertiende-eeuwse Spaanse priester Raymundus Lullus. Deze uitvinder/missionaris ontwikkelde een schema voor een symbolische machine die als &#145;tekstmachine&#146; combinaties van betekenissen genereert. Het verbaasde K&uuml;nzel dat de gevestigde filosofie de technici in haar eigen gelederen zo heeft verdrongen en regelrecht censureert. Als er iets is wat de vertegenwoordigers van de Zuivere Geest door en door haten, dan is dat wel de poging om de filosofische waarheid op welke manier dan ook te mathematiseren, schrijft K&uuml;nzel in zijn boek over Lullus. ''Niets is in hun ogen zo vervaarlijk als de infiltratie van de mathesis in het rijk van de idee&euml;n. '' Sinds het Duitse idealisme rond 1800 heeft de filosofie zich volgens K&uuml;nzel op haar eigen terrein teruggetrokken en de industri&euml;le revolutie aan zich voorbij laten gaan. De kloof tussen techniek en de alfawetenschappen is niet pas in de 20ste eeuw ontstaan. Ik lees nu toevallig Gaston Bachelards opstellen over epistemologie waarin hij de filosofen uit de 19de eeuw verwijt de technische ontwikkeling in hun tijd al niet meer te hebben begrepen. De filosofie die we nu kennen heeft de weinige opvattingen over techniek die ze heeft eigenlijk gehaald uit een periode die nog niet technisch was, dus voor 1800. Bachelard gaat het in dit geval om de elektriciteit. De negentiende-eeuwse filosofie ori&euml;nteerde zich op het bewustzijn van de burgerij en deze was in deze periode in feite zo stabiel, dat een reflectie op de opkomende techniek niet nodig was om de geldingskracht van de filosofie te bewijzen. Pas in de tweede helft van de 20ste eeuw moesten filosofen constateren dat ze uit de boot waren gevallen. Heidegger, maar ook de Frankfurter Schule hebben getracht de geschiedenis van de filosofie te herschrijven, om erachter te komen vanaf welk moment men het contact met de wereld verloor, maar geen van hen heeft het terrein van de natuurwetenschappen of de techniek betreden. Zo bleef techniek synoniem aan &#145;catastrofe&#146;, die van buitenaf de wereld, maar ook het denken zelf, bedreigt. Dat nota bene filosofen aan de wieg van de computer stonden, valt zo volledig buiten het blikveld van de huidige geschiedschrijving. <h3>Technicus-Filosoof</h3> In analogie met Nietzsches &#145;kunstenaar-filosoof&#146; zou je K&uuml;nzel een &#145;technicus-filosoof&#146; kunnen noemen. Ik vroeg hem wat je daaronder zou kunnen verstaan: Een technicus-filosoof is iemand die zijn realiteitsbegrip ontleent aan de media waar hij of zij mee omgaat. Dat is een reusachtige breuk met het realiteitsbegrip zoals dat tot op heden wordt onderwezen, dat nog uitgaat van de Dialogen'' van Plato. Nog steeds neemt men als voorbeelden een tafel, een stoel of een boom. Het mag curieus klinken, maar het realiteitsbegrip is in die 2000 jaar niet veranderd. Het denken vanuit de technische media zou niet het mogelijk verlies van lichamelijk waarnemingsvermogens tot uitgangspunt moeten nemen. Het is eerder een concessie aan de veranderde omgeving. De technicus-filosoof hoeft deze ontwikkelingen ook niet per se verder te voeren, maar dient daar wel over na te denken. Men zou op z&#146;n minst een besef moeten hebben van wat er gebeurt wanneer kennis mediaal wordt overgedragen en opgeslagen. '' Techniek is voor K&uuml;nzel meer dan een verzameling machines: het is bovenal een knutselbezigheid. En ook aan teksten kan gesleuteld worden. K&uuml;nzel bedrijft de &#145;Ars Combinatoria&#146; dan ook op geheel eigen wijze: hij laat zien dat het denken in rizomatische vertakkingen, toegepast op de raakvlakken van filosofie en techniek, een veelbelovende toekomst heeft. Dit gaat verder dan het beoefenen van een vrije, associatieve schrijfstijl om verborgen geschiedenissen te ontsluiten. Elektronische media veranderen de structuur van het denken zelf. Zo zou de invoering van hypertext spannende gevolgen kunnen hebben. Hoe zal de filosofiegeschiedenis gerecipieerd worden wanneer alle basisteksten, van pre-socraten tot postmodernen, op &eacute;&eacute;n cd-rom staan? Heideggers Sein und Zeit zal ongetwijfeld veel toegankelijker worden: je klikt het woord Geworfenheit aan en krijgt een korte uitleg van het begrip, een etymologie, in welke passages en &#145;boeken&#146; Heidegger dit begrip nog meer gebruikt en welke filosofen hierop doorgaan. Compact Hermeneutics die het interactieve interveni&euml;ren in bestaande teksten een solide, technische basis geven. Want de techniek verhoogt niet alleen het plezier in tekstverwerking, maar biedt ook nieuwe communicatiemogelijkheden. K&uuml;nzel: ''In tegenstelling tot film, radio en tv, waarvan men vroeger zei dat ze enkel passieve consumenten van ons maakten, activeert de computer ons en maakt ons producenten. Dit actieve aspect van de wetenschapsproductie brengt een grote verandering teweeg in het auteurschap. De auteur was tot voor kort iemand die boeken schreef en lezingen gaf. De interactieve kennisproductie via netwerken heeft zoveel consequenties voor het auteurschap, dat de filosofie en de literatuurwetenschap deze nog helemaal niet kunnen overzien. '' Werner K&uuml;nzel heeft samen met zijn collega Heiko Cornelius al een voorbeeld gegeven van de technische mogelijkheden en de Ars Magna van Lullus omgezet in de &#145;hogere taal&#146; Cobol (apart verkrijgbaar op floppy). Dit programmeeravontuur is voor hen geen extraatje dat als digitale bijdrage alleen voor technisch geletterden toegankelijk is. Stap voor stap wordt in een apart hoofdstuk de structuur van Cobol en het coderen van Lullus&#146; categorie&euml;n voor de leek inzichtelijk gemaakt. Met enig doorzettingsvermogen kan de lezer vervolgens de afgedrukte uitdraai van het programma gaan &#145;lezen&#146; om erachter te komen hoe de combinaties van Lullus door K&uuml;nzel e.a. zijn omgezet in computertaal. Volgens K&uuml;nzel heeft Lullus de eerste tekstmachine ontworpen die in staat is waarheidsgetrouwe uitspraken te produceren. Met behulp van geometrische figuren, die met elkaar verbonden zijn en volgens exact gedefinieerde voorschriften met elkaar communiceren, worden alle mogelijke uitspraken gegenereerd en in tekenketens ondergebracht. De Lullus-hardware bestaat uit onafhankelijk van elkaar draaiende schijven, met op iedere schijf negen woorden of begrippen. Deze elementen vormen tezamen een logisch samenhangende zin met een vraag (waarom, wie), een subject (engel of levend wezen), de &#145;goddelijke attributen&#146; zoals kracht en deugdzaamheid, relationele verbanden (verschillend van, tegendeel van) en een deugd (trouw, medelijden) dan wel slechte gewoonte zoals haat of hebzucht. Lullus brengt vervolgens de vijf categorie&euml;n samen in letters zodat er, als we een draai aan het rad geven, een bepaalde lettercombinatie uitrolt. Deze heeft Lullus vervolgens ondergebracht in tabellen. De software bestaat volgens K&uuml;nzel uit de strikte regels die aan de interpretatie van de lettercombinaties zijn opgelegd. Lullus wilde met deze machine consistentie en transparantie in het denken aanbrengen door de gebruiker te dwingen steeds van dezelfde bouwstenen gebruik te maken, die voorzien zijn van heldere definities. Volgens K&uuml;nzel heeft de Lullus-tekstmachine als achterliggend doel het formuleren van universele regels, die grens- en cultuuroverschrijdend zijn. Deze moet kennis voortbrengen die ook bruikbaar is in &#145;heidense&#146; gebieden die nog niet gekerstend zijn. <h3>Monadologie</h3> Eenzelfde doelstelling treft K&uuml;nzel aan bij de Duitse filosoof Leibniz (1646-1716). Ook hij wilde in het door burgeroorlogen verscheurde Europa van de 17de eeuw een universele taal ontwerpen die via een netwerk van universiteiten de communicatie op gang zou moeten brengen. Leibniz&#146; nooit gebouwde cilindrische rekenmachine betekent volgens K&uuml;nzel een belangrijke stap voorwaarts van dode mechanische berekeningen naar een flexibele Ars Combinatoria, waarin een verschil wordt gemaakt tussen het invoeren van gegevens en het rekenwerk zelf. Ook filosofeert Leibniz over een binaire rekenmachine, die gebaseerd is op een tweevoudig getallenstelsel. Leibniz schrijft in 1679: ''Het binaire systeem, d.w.z. het rekenen met 0 en 1, is ondanks z&#146;n lengte voor de wetenschap het meest fundamentele systeem en leidt tot nieuwe ontdekkingen. Wanneer getallen worden gereduceerd tot 0 en 1 heerst overal een prachtige ordening. '' Belangrijker dan zijn ontwerp voor een rekenmachine vormen Leibniz&#146; gedachten over de monadologie. De monade als een ondeelbaar bestanddeel van stof of geest is in de technische lezing van dit begrip een in zichzelf gekeerde ruimte, zonder ramen, schijnbaar geheel afgesloten van de buitenwereld. Weliswaar komen er geen beelden binnen, maar er vindt desalniettemin wel degelijk een uitwisseling van &#145;data&#146; plaats. K&uuml;nzel trekt de vergelijking tussen de gesloten monade en met de duisternis binnen de chips van de Central Processing Unit. Voor K&uuml;nzel bezit het monadebegrip van Leibniz (in navolging van Deleuzes Le pli) een bijzondere actualiteitswaarde: ''De klassieke filosofie heeft Leibniz&#146; monade afgewezen omdat het te star en te statisch zou zijn. Bij Hegel, Marx en Adorno is het subject een dynamisch geheel dat voortdurend stroomt en zich transformeert. Volgens Hegel bestaat er geen substantie die niet in beweging is; er bestaat niets dat niet wordt opgelost in deze beweging. Gedeeltelijk komt dat overeen met onze ervaringen, maar tegelijkertijd voelen we ons begrensd. Onze huid en ons lichaam leggen beperkingen op. We hoeven dus niet louter de beweging als uitgangspunt te nemen, maar kunnen ook beginnen bij de polen of de dragers van de beweging. Je zou dan zo kunnen redeneren dat er verschillende instanties bestaan, individuen, die als eenheden weliswaar voortdurend met elkaar communiceren, maar daar niet geheel in opgaan. Ze lossen niet op, maar worden aan elkaar gekoppeld. We kunnen ons vervolgens afvragen wat de aard van de hedendaagse technische interfaces is, wat voor openingen of laspunten dat zijn. Het goede aan het begrip monade is dat het zowel de eenheid van het individu als de verbindingen met de buitenwereld en communicatiemiddelen in zich verenigt. Lange tijd ging het Ik alleen maar op in een dialectisch, groter geheel. De monade daarentegen benadrukt de mogelijke openingen en combinatiemogelijkheden, die niet van tevoren zijn vastgelegd in wetmatigheden. Voor Leibniz bestaat de monade niet zonder een netwerk. Michel Serres toont dat aan in zijn Hermes I en laat zien dat het netwerk van Leibniz zeer economisch is opgebouwd. Leibniz redeneert niet vanuit de dwarsverbindingen. Alle communicatie loopt bij hem via de Goddelijke Centrale Monade en kan volgens hem zo optimaal functioneren. Dat mag onhandig zijn als er maar twee monaden zijn, maar werkt aantoonbaar effici&euml;nter als er duizenden monaden met elkaar gaan communiceren. Zo krijgt de Centrale Monade een technische functie en wordt onderdeel van een communicatiemodel. Op deze manier bezien hoeft dit netwerk niet afgedaan te worden als een star, autoritair model, dat voor een bepaalde wereldorde of religie staat. Vanuit onze optiek heeft een netwerk geen centrale instantie nodig die ingrijpt. Voor ons is de centrale niet meer dan een technische voorwaarde en verdwijnt als machtsinstantie op de achtergrond. Maar voor Leibniz moest de communicatie nog op gang komen en dat wilde hij organiseren. Het blijft de moeite waard voor de technicus-filosoof om de effici&euml;ntie van dit monademodel serieus te nemen en niet alles dat voor Hegel is uitgedacht bij voorbaat af te schrijven. '' De monade wordt ook wel geassocieerd met &#145;cocooning&#146;: de Westerse teleburger die zich afsluit van de boze buitenwereld en alleen nog via telecommunicatie met anderen in contact staat. Het leek mij legitiem om aan een promotor van het monadeconcept de vraag voor te leggen in hoeverre wij aan de vooravond staan van een klassenstrijd tussen monaden en (dataloze) nomaden. K&uuml;nzel: ''De technische kloof tussen bevolkingsgroepen en continenten wordt inderdaad steeds groter. En de situatie zal nog lange tijd zo zijn dat de geprivilegieerde monade wel de keuze heeft al dan niet van e-mail of fax gebruik te maken en de nomade deze mogelijkheden niet heeft. De apparatuur is in het Westen zo goedkoop geworden dat ze voor iedereen betaalbaar is. Maar wellicht geldt dat straks ook voor de hele wereldbevolking &#150; de walkman is al niet langer een exclusief Westers consumptiegoed. Dat zal sterk afhangen van de vraag in hoeverre dringende problemen zoals honger en milieuvervuilingen worden opgelost. Wat heeft een Indiaan in het Amazonegebied aan een laptop als zijn leefomgeving naar de knoppen gaat? Of mensen in Afrika die moeten vluchten voor droogte of een burgeroorlog? '' Behalve met Lullus en Leibniz hield K&uuml;nzel zich bezig met de barokke charlatan/theoreticus Kircher, die de Egyptische hi&euml;rogliefen als willekeurig tekensysteem opvatte en op het niveau van de simulatie tilde. K&uuml;nzels laatste boek is gewijd aan de vroegnegentiende-eeuwse filosoof/ingenieur Babbage. Hij ontwierp een rekenmachine en was tegelijkertijd als filosoof en theoloog in staat om discussies met vakgenoten te voeren. Babbage dacht na hoe de schepping als programma gefunctioneerd zou kunnen hebben. Maar ook hij bleef een outlaw en is in vergetelheid geraakt. Voor K&uuml;nzel zijn deze studies slechts kleine puzzelstukjes uit een groot interdisciplinair onderzoek naar de verborgen geschiedenis van de techniek: In mijn boeken kritiseer ik de bestaande arbeidsdeling tussen techniek en filosofie niet in zulke directe bewoordingen. Ik neem eerder de positie in van de verteller en draag stenen van een moza&iuml;ek aan die het mogelijk maken een algemene kritiek te formuleren. Maar die kan alleen in groepsverband ontstaan. Dit ambitieuze project zou het levenswerk van K&uuml;nzel kunnen worden. Maar wordt, als bijvoorbeeld K&uuml;nzel z&#146;n baan bij Siemens opgeeft en fulltime in de archieven duikt, zodoende niet weer de band met de techniek doorgesneden? Het enthousiasme waarmee hij nu zo&#146;n radicale kortsluiting veroorzaakt tussen historische teksten en het hedendaagse computervocabulaire, zou dan snel kunnen verbleken. De speelruimte van de technicus-filosoof in de huidige academische wereld is nog uitermate beperkt. Zo blijven we aangewezen op nachtelijke theorie-escapades, die de weg weten door de duisternis van de chip. <h6>LITERATUUR:</h6> werner k&uuml;nzel/heiko cornelius Die Ars Generalis Ultima des Raymundus Lullus, Studien zu einem geheimen Ursprung der Computertheorie, 5de ed., Berlijn 1991. werner k&uuml;nzel/peter bexte Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Barock-Projekte, Machinenwelt und Netzwerk im 17. Jahrhundert, Berlin 1990. werner k&uuml;nzel Der Oedipis Aegyptiacus des Athanasius Kircher, Das &auml;gyptische R&auml;tsel in der Simulation eines barocken Zeichensystems, Berlin 1989. werner k&uuml;nzel Charles Babbage. Differenz-Machinen, Exkurse zur Karthographie der technischen Kultur im 19. Jahrhundert, Berlin 1991. werner k&uuml;nzel/peter bexte Pr&auml;senz, Zeitspeicher und Time Machines, Essays, Berlin 1991. Deze rijk ge&iuml;llustreerde boeken kunnen worden besteld bij :Edition Olivia K&uuml;nzel, Holsteinische Str.&nbsp;37/1, 1000 Berlin 31, Germany. The Archeology of Computer Assemblage The 'Ars Combinatoria' of Berlin philosopher-engineer Werner K

The Berlin philosopher and programmer Werner Künzel has hatched an ambitious plan to develop a genealogy of computer theory, written in 'the spirit of philosophy'. In the five books he has published so far, he discusses founding fathers like Lullus, Leibniz, Kircher and Babbage. The roots of high tech, says Künzel, reach back into the middle ages.

In a bright, clear style this textual archaeologist delivers his rejoinder to anyone who believes the computer appeared on the scene only in the mid-20th century and who would write off the pre-electronic era as barbaric. Künzel: computer theory is currently so successful that it seems to have no use for its own history. Yet something is being lost. Artificial intelligence is a good illustration of this. People started researching it in the 19th century and ended up via philosophy and psychology in technological waters. Intelligence seems to have become a question of engineering, though you can treat it in an inter-disciplinary way as well. Küntzel's archaeological excavations blur those boundaries. He is addressing philosophers as well as hard- and software designers. After teaching at Siemens during the day, by night Werner Küntzel enthusiastically hits the books in an effort to expose the 'secret origins' of the computer. It began when, after completing a dissertation on Foucault and Hegel, he trained as a programmer. A reference in an American book put him on a trail of 13th-century Spanish priest Raymundus Lullus. This inventor and missionary developed a blueprint for a symbolic 'text machine' which generates semantic combinations. Küntzel was surprised at how established philosophy had displaced the engineers within its own ranks and how it censured them outright. If there's anything the exponents of Pure Intellect thoroughly detest, it's the attempt to somehow mathematize the philosophical truth, writes Küntzel in his book on Lullus. ''In their eyes, nothing is so awful as the infiltration of mathematics into the realm of ideas. According to Küntzel, since German idealism (around 1800), philosophy has withdrawn into its own territory and let the industrial revolution pass it by. The gulf between technology and the arts and letters did not arise in the 20th-century. At the moment I happen to be reading Gaston Bachelard's writings on epistemology, in which he accuses 19th-century philosophers of not having understood the technical developments of their time. The philosophy we know today gets the few opinions it has of technology from a period that was not yet technological - before 1800. In this case Bachelard is talking about electronics. 19th-century philosophy was oriented to the bourgeois consciousness, which was in fact so stable during this period that reflection on the upcoming technology was not needed to prove the validity of philosophy. Only in the second half of the 20th century have philosophers had to acknowledge that they have fallen behind. Heidegger, and also the Frankfurt School, tried to rewrite the history of philosophy, to trace the point at which it had gotten out of touch with the world, but none of them spoke of the natural sciences or engineering. Technology remained synonymous with 'catastrophe', an external threat to the world, but also to thought itself. That philosophers were, nota bene, present at the birth of the computer is not addressed in today's historical writing. <h3>Engineer-Philosopher</h3> By analogy with Nietzsche's 'artist-philosopher,' you might call Küntzel an 'engineer-philosopher'. I asked him what this would denote.Küntzel: An engineer-philosopher is someone who derives his concept of reality from the media he works with. This is a huge break with the concept of reality as it has been taught up to the present, which is still based on Plato's Dialogues''. We still use a table, a chair or a tree for an example. It may sound curious, but our concept of reality hasn't changed in 2000 years. If we think from a technological media paradigm we're not supposed to take the possible loss of bodily powers of perception for granted. It's more about making a concession to the changed environment. The engineer-philosopher does not per se have to take these developments any further either, but he should at least think about them. We should at the very least realize what happens when knowledge is transferred and stored through media. For Küntzel technology is more than a collection of machines; above all, it is a case of tinkering. And texts can be doctored, too. Küntzel practices 'Ars Combinatoria' in his own unique way: he proves that there is a promising future to thinking in rhizomatic bifurcations, applied at the interface between philosophy and technology. This goes beyond the use of a free, associative writing style in order to unlock hidden stories. Electronic media alter the structure of thinking itself. So the introduction of hypertext could have exciting consequences. How will the history of philosophy be received when all its basic texts, from the pre-Socratic to postmodernism, can fit on one cd-rom? Heidegger's Sein und Zeit will undoubtedly become much more accessible; you look at the word thrownness and are shown a short explanation of the term, an etymology, other passages and 'books' in which Heidegger uses the term, and in which other philosophers take it up. Compact hermeneutics will give interactive intervention in existing texts a solid, technical base; technology not only heightens the pleasure to be had in word-processing, it offers new communication opportunities. Küntzel: ''In contrast to film, radio and tv, which they used to say only made us into passive consumers, the computer activates us and makes us producers. This active aspect of knowledge production has brought about a great change in authorship. Until recently an author was someone who wrote books and gave readings. Interactive knowledge production via networks has so many consequences for authorship that philosophy and literary studies can't fully survey it yet. Werner Küntzel, with his colleague Heiko Cornelius, has already provided an example of these technological possibilities and translated Lullus's Ars Magna into the 'higher language' of Cobol (available separately on floppy). They do not intend this adventure in programming as a bonus digital contribution only accessible to the technically literate. The structure of Cobol and Lullus's category code are elucidated step by step for the lay reader in a separate chapter. With a bit of perseverance, we can then 'read' the printout of the program to see how Lullus's combinations have been translated by Knützel and Cornelius into computer language. According to Küntzel, Lullus designed the first text machine capable of producing truthful statements. With the help of connected geometric figures which communicate with each other according to precisely defined instructions, all possible statements are generated and placed in character sequences. The Lullus hardware consists of independently rotating disks, with nine words or terms on each disk. Together these elements can form a logically coherent sentence with a question (why, who), a subject (angel or living being), a 'divine attribute' like strength or virtue, a relational connection (different from, opposite of), and a good trait (loyalty, sympathy) or bad (hatred or greed). Lullus then assigned the five categories to characters, in such a way that if we give the wheel a spin a certain character sequence rolls out. He then ranged these in tables. According to Küntzel, the software consists of the strict rules imposed on the interpretation of the letter combinations. Lullus intended this machine to introduce consistence and transparence into thought by forcing the user to repeatedly use the same building blocks, all equipped with clear definitions. The underlying goal of the Lullus text machine, he says, was the formulation of universal rules, which could cross boundaries and cultures. It would create knowledge, which would also be useful in 'heathen' areas, which were not yet christianized. <h3>Monadology</h3> Küntzel discovers a similar goal in the German philosopher Leibniz (1646 - 1716). He too, in civil war-torn 17th-century Europe, wanted to design a universal language, which would facilitate communication via a network of universities. Leibniz's cylindrical computer, never built, signified an important step forward from dead mechanical calculations to a flexible 'Ars Combinatoria', which would differentiate between the feeding in of data and the calculation itself, according to Küntzel. Leibniz also philosophized about a computer based on a binary numerical system. In 1679 he wrote, ''Despite its length, the binary system, in other words counting with 0 and 1, is scientifically the most fundamental system, and leads to new discoveries. When numbers are reduced to 0 and 1, a beautiful order prevails everywhere. More important than his design for a computer are Leibniz's thoughts on monadology. As an indivisible component of matter or mind, the monad is technically a space drawn in upon itself, without windows, apparently completely closed off from the outside world. Although no images enter, a definite exchange of data nevertheless occurs. Küntzel makes a comparison between the sealed monad and the darkness inside the chips of the central processing unit (cpu). For Küntzel, Leibniz's monad concept (after Deleuze's Le pli) exhibits an extraordinary timeliness: ''Classical philosophy rejected Leibniz's monad because it was thought to be too rigid and static. In Hegel, Marx and Adorno the subject is a dynamic whole, which continuously flows and transforms itself. According to Hegel, there is no substance that is not in motion; nothing exists which does not dissolve in motion. That partly accords with our experience, but at the same time we feel restricted. Our skin and our bodies impose limitations. So we don't have to take just motion as an assumption; we could also begin with the poles or the vectors of motion. You could then reason that individual bodies exist which are indeed constantly communicating with each other as entities, without being completely absorbed by it. They do not dissolve, but are connected to each other. We can then ask ourselves about the nature of contemporary technological interfaces, what kind of openings or splices they are. The good thing about the monad concept is that the entity of the individual as well as its connections with the outside world and means of communication unite in it. For a long time the Ego was only part of a dialectical, larger whole. In contrast, the monad emphasizes possible openings and communication possibilities, which are not established ahead of time by laws. Leibniz's monad cannot exist without a network. Michel Serres shows this in Hermes I and demonstrates that Leibniz's network is very economically constructed. Leibniz does not think in terms of cross-connections. For him all communication moves via the Divine Central Monad, and functions optimally this way. This may be inconvenient if there are only two monads, but it's demonstrably more efficient when a thousand monads are communicating with each other. The Central Monad then acquires a technical function and becomes part of a communication model. In this light, this network doesn't have be dismissed as a rigid, authoritarian model representing a certain world order or religion. From our point of view a network needs no interfering central authority. For us the central switchboard is no more than a technical necessity, and as an agent of power it disappears in the background. But for Leibniz, communication had yet to get underway, and he wanted to organize it. It's still worth the trouble for the engineer-philosopher to take the efficiency of this monad model seriously and not write off everything that was thought of before Hegel. The monad is also sometimes associated with 'cocooning': the Western tele-citizen who locks himself away from the evil outside world and stays in contact with others only via telecommunications. It seemed legitimate to me to ask a promoter of the monad concept whether we are on the eve of a class struggle between monads and (dataless) nomads. Küntzel: ''The technological gulf between population groups and continents is indeed becoming ever wider. And for a long time the situation will remain such that the privileged monad will have the choice of whether or not to use e-mail or fax and the nomad will not. The equipment has gotten so cheap in the West that it's affordable for everyone. But that will probably soon become true of the entire world population - the Walkman is no longer an exclusively Western consumer good. This will depend heavily on to what extent urgent problems like hunger and environmental pollution are solved. What does an Indian in the Amazon area need a laptop for if his living environment is going down the tubes? Or people in Africa who have to flee from drought or a civil war? Besides Lullus and Leibniz, Küntzel has been interested in the baroque charlatan/theorist Kircher, who saw Egyptian hieroglyphics as an arbitrary sign system and raised them to the level of simulation. Küntzel's latest book is devoted to the early 19th century philosopher/engineer Charles Babbage. He designed a computer and was simultaneously capable of debating with colleagues as a philosopher and a theologian. Babbage reflected on how creation could have functioned as a program. But he, too, remained an outlaw and faded into oblivion. For Küntzel, these studies are merely small puzzle pieces taken from a great interdisciplinary investigation into the hidden history of technology: In my books I don't criticize the existing division of labour between technology and philosophy in such explicit terms. Rather, I take the position of the narrator, and add stones to a mosaic, making it possible to formulate a general critique. But that can only come about in a group context. This ambitious project could become Küntzel's life's work. But won't the connection with technology be severed in the process, if for example he gives up his job at Siemens and submerges himself in the archives full-time? The enthusiasm with which he is now so radically splicing historical texts with contemporary computer jargon might then fade. The play space of the engineer-philosopher in the modern academic world is still extremely limited. We must thus resort to nocturnal theoretical escapades to show us the way through the darkness of the chip. translation laura martz <h6>REFERENCES:</h6> werner Küntzel/heiko cornelius Die Ars Generalis Ultima des Raymundus Lullus, Studien zu einem geheimen Ursprung der Computertheorie, 5de ed., Berlijn 1991. werner Küntzel/peter bexte Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Barock-Projekte, Machinenwelt und Netzwerk im 17. Jahrhundert, Berlin 1990. werner Küntzel Der Oedipis Aegyptiacus des Athanasius Kircher, Das ägyptische Rätsel in der Simulation eines barocken Zeichensystems, Berlin 1989. werner Küntzel Charles Babbage. Differenz-Machinen, Exkurse zur Karthographie der technischen Kultur im 19. Jahrhundert, Berlin 1991. werner Küntzel /peter bexte Präsenz, Zeitspeicher und Time Machines, Essays, Berlin 1991. These lavishly illustrated books may be ordered from Edition Olivia Küntzel, Holsteinische Str. 37/1, 1000 Berlin 31, Germany. Mediamatic Magazine Vol.7#1 Geert Lovink http://www.mediamatic.net/id/927 d d ARTICLE publication 1 http://www.mediamatic.net/id/8638 2009-05-06T15:19:38+02:00 AI! (1)

It sometimes feels as if everything is up for grabs in the crazy, fin de siècle postmodern-cyberchips-with-everything world of today. There's nothing to count on, nothing you can wave above your head and say I believe in this. Maybe this is how it should be, after all.

<h5>In more religious times, people worried that art's imitation of nature carried a disruptive presumption of man playing at God. Computers playing at man is the modern dilemma and in a Godless age, where artists become the fount of spirituality, replicating the artist's actions is the new heresy. If computers can create beauty, perhaps we'd better find faith in God again. paul fisher The Guardian</h5> Even the casual observer of our post-religious times must be starting to cotton on by now that old distinctions between real/unreal, alive/not alive, natural/artificial and so on, right up to good/evil can not be applied in a world of cryogenics, biotechnology, nanotechnology, instant communication, quantum physics. Time to shake the bag and try a new combination. We can all name names – Spinoza's posthumously-published shock-horror claim three centuries ago that it was possible to devise a scientific psychology fully consistent with our knowledge of how the body works, an idea which started the man-as-machine bandwagon; Newton, for giving us the mathematical and conceptual basis for the Western science which made so much of this possible; Darwin, for kicking away the crutch of religion, or Freud for forcing us to realise that maybe the rational mind was not all it was cracked up to be after all. But pointing a finger at the past solves no present dilemmas. There's no go going back to a pre-relative world, no option but to just keep peeling away the layers to see what's (in and out) there. We have long become used to our machines outstripping us in many departments, including ones once important to the survival of the individual and held in great esteem by society, such as strength, speed, stamina and more recently, calculating ability. But the idea that a computer might equal or even overtake us in the capacities of the mind, might become creative, is seen by many as a threat, an outrage, even a blasphemy. Acting like a magnifying glass, focussing and concentrating the technical and philosophical issues, lies artificial intelligence (ai), the most personal attack on traditional definitions of humanity. Both lay people – ai has always had the power to incite popular media interest with Electric Brain Will Rule World-type headlines – and academics alike have criticised the development of as fundamentally misguided, dehumanising and ideologically pernicious, undermining human agency and responsibility and presenting a travesty of human potential. Scepticism and mockery are now commonly accompanied by fears that if we allow humanity image to be moulded in the likeness of a computer, human values must take second place or even be negated altogether. The deepest anxiety is that such theories and technologies will impoverish our image of ourselves and increase the individual's sense of helplessness in the face of life's challenges. If we are nothing but machines, then the social practices and personal attitudes, which value our specifically human qualities, must be sentimental illusions. If our minds are nothing but computers, what then? But paradoxically, ai is currently helping some thinkers investigate how such mental processes as purpose and subjectivity are possible. ai's main achievement is precisely that it forces us to appreciate the enormous subtlety of the human mind. Computer models have allowed the simplistic theories of the mind, language and perception to be trashed. In fact it wasn't until these theories were attempted to be applied to computers that we realised how oversimplified they were, and at the same time that it was not our ability to play chess schedule industrial processes and calculate pi to a thousand places that was so remarkable, but the simple skills we all have like interpreting a wink across a table from a friend, walking across a crowded room without bumping into anyone, recognising 100 different designs of chair as chairs and learning to speak without being told the rules of grammar. Antecedents of the computer date back to the 17th century, when Leibniz (the patron saint of cybernetics, Norbert Weiner called him) and Pascal designed arithmetic machines. <h5>1 See Bert Mulder's review of J.P. Bischoff's Versuch einer Geschichte der Rechenmachine.</h5> ai' s antecedents go back even further: the dream of sexless reproduction or artificial consciousness can be seen in the ancient Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea; the alchemists' homunculus and the Golem of Jewish Kaballa fame. Leaving the fairy stories behind, in the 1840s Charles Babbage designed his Difference Engines <h5>2 So called because their operation is based on the method of finite differences used by contemporary human 'computers' in the preparation of mathematical tables.</h5> based on the more dependable (but equally obscure to the uninitiated) Kaballa of mathematical integration. Neither these nor his later Analytic Engine were built because of the limitations of Victorian mechanical engineering, <h5>3 The British Science Museum built Difference Engine No. 2 last year out of 4,000 iron, steel and gun metal parts. It weighs 3 tonnes and calculates 7th order polynomials to 30 decimal places, analogically by cranking a handle.</h5> but the latter would have been the first programmable mechanical computer – and would have been programmed by Lady Ada Lovelace, <h5>4 Whose father, Lord Byron, was coincidentally present the night Mary Shelley conceived her Frankenstein myth.</h5> who predicted that the Analytical Engine would be able to act on other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations (...) such as those between pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition (...) the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent (B. Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers). The modern search for ai began in 1950, when Cambridge mathematician and wartime cryptographer Alan Turing published a popular reworking of the core concepts he had first outlined in 1936, claiming that computers could - and by 2000, would - imitate human intelligence perfectly. He devised and gave his name to a (purely behavioural) test for establishing whether this had been accomplished. The initial reaction in England was to scoff, but the academics <h5>5 Turing believed this was because he was gay, and wrote a syllogism expressing this belief shortly before killing himself: Turing thinks machines could think. Turing lies with men. Therefore machines can not think. </h5> soon got over this and the search for ai began at what seemed the most obvious starting point: design a computer modelled on the brain. Simple, transistor-based learning networks were built in the 50s, but neither the technology nor the theory were sfficiently developed to get anywhere. General-purpose (Von Neuman) logic machines had arrived on the scene, and seemed to offer greater scope. By the end of the decade, the question Could a computer think had been rephrased to Could a machine that manipulated physical symbols according to structure-sensitive rules think? At the time there were good reasons for believing yes. Church's Thesis that every effectively computable function is recursively computable and Turing's demonstration that any recursively computable function can be computed in finite time by a maximally simple sort of symbol manipulating device (known as a Universal Turing Machine). Together, these ideas mean that a digital computer, given only the right program, a large enough memory and sufficient time, can compute any rule-governed input-output function. In other words, it can display any systematic pattern of responses to the environment whatsoever, and therefore a suitably programmed computer would be able to pass the (purely behavioural) Turing Test for conscious intelligence. The only problem left was to identify the complex function of response to environment and then write the program (the set of recursively applicable rules) by which the symbol manipulating machine will compute it. These goals became the kernel of the classical or hard ai research program. Protestations from psychology labs and philosophy seminar rooms that digital computers were not very 'brain-like' were brushed aside with the theoretically appealing notion that the physical machine has nothing to do with what functions it computes; what you can compute doesn't depend on what you're made of, meat or silicon. <h5>6 The point had been made through the 60s that thinking was a non-material process in an immaterial soul – but it had little impact on ai research, having no evolutionary or explanatory mechanism behind it. It didn't fit in with the logical positivistic worldview then dominant that science was all.</h5> Secondly, according to Turing's Principle of Equivalence, the details of any machine's functional architecture (the actual layout of the circuits) is also irrelevant. These points were the full rationale behind Hard ai, and its proponents (still) believe that it's only a matter of time before computers will do everything a mind can do. Mental activity, they claim, is simply the carrying out of some well-defined sequence of operations (an algorithm). The difference between a brain, including all its higher activities and a thermostat is simply a degree of algorithmic complexity. Careers have been built on this assumption and its corollary: that when that algorithm is found, it will be runnable on a computer. In its most extreme form, writers like Hans Moravic (Mind Children) have used Turing's Principle of Equivalence to claim that as the specific hardware is unimportant, then software is all important. What is our identity? they ask. It's not the particular constellation of atoms at time x: we are replaced several times over through life. It's the pattern that's important. They claim that just as the words on a word processor can be saved on disk and reopened in the future exactly the same, so a person's individuality could be encoded in a similar form - indeed, the person's sense of awareness would travel with them into the disk. These claims are reliant on the presumption that the brain is a digital computer and that no specific physical phenomena are being called upon when one thinks that might demand the particular physical structure the brains have – presumptions that in the last few years have been seriously challenged. <h2>Now the Bad News</h2> Back in the 60s, the initial results had looked good: computers were programmed to do all sorts of smart things like play chess, engage in simple dialogue, solve algebraic problems and so on. Performances continually improved as machines got bigger, faster and used longer, more complex programs. These rule-based systems consisted of a database of knowledge, often extracted or engineered from a human expert, plus a management system to apply these rules. But many of the things researchers most wanted to do with ai - artificial vision, speech synthesis, automatic machine translation - proved almost completely impossible. In 1972, philosopher Hubert Dreyfus argued that the pattern of failure suggested computers were missing the vast treasure store of experience or inarticulate background knowledge that all humans have. MIT's ai guru Marvin Minsky came to appreciate this when he tried to build a block-stacking robot: it kept trying to stack the blocks from the top down, repeatedly releasing them in mid air. No one had told it about gravity. The experience, according to Minsky, changed his views of what 'intelligence' was. The secret of our success, he claimed, is not some spark of creativity but the simple common sense we pick up in our day-to-day existence. For computers to be intelligent the argument now went, they would have to be educated from the ground up. This is what Doug Lenat is trying to do in Austin, Texas. He's building a database of common sense knowledge. The Cyc (encyclopedia) Project aims to write down as much as possible of what every child knows, taking newspaper clippings and encyclopedia entries and asking 'what a computer would need to know to understand the piece?' For example, to understand The man drank the beer in the glass, it would not only have to know what beer and glass were (and distinguish this from the glass in a window), and that to be drunk out of, a glass must have its open end pointing up for the beer to stay in, and so on. Lenat estimates he will need a few million entries to approximate everyday knowledge (compared to an estimated 20,000 pieces of knowledge needed for an expert system to encapsulate everything a law student learns in three years). But work on vision in the late 70s and early 80s showed processing to be hugely intensive and taking much more time than any biological system. Despite a computer being a million times faster than a nerve, and clock frequencies being many times more rapid than any signal picked up by the brain, the tortoise still outran the hare. Constructing a relevant knowledge base is hard enough; accessing the contextually relevant bits gets harder as the database gets bigger. The strong ai researchers admit that more than a database is needed to think like a human. What is needed is what Minsky calls a Society of Mind. He illustrates what he means by looking at vision. What makes human vision so versatile is the many ways we have of interpreting a visual scene and the fact that we can use them all at once: to tell how far an object is away we may process its apparent size, brightness, the shadows it casts, its parallax motion and a dozenother visual clues. Although no method works all the time, at least one works. Programmes already exist that allow computers to use one - but only one - of them at a time. He speculates that we may be able to make an expert system, which uses them, all, but this is impossible until we have a program that allows each expert to access the body of knowledge of the others – and we don't know how humans do this yet. <h5>See for continuation of this text: <a href="/cwolk/view/4238" title="AI (2)">AI (2)</a></h5> Mediamatic Magazine Vol.7#1 Jules Marshall http://www.mediamatic.net/id/893 d d ARTICLE publication 1 http://www.mediamatic.net/id/5779 2009-05-06T15:29:57+02:00 AI !(2)

Back to Networks

Hard ai also came under attack from other directions in the 80s. Philosopher John Searle came up with his Chinese Room thought experiment. He cited examples of how simplified versions of the Turing test had already been passed, but denied that this indicates the possession of understanding, that appropriate symbol manipulation by recursive rules represents conscious intelligence. He imagined himself locked in a room, doing all the calculations himself on pen and paper to run the test-passing algorithm. Equipped with an instruction manual in English giving him all the information he needs to run the algorithm, problems are fed into the room in Chinese. He manipulates them according to his rulebook and posts the answer back, in Chinese. Does he understand Chinese? The consensus is that he doesn't (Scientific American, Jan 1990). Searle argued that the difference between brains (which can have a mind) and computers (which can't) lies in the material construction of each and this assumption led in the mid-80s to a resurgence of interest in artificial neural networks – computers modelled on the wiring of the brain. Neural nets had been around before until Minsky and Papert's book Perceptrons appeared to demolish their theoretical base, just as the us military was making hundreds of millions of dollars available for conventional expert system research. <h5>7 Besides the dreams of fighting robots and pilotless planes, their main goal was automated translation of Russian technical journals and radio broadcasts into English. With the end of the Cold War, expect to more and more talk about the ai Gap with Japan, which has taken on the role of stick - with - which - to - beat - dollars - out - of - Congress - with. In 1988, a leading neural net researcher for the government called neural nets more important than the atom bomb.</h5> But modification of the theory and new research into the brain's biology has convinced increasing numbers of researchers that neural nets are the way forward. Firstly, nervous systems are massively parallel. The retina, for example, processes its whole input of around 1 million distinct signals arriving at the optic nerve at once, not 16 or 32 bits at a time. Secondly, neurons are comparatively simple and analogue - i.e. their output varies with their input - not digital. Also, axons (the 'wire' part of a nerve cell) from one cell to another often have a complementary axon returning, which allows the brain to modulate its activity as a genuine dynamic system whose continuing behaviour is to some extent independent of the outside. Moreover, the brain wiring is immensely more complicated than that of a computer. An important difference is that logic gates have few in-outs, but nerve cells may have 80,000 excitory synaptic endings, which are not fixed, as in a computer, but changing all the time (there's evidence that changes in synaptic organisation can occur in a matter of seconds). This brain plasticity is probably responsible for laying down memories, so it can be seen as an essential feature. If the brain is a computer, it's a permanently changing one. Artificial neural nets turn out to be very good at things conventional computers are not, such as pattern recognition, learning, tolerance of faults, storing large amounts of information in a distributed fashion (thanks to its specific synaptic configuration strengths being shaped by past learning). Recent work by connectionists (as neural network fans are called) looks very promising. Carver Mead at Caltech has used vlsi (Very Large Scale Integration) chips to make an artificial cochlea and retina. These are not simulations, but real information-processing units responding in real time to real light and sound. The circuitry of the chips is based on known anatomy and physiology (of a cat) and output is dramatically similar to their biological counterparts. Terry Sejnowski developed a network called net-talk, linked it to a speech synthesiser so that its output could be listened to while it learned to read out loud. Starting by producing a formless noise for a few hours, the net eventually starts to babble like a baby, and overnight training improved its performance to 95% accuracy - far better than any conventional ai has managed. Intriguingly, it made the same mistakes (such as over-generalisation of rules) that children make when they learn to read. <h5>8 See Apprentices of Wonder – Inside the Neural Network Revolution, by William Allman for an excellent introduction to connectionism and more details of these and other important developments.</h5> Finally, Carnegie Mellon University's alvinn (Autonomous Land vehicle in a Neural Network) uses four Sun workstations to process incoming video signals and compares them to thousands of stored images. It knows to brake for a person, swerve round dog and keep off the pavement, and set a driverless speed record of 55 mph over a 21-mile trip. Its primary use, of course, is intended to be military, but it's also intended as some sort of 'ultimate cruise control' or robo-mailman. The drawbacks of neural nets are their slow and limited training, usually needing thousands of trial-and-error attempts. As for replicating human intelligence, neural nets' results are more like habits than insights. In spite of this, many critics of Hard ai accept that an artificial intelligence may be developed by exploiting what is learned about the nervous system, if this artificial mind has all the causal powers relevant to conscious intelligence – which brings us back to square one: more empirical studies are needed into the neuronal basis for memory, emotion and learning, plus how these interact with the motor system. <h2>Creativity</h2> Margaret Boden (The Creative Mind) challenges those who think ai can't teach us much about distinctly human processes like imagination and creativity. She too believes connectionism may give us the first significant ideas on how analogical thinking and generalisation occur in the mind. Her point is not that computers can be creative, but that there are aspects of human creativity, which we can begin to understand through the attempts to build computer models of creativity. This involves the exploration and transformation of conceptual spaces, and the notion and structure of a conceptual space - as well as its various possible transformations - can be described using computational concepts. Recently, several programs have been written which appear to create. Jazz Improviser which can, surprise, do jazz improvisations (well enough to probably pass the Turing Test); Lawyers for the estate of deceased American fiction writer Jacqueline Susann are suing the author of a program which writes original stories in her style; Aaron, a program (written by human artist Harold Cohen) consisting of a few hundred rules on artistic style has generated thousands of different drawings, some of them exhibited in the Tate and other galleries. Are they creative? No more than painting-by-numbers is, or following a knitting pattern. Regarding Aaron, Boden says since all the drawings could have been done before with the same program, it's more like an artist who's found a style and is sticking with it. A truly creative artistic program would be able to say I'm bored with this, I'll try drawing limb parts as straight-sided geometrical figures and see what happens. The program would need a way of reflecting on its own knowledge and would have to be able to construct, inspect and change various maps of its mind. The point is that by their failings, such programs teach us more about human creativity. Genuine creativity requires a break with or transformation of what has gone before, and therefore some conception not only of what has gone before, but of the outer context (technological, social political, etc) in which work is being created. The question of what intelligence and creativity is, is subsidiary to that of what is consciousness, since (unless researchers can show us otherwise), the former cannot be present without the latter. Physicist David Penrose (The Emperor's New Mind, oup) argues that there's an essentially non-algorithmic ingredient to consciousness. In direct opposition to our century's assumptions about the mind, it is the mysterious black box of the unconscious that may well be governed by (horrendously complex) algorithms, but it is the conscious, aware 'me' – what researchers have been formally studying as the rational and therefore translucent part of the brain – which is in fact the non-algorithmic, mysterious side. Penrose claims that given our brains are the result of natural selection, there must be some advantage to having a consciousness, and that is our ability to form instant judgements about fresh information (and determine its truth or beauty). Even mathematics, he points out, simply communicates those truths and to claim that the algorithm for consciousness would itself be conscious is nonsense. <h2>Synthetic or Applied Intelligence</h2> Whether computers could ever think like humans is still a rather rarefied question. Getting the last 10% of verisimilitude may be of only theoretical interest and likely to be mega-expensive. The biggest impact of ai is likely to be in the middle ground between the theoretical and conventional applications of computers with what has been termed applied intelligence. This uses case-based reasoning (as opposed to rule-based), which draws inferences from thousands of actual experiences. It is this pragmatic strand of ai which will have the most impact in the coming years, both economically and socially. <h5>9 Business Week magazine estimates that knowledge of how manufactured goods are built and work amounts to 70% of development costs, rising to 90% in the service industry. If such knowledge can be encapsulated in programs, that knowledge could be leveraged to the hilt, as they put it.</h5> It's an idea put forward by David Bolter in Turing's Man. Bolter – a classicist – argues that the computer, as a defining technology of our age, <h5>10 Being a technology which captures the imagination of poets and philosophers and in doing so helps redefine how an age sees itself and how we resolve the dichotomies of life/death etc, rather as the steam engine in the Industrial Revolution, the clock in the Renaissance and the potter's wheel in ancient Greece did.</h5> is changing the way we think about time, space, humanity, history – everything. To be a Turing's Man (the up-to-date phrase would be something akin to Tim Leary's cybernaut), you don't have to agree with the Hard ai position (or be a man), merely work intimately and for extended periods of time with a computer. In doing so, new metaphors and ways of seeing suggested by the computer become internalised. Thus modified and at ease with our new silicon partners, we will be free to enter a new age – the age of synthetic intelligence. What will this mean for our concepts of reality and illusion; of what it means to be alive or dead? to be conscious or immortal? These terms in previous ages had been pure abstractions whose existence was tied to matters of semiotics and definition. Despite their huge psychological resonance, such discussions had little practical relevance until we developed the technology to keep brain dead bodies alive, replace body parts with artificial prostheses and develop ai systems that simulate features of human consciousness. To answer, we have to look at ai as part of a western science which functions within a set of conceptual parameters that are largely set by corporate, governmental, military and scientific institutions. No formal means exists by which ordinary people can debate or even discuss the pros and cons of what is happening. We are suffering (or just waking up from) what Langdon Winner calls technological somnambulism, Our willing sleepwalk through the process for reconstituting the conditions of human existence. With each new generation of technology, we have fewer alternatives and become more immersed in technological consciousness. As Jerry Mander said in Whole Earth Review (Spring 1992): Living constantly inside an environment of our own invention, reacting solely to things we ourselves have created, we are essentially living inside our own minds. Where evolution was once an interactive process between humans and the natural, unmediated world, it is now an interaction between humans and our own artefacts. We are essentially co-evolving with ourselves in a weird kind of intraspecies incest. What kind of world are we building here? What qualities of social, moral and political life do we create in the process, and will this world be friendly to human sociability or not? Heidegger predicted in 1956 that we may finally find a synthesis of the apparently irreconcilable dialectic between mechanism and meaning by literature revealing technology's essence, its power to enframe the phenomenal universe within structures of utility: Because the essence of technology is nothing technological but rather is a way of viewing the world, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is on the one hand akin to the essence of technology and on the other fundamentally different from it – i.e., art. So far, most essential artistic reflection about ai and the other major epistemological/technological issues has come from cyberpunk fiction, film and criticism. <h5>11 William Gibson's Swarm trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive), introduces a number of identifiable ai types: the artificial (electronic) consciousness of the fused elements of cyberspace (Wintermute/Neuromancer) is a vast artificial consciousness similar to models suggested by connectionism: create a net big enough and fill it with enough information and consciousness will spontaneously develop as an emergent property of a dynamic system. The (steam driven) conscious ainarrator of The Difference Engine represents the same principle and illustrates the equivalence of Turing machine's principle. The idea of a digitised human intelligence maintaining its sense of identity after transferal to a computer is illustrated by the Finn character, while Case's human intelligence was augmented with discreet, intelligent programs such as that which enabled him to speak Spanish. Putting many of these programs together created the more sophisticated intelligent agent, like the hand held electronic amanuensis used by Komiko in Mona Lisa.A selection of ai in film includes the humans - create - machine - smarter - than - themselves (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968. Evil machine runs amok because, the 1984 sequel informs us, of the imperfection of its original program); computer links up to everything else and takes over the world (Colossus: The Forbin Project, 1970); expert system for controlling defence, fitted with voice recognition (War Games, 1983); neural network brain gradually learns to become more like a human (Terminator 2, 1991). The best popular tv handling the topics are probably Star Trek: the Next Generation and Red Dwarf.</h5> Partly because of the huge technological knowledge that is required to make sense of them, partly because it is science fiction's generic task to explore the cognitive mapping and poetic configuration of social relations as these are constituted by new technological modes of being-in-the-world (Vivian Sobchack). But the spectre haunting cyberpunk is the uneasy recognition that our primal urge to replicate our consciousness and physical being (into images, words, machine replicants, computer code) is not leading us closer to the dream of immortality, but is creating merely a pathetic parody, a simulacrum of our essences that is supplanting us, taking over our physical space and our roles without the drawbacks of human error, emotions, the passions that make life so exhilarating and frightening. Penrose makes a similar point: either artificial consciousness is impossible, or we will eventually discover what is responsible for consciousness, in which case we will probably try and replicate it. Such an artificial consciousness would have a tremendous advantage over us in being designed specifically for consciousness, and not simply the high point of some messy evolutionary past. Unencumbered by the useless bits of baggage we carry around (like emotions) and built whole rather than grown from a single cell, they might supersede humans. On the other hand, he says, maybe there's more to consciousness than that, and all the 'evolutionary luggage' is a prerequisite. On the fringes of neo-Darwinism, there is an increasing admission that there does in fact seem to be something too perfect about evolution for blind chance to be solely responsible, that there's an apparent 'groping' towards some future purpose (Penrose). The search for artificial intelligence will inevitably become synonymous with the search for humanity and God. If technology took them away from us, only an analysis of technology can give them back. Mediamatic Magazine Vol.7#1 Jules Marshall http://www.mediamatic.net/id/893 d d ARTICLE publication 1 http://www.mediamatic.net/id/5794 2012-09-21T11:35:39+02:00 A Network of Relationships

Having a computer on your desk and no modem is like using the Ferrari in your garage only to sit in and listen to the stereo, I once read somewhere. A pc connected to the phone network now has an overwhelming choice of roads to travel down, from the speed limit-less spun glass Autobahns that span continents, to the short hop Local Area Networks (lans) used by colleagues for office gossip.

The ultimate aim of an information-based society is to enable any person to find the answer to any answerable problem. Jerry Pournele By modulating and demodulating digital data into- and back from the analogue signals of the phone system, the modem acts like an electronic doorman to a parallel universe of clubs, services, arenas and knowledge banks that anyone and everyone can use for entertainment, communication, gainful employment, subversion, sexual gratification, plain old curiosity and a thousand other activities. Whether it's access to a live, global press conference, back issues of the Washington Post, or psychoanalytic abstracts you're after, or swapping multimedia artworks, nifty new shareware programs, snippets of new hacker lore or the latest stock quotations, the doorman always remembers your face, rarely asks for a tip and never refuses you entry for wearing sneakers. <h2>Network Roots</h2> It wasn't until the advent of direct access storage devices in the mid-60s that the techniques behind this wealth of activities - text manipulation and on-line (interactive) operation - became practical. Before that, electronic data was stored on tape and access to it was sequential (and therefore slow) only. From simple message-passing utilities developed the now-familiar electronic e(lectronic)-mail. In 1971, the Nixon administration's wage and price freeze generated a sudden demand for communications and coordination among the private sector, labour groups and government policy makers, and the Office of Emergency Preparedness commissioned Dr. Murray Turoff to develop emisari (Emergency Management Information and Reference System), a computer-based version of the voice conference call, and the prototype computer conference system (Rappaport, Computer Mediated Communications, Wiley 1991). The following year, the fact that much work in government and academia was already being generated electronically, coupled with the development of larger storage devices and advances in techniques for searching for text strings, allowed the first information services to start up. By 1989 there were 4,000 in the us alone, devoted to every subject under the electronic sun, from an exhaustive list of Pancake Recipes Database, to data from the last us census. In 1978, file exchange by the first modems was possible and all the key ingredients for an electronic community were in place. Today, computer conferencing, bulletin boards and information retrieval systems together form a global web of interconnecting technology. This web is not yet integrated in any significant way, but gateways between centralized conference and e-mail systems, and global networks such as Usenet, mci mail and Sprint are growing. From these humble, nerdy roots, with a little help from a crooked us president, the global telecommunications network has become the most complex human creation ever and the arena for an increasingly dominant share of economic and social activity. We're starting to call it Cyberspace, a developing dimension of electronically amplified human consciousness; the ultimate medium. As John Barlow said recently: If you don't believe Cyberspace exists already, where do you think most of your money spends most of its time? <h2>Network Explosion</h2> If the 1970s were a decade of experimentation and model formation, the 80s witnessed an explosion in both systems and user numbers, as well as databases and the information in them. The trend to interconnection began and is gathering pace as the 90s progress. The local lans are linking up with the more widely dispersed Wide Area Networks (wans), connecting to national and international networks (often through electronic or virtual gateways) which are themselves coalescing into meta-nets. Although it is too soon to speak of The Network, very soon will be. Only then will we really start to see what it - or should it be we-is/are really capable of. There's big money being put on the table to make sure it happens. During the next decade, estimates Northern Business Information, more money will be spent on phone equipment than has been spent since the invention of the phone in 1876. If I wasn&#146;t averse to their use, I'd have used an exclamation point there. Sales are expected to nearly double from $101.6 billion in 1991 to $192 billion by 2000. This kind of money does not slosh around the global economy without leaving some pretty major change in its wake. If you read the right magazines, you can be forgiven for believing that what the world needs now is billions of dollars of new glass fibre lines &#150; Highways for the Mind, as they&#146;ve been dubbed by those pushing the vision. Available bandwidth (the measure of how much data can be squirted down the line in a given time, measured in kilo- or mega-bits-per-second) is expanding all the time. So-called t1 (1.5 mbps) trunk lines are common, t3 (44 mbps) are already available and by the end of the decade, 100&#150;500 mbps will be common, while gigabit-per-second and faster technology has already been demonstrated by researchers. Each increase in bandwidth expands the uses of the network, and the media that can be used on it. In 1975, when messages were passed from one machine to another, round trip delays in electronic text communications of several days were not uncommon. As network speeds have grown, so the media we can use on them have expanded from text to graphics to Voicemail to video and eventually to hdtv images - all further extend the power of the phone line. The plain vanilla e-mail medium is splitting into a whole tutti-frutti of electronic media. <h2>Smarter is Faster</h2> However, telling us we need Highways for the Mind now (and subscribers and/or government should pay for it) is disingenuous, to say the least. For one, we're going to get them anyway through natural upgrading. Glass fibre is cheaper and easier to install and maintain than the old copper wires. Secondly, it disregards the equally important role of the intelligence of the communications terminal (computer plus modem) being used. Smarter machines can use smarter compression techniques and better interfaces with the network, more intelligent modems can send and receive data quicker, irrespective of the network speed. Nicholas Negroponte, director of MIT's Media Lab, uses a &#145;wink&#146; metaphor to explain why bandwidth is an over-rated necessity (Scientific American, September 1991). A wink (1 bit) across the dinner table to a friend may convey an enormous amount of information - say, 100,000 bits or a compression rate of 100,000 to one. The transmitter and receiver share a common pool of knowledge and experience and they have the intelligence to put the wink in context. We cannot look at bandwidth at the expense of the intelligence of its terminals (which itself is growing at a phenomenal rate, as is the speed/price ratio of modems, and compression technology). We can already send video signals down the old t1 wires. Both channel and computing capacity used imaginatively will lead to useful services and products in the future, not one. It seems possible, even likely, that this combination will lead to the demise of text-based communication, as vr goggles, and multimedia video images, etc. become cost effective. Far more significant are the social barriers to cyber-paradise. As the range of services and options available increase, so training time and costs to use an expanded data network grow too, demanding significant commitment from employers, and effort from users to master complicated interfaces and sophisticated search techniques. Both have been overestimated by network architects, to whom networking was both easy and its benefits obvious. At the same time, by extending the power of the desktop to reach any corner of a corporation (in the sense of 'group of collaborating humans'), and beyond, the 'risk' that traditional lines of corporate communications are bypassed is increased. Equally importantly, the very construction and functioning of most electronic media ensure messages sent leave an indelible audit trail as they move around the network. The immediate availability of such records is a potential political problem and may be the primary reason for the resistance to this form of communication, claims Rappaport. He illustrates the point with an episode from the recent past. When the Exxon Valdez hit Prince William Sound in 1989, communications between Exxon HQ in New York, the us Coast Guard and Alaska were conducted through one fax machine (all the public phones were jammed with calls). Exxon set up an emergency office in Houston and asked Notepad International Inc to submit a proposal for facilitating communications (this a week after the spill). Notepad's proposal emphasised not only the comms. capabilities but the auditability of the electronic trail. Exxon's reply was a thanks, but no thanks. According to Notepad, the system could have been up and running in hours. About three months later, an Exxon employee claimed to have 'accidentally destroye' a tape containing all records of communications about the crisis. Communications software and potential revelation of culpability go hand in hand. The threat to management comes from this unquestionable documentation of the negative (although records will also reveal who made good moves and suggestions too). Can the rising call for public accountability of governments and corporations be stemmed much longer? Rappaport fears that managers, who have achieved their status largely on verbal skills (and the ability to cover their asses, claim credit while avoiding blame, etc) fear alteration of the communications landscape towards text skills. This very fact may prevent text conferencing from ever achieving a significant impact on the American corporate scene, says Rappaport. The legal and ethical questions surrounding our march into cyberspace also threaten to disrupt a smooth transition to this new era in human communication. As the network and its human creators are corkscrewed together in increasingly committed symbiosis, so the flaws in our half of the partnership become intensified. The primary symptoms are an increasingly urgent need to answer questions such as who owns the knowledge on the network, how do we ensure equitable access to it and how do we protect our privacy and the security of our data? Beneath these are deeper questions such as what is wealth and creativity for? What do we mean by equitable? How do we address the grievances of potential electronic terrorists? What does it mean to be human? These are questions which have to - maybe more importantly, can- be attended to synchronously with the development and extension of our new symbiotic partner. <h2>Cosmic Networks</h2> Peter Russell (The White Hole in Time) approaches this issue by backtracking a few tens of billions of years to get the wider angle. Throughout the evolution of the cosmos, says Russell, the amount and speed of information (change) has been growing through positive feedback as creativity begets more creativity. The more things that exist, the greater the chance of more existing. The evolution of matter took around 10 billion years after the Big Bang to occur. Once complex chemicals had allowed the evolution of life, the rate of change increased. The evolution of sex whipped things up a bit more, and so did the evolution of multicellularity. This in turn enabled nervous systems and brains to come onto the scene, again speeding up the rate at which change occurred. The human brain &#150; the most complex structure yet observed in the universe &#150; allowed the evolution of language, as significant as the evolution of sex. We no longer had to build up all our experience from scratch but could pass it on across generations and the meme (idea) began its journey to replace the gene as the currency of human evolution. We began to see order in the universe, ask questions &#150; science was born, along with philosophy and theology. Time was extended beyond the &#145;eternal now&#146; into past and future as we became conscious that we were conscious, an eye on the universe which through us was able to observe itself. Each new step forward quickened the pace at which change could occur, like a huge spiral whose first revolution took 10 billion years, it tightened in on itself as the spiral&#146;s arms got smaller and smaller. Our opposable thumbs also allowed the development of tools and technology, giving us immense power to shape the environment. Agriculture, fire, the wheel &#150; all increased our leverage, extending life&#146;s ability to collect, process and store information to the stage where we needed electronic brains (computers) to sort through it, again tightening the spiral with positive feedback. The spiral is now so tight, its turns now take just years, soon months. How long can it go on? The headlong rush has created unparalleled opportunities for disaster, Russell claims as result of our detachment from nature. Our best, if not only chance of making it through to the end of the spiral (to God knows what&#146;s is in store) is to explore the last domain, the inner self. Russell calls for a Manhattan Project of the Mind to develop technologies for the management and understanding of the mind. <h2>De-bugging our Human Software</h2> Still prone to the greed, paranoia and aggression of our ancestors, Mankind is like a cancer or a viral program that keeps us growing uncontrolled at the expense of the organism (Earth). Although greed, paranoia and aggression had their role to play in the development and success of humans, today they are not just inconveniences but lethal bugs in the software of the mind, rather than the hardware of the body. Russell&#146;s Manhattan Project of the Mind would be a project to de-bug our software. Such a project would be the largest and most important in our history. The only way it could be achieved is through the networks. Only the networks have the speed, reach, storage capacities and interconnectedness necessary to handle the flow and exchange of information necessary. The psychotherapeutic and imaginative uses of a fully-functioning cyberspace have been widely discussed, but the promise of group collaboration across and between academic disciplines, the electronic audit trail mentioned, on-line political activism and fundraising, all combine to make cyberspace the key to personal, societal and global survival. But to get there, one of the biggest hurdles we face is the question of security, from cybervandalism, government and commercial intrusion of privacy, blackmail, terrorism and so on. The technology for 100% security already exists, but the us government (the de facto standards setter in computing thanks to its huge power of patronage) consider the main techniques military critical technology and subject to export controls. They even keep trying to insert a right to tap amendment to the various communications bills that come before Congress, like a bunch of old men hanging on to their childhood security blanket while the world transmutes around them. Until the question of security is answered to the public&#146;s satisfaction, the potential of cyberspace will remain neutered. What no politician I&#146;ve ever heard appreciate is that the shift to a networked society necessitates a move to a new system of social control based on fairness, tolerance, mutual need and diversity rather than fear, coercion and monopolisation of material and geographic resources. In the meantime, the fbi has a growing role call of heavy-handed and inappropriate action against electronic information users and service providers. From within the cosy, congenitally tolerant and mutual society of Holland, it is easy to downplay the problems of privacy and censorship. The Dutch Grondwet (Constitution) guarantees that telecoms carriers have no say over the information carried, and the government takes it seriously. Yet even here, the tram ticket inspectors are already carrying cd-rom players loaded with a complete list of names and addresses of Amsterdam residents (to check up on fare dodgers giving wrong addresses). There are opportunities for abuse of electronic data we are only beginning to dream about. The European Community is currently tendering for suppliers to build the European Nervous System, a high-speed data highway similar to that proposed by the us National Research and Education Network. This is designed to link up taxation, customs, police and emergency services Europe-wide. Barely a peep from the non-specialist European media about it. Being British, I have more time for the fears of the likes of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff). Britain has over 100 laws restricting access to information. The Thatcher years were notable for the number and range of cases brought against journalists, civil servants and members of the public who revealed embarrassing details of government shenanigans. mi5, the primary internal security force, has just moved to a spanking new, state-of-the-art headquarters in London, said to be filled to the rafters with electronic surveillance and counter surveillance (and counter-counter surveillance for all I know) equipment. We need organisations that care about and lobby for the right legal and technical cyberspace. For the record, the eff has published a set of principles of network access. <h5>1. Establish an open platform for information services by speedy deployment of personal isdn nation-wide (I would change this to worldwide. Even the most liberal minds keep clinging on to the idea of national competitiveness. You can&#146;t have half a cyberspace.)</h5> <h5>2. Ensure competition in local exchange services</h5> <h5>3. Promote First Amendment free expression by reaffirming the principles of common carriage</h5> <h5>4. Foster innovations that make networks and information services easier to use</h5> <h5>5. Protect personal privacy</h5> <h5>6. Preserve and enhance equitable access to communications media.</h5> There are many other areas of legality that need ironing out as well, such as who owns the text posted to a bulletin board? Compuserve claims &#145;compilation copyright&#146;, while leaving individual texts under ownership of their authors. What rights of editing do sysops have? What is an author? The problems of legal and political barriers will be harder to solve than the technical. Says Rappaport: Universal access is unlikely before a world government is in place. The price of access to the network is still based on the (inflexible and expensive, especially in Europe) phone billing system. With an isdn network, connectionless service is possible, private-public network differences disappear, the trunk-and-branch topology disappears, as does the concept of a network backbone, as any computer can establish identical connections to every other node as required. Self-routing datapackets whiz through the net making and braking connections in microseconds. The network itself becomes a huge processor with its own high-speed storage, dynamically moving, replicating, modifying data and adding or deleting control or accounting information as it passes from connection to connection. From the view of the network there are no users or circuits per se, only self routing, variable packets of data. Prices should reflect this, perhaps by charging for the number of nodes visited rather than amount of time logged on or the distance travelled. <h2>A Network for Who?</h2> The benefits of using a network increase the more people are using it. Companies have consistently overestimated the motivation of the mass market to use information services. The problem is that the more there is to watch, the less the untrained user feels inclined to spend time getting to know their way around. The problem of the personal commitment needed to use the services has not been tackled. Motivation was taken for granted by software authors. Games, telerotica or a Rupert Murdoch-like entrepreneur (Play Cyber-Bingo and win a Ford Fiesta or later, Bonk Sam Fox in Cyberspace!) may be the best bets to bump-start a mass market. Office gossip and politics are great motivators, but it is just this sort of use that many managers have been keen to stamp out, for reasons mentioned earlier. Nor should discussions be confined to getting the affluent North alone on-line. In fact, with their traditions of oral storytelling, shamanism and mystic paths to enlightenment, the &#145;developing&#146; nations have a major role to play in the building of cyberspace. Where on-line technology has been put in the hands of indigenous populations, their reactions have been to show an acceptance and comfort using it that would shame many a grizzled old exec. Dave Hughes, a Colorado techno-pioneer, gave a workshop in using the combined text/graphics code naplps to a group of native American artists last year, and found a people who could share his vision and then expand it (High Performance, Spring 1992). In the hands of the Sioux, Crow, Navajo and Assiniboine artists, naplps had become an algorithm with soul. With it they created bold colourful graphics and sent them to each other down the phone line and stored them in a virtual library. The works recreated stories sketched out in the sand by grandfathers, tales of shamanic flight. Virtual reality had been discovered by indigenous peoples aeons ago. At a time when Future Shock is becoming a permanent state of mind and philosophers grimly ponder how the proliferation of new technology will affect our lives, the Indians are excited by the prospect of reintegrating the cultural values of their ancestors, concluded the article. It seems we could all use a little reintegration around here. After dividing and differentiating knowledge for hundreds of years &#150; with, let&#146;s not forget, some great achievements &#150; it seems that to go any further it&#146;s imperative we stand back and re-integrate it to give a more encompassing and meaningful model of nature that takes into account the whole of human experience. Such a broad-brush vision painted in cyberspace is not only desirable, it&#146;s crucial. Mediamatic Magazine Vol.7#1 Jules Marshall http://www.mediamatic.net/id/893 d d ARTICLE publication 1