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tecture regarding the German Museum of History in Berlin (DHM) involved a building
where real time of other museums or historically significant sites would be received,
made visible, or stored. The net of Eurovision, news services, airlines, cable connections,
telephone and telefax have long provided a different kind of cartography of the real,
drawn up a different kind of museography. And so this museum proposal for the DHM includes
a terminal, an electronic ramp, an ISDN connection, the DATA BANK telecommunication
beyond the black box of the classical part of the exhibition, and the "remote transmission
of holograms" 45 . Looking into the distance, once idealistically called "imagination",
is now literally called: television. The museum no longer is the place of destination,
the parcel office for historical or aesthetic objects, but becomes the relay of immaterial
impulses which have long determined the perception of our present. And thus the
monitor takes the place of the museum exhibition.
"What is fundamentally new is that only the information is travelling; it needs to
be prepared for dispatch. The images need a place to arrive in after transmission, where
they can light up and be seen and (perhaps) understood. So it is about networks in
which to circulate the information: that part of the building, the station, the museum, the
warehouse, etc, where the connection to the 'intelligent net' is made, the ISDN socket." 46
In the electronic musee imaginaire, the monitor surface takes the place of the museum
space (with the loss of three-dimensionality, until Cyberspace functions in a truly immersive
way): "The Interface, the 'transmitting' agent consisting of luminous dots on a thin
skin, is today's monumental medium, and perhaps also that of the museum - in an age
which perceives [...] movement at speed as an overriding value." 47
Speed and disappearance: So far, it had been the function of the museum to establish
the significance of historical objects by placing them on pedestals and investing
them with significance. This monumental way of giving meaning has long been undermined
by the fleetingness of the images where history, once again in keeping with Walter
Benjamin's dictum, now quite literally flits past: "The past can only be captured in pictures
that flash up for an instant at the moment of recognition, never to be seen again." 48
As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari pointed out in Anti-Ödipus, the stability of traditional
writing disappears in the electronic process, the transformation into luminous
dots on the monitor. Thus, chronography is turned into light. What happens in this lighting
(Lichtung) - to speak with Heidegger - demonstrandum est. Even where a photograph
guarantees reality, its inventor Henry Fox Talbot saw a "word of light" - light effects
that enter the image carrier as graphemes and are developed later. Which bears out
forcefully what was manifest in the dispute about the authenticity of Auguste Rodin's
casts of negatives for The Gates of Hell: multiple copies without an original. Benjamin's
essay on art reminds us that authenticity becomes an empty phrase where duplication is
inherent in a technological medium: "for instance, it is possible to produce a wealth of
copies from a photographic plate, so the question of the true print is meaningless." 49 The
current culture about the photographic vintage print, by contrast, is seeking the re-entry
of the concept of the original by defining it as the print that is "almost concurrent with
the aesthetic moment" - which would make authenticity "a function of the history of
technology" the past future of the original (and its apparent re-entry in digital space)5o.
Today, the time difference between recording, latent storage and development is reduced
to the speed of light, to luciferic (or better: luci- rather than metaphoric) real time.
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