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gic mirror' and 'window on the world' refer to the transparency of the glass surface of the
receiver" 56 . "Actually, the whole edifice is just a display cabinet", it says in an architectural
critique of the glass-dominated Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz, Berlin. It is notable
what happened within this space: One part of the building (the Kaisersaal) of the former
Hotel Esplanade, which was situated on the company's property and a listed building,
was moved by 70 meters at great expense in order to make room for a road, and integrated
into one of the new wings. Still original, this artefact has now turned into a quotation,
into a copy of itself: and consequently, the wording for this hybrid in the space
between original and copy is Architekturmuseum. 57
Indices of the Real
For the first time, optical media since photography make it possible to record the real of
light. In analogue photography, it is the index, i.e. the unique pointer to something real,
that authorises the medium. "In contrast to symbols, indices produce their significance
on the basis of a physical relationship with their referents." 58 In that sense, the video
magnetic tape is equally indexical (if not iconic, since it entertains no visual similarity to
its model), the store of a real impulse track or "marking". In turn, the electronic video
image on the monitor is - like the television image - in the tradition of Kepler's eye
image theory, since it is not an image-producing process, but scans real impulses:
The pictura produced by light in the eye entirely according to geometrical laws [...]
is on the one hand, via the incoming rays [...] clearly related to the pictured subject in the
exterior world, its object of reference, on the other hand it acquires at the same time an
independent existence of its own. 59
With the video disk, it is crucial for digitally encoded image and sound information
is scanned by the laser beam without loss, also with regard to time; "a linear time structure
no longer exists" 60 . On this level, therefore, applies - in variation - Roland Barthes'
notion of the uncoded message of the photographic image: "that the relationship of significant
and significate is, as it were, a tautology: [...] not a transformation (which an encoding
could be); [...] one is faced with the paradox ... of a message without a code." 61
While the physical nature of the natural world is still expressed in the photochemical
emulsion, giving the photographic imprint its documentary, indexical status, this mark is
ephemeral in technological images. Because "photographs are produced under conditions
that force them physically to correspond point by point to the original," - as stressed
by Flusser's photo theory - they belong to the sign class of indices "which are signs
on the basis of their physical connection" 62 - and hence are not identical with the icon
whose effect derives from the similarity of the picture, not necessarily from its material
connection.
An Index is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really
affected by that Object. It cannot, therefore, be a Quality, because qualities are whatever
they are independently of anything else. In so far as the Index is affected by the
Object, it necessarily has some Qualities in common with the Object, and it is in respect
to these that it refers to the Object.
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