"... ELSE LOOP FOREVER". THE UNTIMELINESS OF MEDIA In ...

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individual laws of media. While movies represent closed blocks oflength, television developed the weekly series and its repetition.With hypertextual media (computer games, and the World Wide Web),non-temporal modes of beginning and end become aquainted:hypertime. The point and moment to step in is almost arbitrary.Expressed in the mathematical theory of graphs, an adventurecomputergame is defined by a beginning and an ending (almost„Homeric narrating“, according to Erich Auerbach): everythingwhich happens between point a and point b in binary spacepartitioning.While human memory remembers the same response to the same signal,a counting function counts it different each time . This is non-narrative time in action, replacingraconter (in French) by conter, disrupturing narrative (German"Er/zählung"). For the first time, in the so-called digital agehistoriography does not take place on the symbolical level of thephonetic alphabet exclusively, but on the level of electronicallyembodied alpha-numerics. <strong>In</strong> binary form the year 2000, f. e.,appears as numerical string „11111010000“, reminding us not to beseduces by narrative suggestion, but to calculate in discretestates, with the consequence not to tell events intransitively butto count them transitively, quantizing data. The media theoristLev Manovich (in a chapter of his book The Language of New Media)calls this the aesthetics of data banks, corresponding with adata-archaeological information ascetitics. Beginning and end, incomputing media, are not structured by dramatical structures anymore, but dramaturgische Struktur, but by the (equally complex)logic of count down.The "Y2K problem" and the non-sense of ending<strong>In</strong> spring 2009, I received per e-mail a strange message sent fromthe computing service of my university (Humboldt University,Berlin): The storage capacity of my account was close to overloadand memory capacity will expire soon. Having passed the firstmoment of astonishment, my assistant (Felix Pfeifer) pointed atthe date indicated for this temporal limit: "1.1.1970" - thebeginning of "system time" in IBM computers. This apparent jokenevertheless is indexical for the being-to-death of computingtime.Almost ten years ago, a computational problem (both in ArnoBorst's sense of medieval computus as time-counting and in thesense of mechanized data processing) almost led to a collectivepanic for the so-called post-industrial information society: themillenium bug. The so-called "millenium bug" reminded ourinformation society of its very temporal being-to-death. There isa close connection between the temporal, destinational logic of
narrative texts and apocalyptic expectations. Most computers sofar had been programmed in such a way that the step into the 21stcentury - without laborious intervention - meant a jump back intime, so the 1st January 2000 was indicated as the 1st January1900. The reason for this lied hidden deep within the operatingsystem - a media-archeological deep time. The jump from 1999 to2000 (in chronological time) as a jumping back to 1900 (incomputational time) was not biased by philosophical musing on theende of history any more, but has been triggered by integratedcircuits. The computer-temporal bomb namend the Y2K problemreminded the post-historical society drastically that its temporalorder is no more a function of philosophy of history but of datastorage economy, since in the early years of digital computingmemory space had been the most precious commodity. Thus the Y2Kproblemturned out to be a function of the technomathematialarchive to which the philosophical notion of "beginning" and "end"is alien. The millenium-bug thus turned out to be (like allkatastrophies) a chance as well: the liberation from the culturalsupremacy of narrative. With the "millenium bug", the mightycultural engineering of calendar time turned out to be no more thepriviledge of the church (like in medieval times) or of learnedsocieties (like in the modern age). Calculating time turned out tobe a technical historicity from now on - a temporality to whichhuman concepts of time are increasingly subjected .The idea of historical time, according to Vilém Flusser, is animplication of alphabetic writing which reduced themultidimensionality of architecture and images to linear,sequential lines. According to Marshall McLuhan, the invention ofthe printing press, i. e. the mechanized form of alphabeticwriting as a further escalation, gave rise not only to perspectivein Renaissance painting, but as well "print produced the idea of apast in distant perspective" which isdirectional, end-orientated time. Historical consciousness, readthis way, is the direct function of a specific media technology.The loss of historical consciousness as reference for theselection of information in combination with the increasingtechnological manipulation of time leads of the simple storage ofall incoming data - starting with the E-mails on almost everyprivate computer desk. The end of history is the future of thearchive, a kind of post-historical condition not to thing inlinearities any more, but to calculate with discreet states.Storage, according to the mathematical theory of communicationengineering, is the pre-condition for all transfer.The moment when facts are disseminated by news media, they gain akind of kinetic energy which divorce them from their originalcontext and throw them into hyperspace where they loose anypointed direction, de-referentialized, with no more teleology(which is the condition for the discourse of history as sensedrivennarrative). When events are not only registered but as wellwritten (historio-)graphically with no more sense of ending, what
Page 6 and 7: But wait a minute, have you noticed
Page 8 and 9: perception of a melody takes place
Page 12 and 13: emains in the end are listings - a
Page 14 and 15: techniques of synchronisation meet
Page 16 and 17: trajectory is the final hit of the
Page 18: Feedback, Control, and Computing be

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