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The Finiteness of
residency
vorspiel
Algorithms
Friedrich Kittler's keynote from transmediale
2007, transcribed and translated for the first time,
09.11.2017

Friedrich Kittler at transmediale.07 unfinish!

What is the relation between computational

algorithms and creative production? Can the
second be arrived at through use of the first?
Is there historical specificity to their
relationship due to recent advances in
technology, or are there age-old connections
between mathematical constraints and
creative questioning of the universe?

In 2007 the eminent media theorist Friedrich

Kittler (19432011) worked through these
questions (and many others) in a lecture at
transmediale. The lecture and following
conversation, moderated by informatics
professor Wolfgang Coy, is publicly presented
as text and translated from the original
German for the first time here.

Kittler took the premise of that years festival

title, unfinish, to carve an arc through several
of the topics central to his theoretical work
throughout his life on indeterminacy and
finitenessboth as mathematical concerns
and as fundamental philosophical matters.
While he speaks on contemporary media art,
he also emphasizes that algorithmic
constraints when it comes to artistic
production are nothing new: I believe that
nothing in this worldnot even the invention
of media and computer artcan alter the task
of art, which is to reveal the eternal in the
finite.

transmediale 2007 | Finiteness of Algorithms by Friedrich Kittler

Wolfgang Coy
Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Im glad to
see so many have made it here and that Friedrich
Kittler is here. We can start. My name is
Wolfgang Coy. Im a professor of Informatics at
Humboldt University. Friedrich and I are both at
the Helmholtz-Zentrum fr Kulturtechnik, and Id
like to say a few words about our guest before he
starts his lecture, even though it is hardly
necessary in Berlin. Perhaps just a couple of
things anyway.

Friedrich Kittler studied German, Romance

Languages, and Philosophy at the Albert Ludwigs
University of Freiburg from 1963 to 1972. He
received a doctorate in literature from there in
1996.

Friedrich Kittler
1976, I think.

Wolfgang Coy
1976? Did I say 1996? That would be a
performance boost, wouldnt it? Work per unit of
time would be substantially more. No, in 1976, of
course. He then spent ten leisurely years there as
an assistant and in 1984 earned his Habilitation
that was still important thenand then, in 1987
he took the logical next step of accepting a
professorship in Bochum at Ruhr University, an
architectural highlight of the university
landscape. We have been fortunate enough to
have him at Humboldt since 1993, where he
holds the chair of Media Aesthetics and History. I
believe it is almost a direct lineage from Hegels
chair.

Wolfgang Coy
With about 150 academic publications, our guest
is very, very prolific. I want to mention just a few
of the titles that youll know: Discourse Networks
(1985) and Gramophone Film Typewriter (1986),
which is probably the best-known work by title. In
2000, an introduction to philosophy that I
personally really love, Cultural History of Cultural
Studies, and now, in 2005, the first volume of
Music and Mathematics with the subtitle Hellas:
Aphrodite, of which there are still most likely four
volumes to comebut who knows how many
therell be, it could be seven, I dont think its
been decided yet. He has co-authored many
books, and written many, many essays; from the
published works Ill only mention Computer as
Medium from Fink Verlag, Turing, the non-
mathematical writings, I think the subtitle was
writings about the Turing machine and thoughts
about the computer. And a very famous work,
The Expulsion of the Spirit from the Humanities, a
work that has not succeeded, so to speak. That
demand has unfortunately not really been met,
but Friedrichs great achievement is surely that,
in many ways, he reoriented the humanities and
reopened the bridge to other sciences. The
unfortunate closure of that bridge, which came
from [Wilhelm] Dilthey and our university as well,
and had disastrous effects, has been somewhat
overcome. Looking more closely, you sometimes
have to ask whether just the names have been
switched, but for many people, doors have
opened to make other work possible. Today it
can be seen that the humanities comprise more
than just spirit.

He has taken on a whole host of internal

academic responsibilities. He was head of the
DFG Research Group from 1986 to 1990, a
geographically dispersed group of literature and
media analystsnot only Kassel people, but
anchored in Kassel. He co-founded the
Helmholtz-Zentrums fr Kulturtechnik in 2001
where he is also deputy director. In 1993, he was
awarded the ZKM media art prize. Hes done
residencies in Californiain Berkeley, Stanford
and Santa Barbara. In 1996, he tapped into the
East Coast where he was a distance caller at
Yale, and in 1997 a distinguished visiting
professor at Columbia in New York. And I
probably should say: the writers perceptible in his
work time and again are Martin Heidegger,
Thomas Pynchon, Homer, and Andreas Stiller.
Friedrich, over to you.

Friedrich Kittler
A very good evening, ladies and gentlemen,
sweet Ladies, dear Gentlemen, but Ill speak
German. Thank you, Wolfgang Coy for the lovely
introduction and, above all, for connecting the
last two names, Homer and Andreas SchillerI
had to switch gears for a moment until I realized
that Andreas Stiller is, of course, the founding
editor of ct at Heise Verlag in Hannover.

With thanks to transmediale I am happy to

comply with the request to talk about the
finiteness of algorithms. It is difficult, so whether
it is successful or not, we shall see in the
discussion, which could well be longer than the
lecture.

Finiteness I will begin with finiteness and move

on to algorithms and try, in the end, in the
second part, to say something about algorithms
and artworks.

Concerning finiteness, perhaps it would be best

to start with a poem that Jorge Luis Borges says
he found, by a ninth-century Arabic poet. The
poem reads: Others died, but it happened in the
past, the season (as all men know) most
favorable for death. Is it possible that I, subject of
Yaqub Al Mansur, must die as roses had to die
and Aristotle?

So, we know from the time we are about ten

years old that we are finite beings and that life is
a finite process,
a being-towards-death as its called in Being
and Time. Or, conversely, whether the universe in
which we live and its processes, in which we are
included, is itself a finite or an infinite process,
has proven, so far, to be incalculable, and the
hypotheses vacillate between a finite, sine-
shaped universe and an infinite, hyperbolic sine-
shaped universe.

It has been so since time immemorial, but only

for the last 50 or 60 years have we lived in a
world where we set up high-tech processes by
programming computers. These processes are,
of course, algorithms, which I will explain next.
Explanation is necessary because these
algorithmic processes have a tendencylike
nature in Heraclitusto be hidden.

In car industry circles, you hear that drivers of

German luxury cars are accompanied by
something like 200 invisible computers that are
calculating and accelerating and braking and
sensing. Embedded controllers sounds like the
embedded reporters of the Iraq War, that is, they
must be unnoticed or they will not be successful.

Now, finiteness isat least hopefullywhat

separates algorithms from mathematics in
general. The word algorithm is a made-up Latin
word that sounds Greek. In fact, its not even
Latin, but a Latin corruption of the name
Muammad ibn Ms al-Khwrizma
mathematician who, despite his Arabic-sounding
name, was not Arabic. He was born around 8131
in an oasis region of the (former) Aral Sea in
todays Uzbekistan called Khwarezm, or at that
time, Chorasmia, from which the name al-
Khwrizm came.
Statue of al-Khwrizm in Chiwa, Uzbekistan. (Photo: pixabay. All
other images from Wikimedia commons)

Statue of al-Khwrizm in Chiwa, Uzbekistan. (Photo: pixabay. All

other images from Wikimedia commons)

His writings were so influentialor one of his

works wasbecause it demonstrated the
simplest arithmetic rules with the decimal number
system, which had been imported from India to
Arabia and later to Europe. How to add, how to
subtract, and so on. This work was transliterated
or translated into Latin a number of times in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the most
influential was surely via Fibonacci and his book
Liber Abaci from 1202. But the term algorithm
was already in use in earlier, anonymous Latin
translations, one of which begins with the
memorable words: Dixit Algoritmi: laudes deo
rectori nostro Algoritmi has spoken: praise
be to God, our Lord. And that is actually the
deepest question transmediale posed to me: Is
God necessary for mathematics and algorithms
or not? We cant answer that. Descartes, as we
know, feared a God who could be so deceptive
as to tell him that two plus three do not equal
five. Therefore, cogito ergo sum.

It seems to me that Leibniz introduced the

modern concept of algorithms, something that,
dubiously, the most authoritative history book of
algorithms doubts. In 1684, Leibniz formally
described the basic rules of calculus, differential
calculus, and called it an algorithm instead of
what Sir Isaac Newton had previously called it, a
natural-philosophical pseudo explanation of
derivation rules. And Leibniz formalized concept
seems to be the one that is now significant inif
Wolfgang Coy doesnt shake his head
informatics. Or perhaps better to call it
computing, as you said just before, or even
computer science.

Now, for those whod like a bit more precision,

Im going to briefly outline what is required of an
algorithm and why it is required. The first basic
characteristic is determinacy. With identical
starting conditions, every application of an
algorithm delivers the same output. There are, of
course, exceptions. For example, we can only
stochastically model the weather for the next fifty
yearsor model climate change, like you see in
all the papers these daysnot deterministically.

The second characteristic: determinism. For

every step at every point of processing an
algorithm, one specific step always follows.

And, finally, the third feature likewise connected

with the term: termination. For each input, an
algorithm always stops after a finite number of
steps. You open the word processor, write your
love letter, you close it again. The exceptions are
both inconspicuous and insidiousembedded
controllers in cars that run as long as the car runs
and operating systems with their maliciousness
and built-in advertising mechanisms and costs.

Of these three criteria, the last is surely the most

important: after a finite number of steps, an end,
a holding state, is reached. The question is how
long it takes and how to estimate a priori the
magnitude of this end state as the complexity of
input increases. Processes that are, for you
computer scientists, good and well-behaved are
called class P, which can be solved in any
quadratic or cubic time. If [a route between] ten
cities is to be worked out, the difficulty, as far as
Im concerned, is ten to the power of two, so 100
steps. If [a route between] 100 cities needs to be
figured out, the task time is 1002, that would be
10,000 steps.

Sadly, not all known algorithms belong to this

wonderfully sensible, well-behaved class. There
are many things in mathematics and in reality that
can only be solved in exponential time, or worse.
The most famous example is the traveling
merchant who has to find the shortest route
between ten cities, then between a hundred
cities, and then between a thousand cities.

Its a task that has only ever been solved in

exponential time on a computer. But its not
impossible computer science gives us some
hope that a polynomial solution may appear. We
are open to surprises in the realm of algorithms,
albeit pessimistically after 60 years.

To give a drastic example from the foundational

crisis of mathematics in the 1920s: there are
functions that have been so thoroughly worked
out that they have led to, for example, the
famous Ackermann function that gets results
from tiny arguments about nothing. With two and
four as inputs, the Ackerman function is already a
number with almost 20,000 decimal places
while, as a nice comparison, the lifespan of the
Earth expressed in seconds is only 1017. To
come to grips with this explosive realm, which
could be compared to Archimedes famous
grains of sand, 23-year old English
mathematician Alan Turing lay down in a meadow
near Cambridge and unintentionally led us into
the computer age, an event later immortalized in
pop music by Pink Floyd with Grantchester
Meadows. It seems it was there he dreamed up
what has since defined our Age of Turing.

Alan Turing, age 16.

Alan Turing, age 16.

Its impossible to compute everything that can be

questioned with mathematics. But there is a sub-
class of functions and real numbers that can be
calculated because they can be described in a
finite number of steps. An example of what is
non-computable in real numbers would be a
number line onto which a needle with an infinitely
fine point is dropped. Nobody could come up
with a rule to specify exactly where the
needlepoint hits the number line. In contrast,
there are numberseven those with an infinite
number of decimal places, which seem
incomprehensible at first, not comprehensible for
computers, regardless of structurethat are
described as computable real numbers.

Now I want to talk about the most famous and

the oldest of these transcendent numbers
because its so nice and should wrap up the
mathematical section of my meditationspi:
3.14159 and so on with no end and without any
apparent regularity in the sequence of decimal
digits. The dreamers among computer scientists
say: all the works of Shakespeare, the Bible, and
everything are coded in the decimal places of pi,
somewhere in the infinite number of points.

This curious, miraculous number, which defines

the ratio of a circles circumference to its
diameter, has been described in a closed-form
expression since 1674. If I had a blackboard I
would write out the formula; instead, Ill just have
to say that the arctan of one, multiplied by four,
gives the number pi. And, as Leibniz and later the
seven-year-old public school student Alan Turing
discovered, the arctan of one can be expressed
as: one minus one-third, plus one-fifth, minus
one-seventh plus one-ninth. That can be written
more simply with a sigma or sum symbol, and
then even the even the most blind can see that
an infinitely long number can in fact be written or
definedin these infinitely many signssigma
one divided by x to the nand therefore the
problem of real numbers, of being uncountable
with a countable, quasi-whole number, is
replaced with the description of this number. And
this description can, of course, be fed into any
computer.
Turing wrote in his dissertation in 1936,
According to my definition, a number is
computable if its decimal can be written down by
a machine. That is all well and good, and it was
a great lightbulb moment, not yet in silicon at that
time, but in thought, for the whole world.

The only downside to this limitation on

computable, real numbers is that unpredictability
remains. Most importantly, there is no algorithm,
no machine that can automatically state, in
advance, whether an algorithm presented to it is
either going to end, or run indefinitely in an
infinite loop.

Thats why Hilberts program failed between

1931 and 1935, but it is also why we are now
living in a world where you can say, at the very
least, that computers have taken control, just as
Turing predicted. And although in that wonderful
year of 1936, two American mathematicians
proposed effectively the same theory, with
calculable numbers and functions, Turing, in
England, was the only one who specified a
machine for it. The machine has appointed us
and the machine, not mathematics, is the reason
we are here talking about media art in 2007.

But what does it mean that we no longer

calculate pi by hand, as Ludolph did, but that
machines relieve us of that need and that there
are things in the world that imagine things of the
world without us having done anything other than
construct them and get them to think? What
does it mean that logic, in a Heideggerian sense,
has fallen to machines, and that logic professors
are gradually becoming superfluous? Does it
mean anything for the formalism and laws of
logic and thought, or do such things as pi and its
decimal places reveal something about the world
we live in? The physical, the chemical, the
biological world that were in?
The most recent novel Thomas Pynchon
published, last December 2006, Against the Day,
answers the question with: yes, numbers and
functions do say something about the world. An
example in Pynchons novel is the conjecture by
Bernhard Riemann of Gttingen, which is still
unproven after 150 years, that all non-trivial zeros
of the zeta function have a real part of 0.1. In the
novel, a beautiful young and horny Russian
mathematician appears in the middle of a lecture
and tells Hilbert that this fact reflects something
about the mystery of prime numbers that reveal
themselves, so to speak, in this function the way
the circle reveals its nature in pi. And we can read
that in the course of our mathematical and world
history. We learn something.

Thats actually the oldest idea that came to the

European philosophy of mathematics from Plato.
In the secret Seventh Letter to the tyrant of
Syracuse, which the tyrant was supposed to burn
immediately, Plato wrote that circle is, firstly,
merely a word, different in every language;
secondly, a drawing that never fully corresponds
to a circle and is always defective; thirdly, a
definitionall points with an equal distance from
the center; fourthly, a concept that from this
definition arises from the soul; and fifth, the circle
is, in contrast to and distinct from the concept,
something that is not only in our soul but
simultaneously in the heavens. Not distorted like
a drawing of a circle in the sand, but an eternally
radiant truth. I think you have to be a bit of a
Platonist to make this evening lecture a bit of fun
for us all. The Aristotelian counter-assumption
would immediately silence me.

Indeed, you have to wonder how people got this

number at all, the mystery of the circle and its
irrational, transcendental number, which reveals
itself as an algorithm and a historic process.
In the first Book of Kings, chapter 7, verse 23, pi
put Solomon, King of Jerusalem, in such an
awkward position that a king and a master
builder named Hiram of Syros was brought from
Phoenicia to build the first round basin in a
Jerusalem temple. In the Bible, it says that the
diameter was ten cubits and the circumference
consequently thirty. I am unaware of any larger
error in the calculation of pi. Its a whole-number
estimate or a rounding off. In the Rhind Papyrus,
which is certainly older than the first Book of
Kingsbeing an Egyptian papyrusthe
approximation is much, much better: sixteen
divided by nine, in brackets, squared.
Archimedes went to the trouble of drawing, in the
sand in Syracuse, a 96-sided polygon around a
circle, and another 96-sided polygon within the
circle to reached the wonderful estimate that
300/17 is smaller than pi is smaller than 22 over
seven.

Excerpt from the Rhind Papyrus.

Excerpt from the Rhind Papyrus.

And in 1766, a Japanese person, God knows

who, Amaterasu, helped him, gave the fraction,
the fractional approximation of pi as 5,491,351
over 1,725,033. We call that Zen Buddhism.

But none of these approximations are generative

forms that allow us to grow pi, so to say, like a
tree, like an apple on a tree. And thats the main
point of this long mathematical world history. To
find a closed form from which a principally
unlimited number of processes can result.

This transition is extremely hard; youll have to

think with me while I stammer a bit. I think that in
this function of revelation, of deprivation, which
then comes to an end, to completion, to a
finished work, that algorithms have an inherent
relationship with art. Its probably only been
noticeable since weve been surrounded by
computers and algorithms and were no longer
dazzled by masterpieces in museums and
galleries the way we were in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, but where, in a series of
images surely the most difficult examplea
process, a generative process, appears to us
behind these images. I have to confess that I find
Johannes Vermeer van Delft better than all media
art, and when Im standing in front of those
miraculous panels, most of which show one and
the same room populated by various beautiful
people, the most exciting thing is to see that
Vermeer apparently painted all these images with
the help of a camera obscura.

There are different perspectives in this room,

always from the same door, but at different
distances from door and room. This was only
discovered in the 1950s as interest in pictorial
processes caught up with, but did not overtake,
interest in pictorial content. So, we can see the
process in which Vermeer, in hours, or days, or
weeks of work, painted an image in oils: it was a
machine-generated camera obscura image
actually created from one window and the
sunlight coming through that window. As we
know, for a finished image the sun needs just
fractions of fractions of seconds; the camera
obscura also reveals an image in fractions of
fractions of seconds. Vermeer took days or
weeks. And when computer graphics in the 60s
and 70s dared to imitate this effect of incidental
light through a window and its reflections of
reflections, my 386 computer in Bochum, in the
1990s, was calculating the algorithm, called
Radiosity, for the whole night.

Now, an approximation can be done in an hour.

The complexity of Radiosity relates to the
complexity of the algorithm, to what is
happening, and to what is, arguably, the task of
all art. Such infinitely fast and infinitely
continuous and infinitely exciting processes are
captured in works of art and in algorithms, both
of which are finite by definition! A perhaps more
beautiful example for the computer enthusiasts
among you might be the famous optical illusion
woodcuts by M. C. Escher where a staircase
around a brick square seems to go endlessly
upwards, which is physically impossible. Or the
corresponding waterfall, endlessly cascading,
closing in on itself over and over again, and not
just in our imagination, but really, in a strange
limbo between painted-state and imaginary-
state. Of course, Douglas Hofstadter has already
said everything necessary about that in Gdel,
Escher, Bach.

So, moving towards our goal, we have algorithms

and processes on one side, and artworks on the
other side, and between them things like the
camera obscura, the Turing machine, computers,
and more basic things: palettes, painting tools,
and musical instruments. Things within which
knowledge, often thousands of years of
knowledge, have accumulated, knowledge that
is, however, different from that which is in
artworks; instruments and machines collect
knowledge in order to create works and
processes.

The best and most algorithmic way to end is

definitely with musical processes, because the
concept of this next step is highly difficult.
Computer science doesnt seem to have such
drastic complexity as painting, where so many
follow-on steps seem at least possible. This
years transmediale is called unfinish, and it
refers to the fact that a composer can write a
score as an algorithm, as Mahler did. The
instruments, the orchestras and their instruments
are then machines that reproduce different
instances of the Mahler score; you could also do
the entire thing without instruments, and today it
would be possible to approximate all the
instruments of a big orchestra on a computer
with physical modeling.
Gustav Mahler in 1909.

Gustav Mahler in 1909.

At some point, Mahler finishes the composition.

He gets it printed. When its played, it lasts 120
minutes and then comes to an endtotally
different to Platos imaginary Music of the
Spheres, which we supposedly dont hear
because its been playing since the beginning of
the world, since before we were born and will
continue after we die. And at some point, very in
keeping with unfinish, Mahler decides to rework
the piece, despite the completed, printed score,
to change the instrumentation, to add a few
notes and, especially, to take some out, to make
the composition tighterthats the style of late
Mahler as opposed to mid-career Mahler. And I
wonder, I really openly ask the question: could it
be that just as the zeta function betrays
something about the otherwise totally chaotic
prime numbers and their coding, and as pi
reveals something about the essence of the
circle, that Mahler, when he takes up the
composition for the second time and changes it,
and makes the work into a process againcould
it be that when Mahler changes something in the
image he has made of the Earth, that the Earth in
reality sounds different?

If you ask yourself this as I have, then perhaps

youll understand why Mahler used German
translation of ancient Chinese poetry for all the
songs in Das Lied von der Erde but wrote the last
six lines himself, even though he was a composer
and not a poet. These last six lines, which of
course shouldnt be read out here but rather
heard, are not entirely accidental and seem to
me to describe the relationship between infinity,
processuality, artworks, finitenessI quote:
Beloved Earth, everywhere, blooms in spring
and flourishes anew everywhere and eternal blue
light in the distance, eternal, eternal, eternal,
eternal, Pianissimo, end.

I believe that nothing in this worldnot even the

invention of media and computer artcan alter
the task of art, which is to reveal the eternal in the
finite.

Thank you.

Wolfgang Coy
Yes, thank you so much. If anyone wants to step
out, you can do it now. And for those remaining
there is an opportunity to ask questions; we have
microphones in the hall. I dont know what its
like in the back, it might be a bit difficult, but well
just start. So we have about forty minutes to talk
about this topic. Would anyone like to ask a
question or make a comment? Or is everyone so
completely satisfied that weI think, over there
was there somebody? Yes. I thought it was
somebody wanting to ask, but people arent out
yet.

Friedrich Kittler
And what does this do...? Hello?

Wolfgang Coy
I dont know.

Audience member [in English]

Hi, Im Jaromil. Im a programmer. Thank you for
your keynote, it was fascinating and Id like to
pose a question: you basically focus on the
relationship of humans and machines, and Id like
to ask you, how do you see the relationship
between humans nowadays concerning
algorithms? Ill give an example: I like to depict
programmersor whoever writes algorithmsas
alchemists, for instance, from the eighteenth
century. They were really jealous about their
ingredientsin fact, the ingredients couldnt be
copied, they were finite, and so it was very
difficult to exchange recipes, and I think the
situation has radically changed nowadays, since
it's possible to copy, to reproduce very easily all
those recipes. Plus, as you mentioned,
computers are a really powerful extension of the
human mind, so basically we can tell that straw
can be converted into gold. An example is
Second Life and the crossover between reality
and metaverse. In all this, do you see any change
in the relationship between humans also
regarding algorithms, so what changed in
creating algorithms in this sense?

Friedrich Kittler
I didnt quite get the first part of the question
unfortunately, because of the technical issues.

Audience member
I mean, is it only that machines brought an
extension to humans to execute the algorithms?
But if we consider the fact that we can exchange
algorithms much more freely nowadays and
basically they grow out of what Pierre Lvy or
other philosophers define as collective
intelligencede Kerckhove and so onwhat do
you see that has changed in the history of
algorithms? And what is changed andthis is
pretty recent, no? is the way, really, to
exchange the ingredients? Im not really a
historian of mathematics as you are, so Im pretty
curious about your vision compared to the
Abbasid dynasty once when Muammad al-
Khwrizm was forging those algorithms and now
passing through all the various stages of human
developments in terms of science.

Friedrich Kittler
Yes, yes, yes. Ive got it now.

I felt it was important, as I said at first, that the

algorithm is, as you also confirmed, much older
than computer science, and that you cant say
whether it is a divine gift or enlightenment or a
human construction. We must, I believe, accept
the history of algorithms in their contingency, in
their randomness. Of course, sometimes reasons
historical, media-historical signscan be
offered for why this algorithm appeared at this
timewith Leibniz, for instance. But what was
most important to me was the escalation, the
bottleneck that occurred the moment algorithms
were no longer created with paper and pencil,
but were entered into operable machines with
operating systems that solve the whole lot much,
in most cases a hundred thousand times, faster
than humans.

And in contrast to Mr Lvy, Monsieur Lvy, I

wont see it as the result of an average,
internationally distributed, global, collective
intelligence, but as the performance of people
who have found, for example, this highly efficient
prime number algorithm, and have therefore
earned the Fields Medal they have been
awarded.

Whether the rest of humankind is anything other

than passive is a question better addressed to
Wolfgang Coy than to me.

Wolfgang Coy
I mean, if no one has a question at the moment, I
would like to respond. The exciting thing is, yes,
on one hand the machine confronts us as our
own product, but one that engulfs us, and in
many respects reveals us faster than we can see
ourselves in the mirror. But, on the other hand,
this is how I understood the questionwe
experience the networking of machines as a
communicative system simultaneously. So the
special status of the machine, its becoming
independent, which you emphasized, has
nevertheless been weakened in a new
development where this communication can be
unbelievably more diversified than weve ever
experienced in traditional machine
communication. Is that a shift? Have we
experienced a change in the last ten years or is it
just more of the same? Is this ultimately just the
self-sufficiency of the system?

Friedrich Kittler
Actually, if Im being honest, that I would prefer
fewer people be connected through the internet
and more machines to be connected.

Wolfgang Coy
I think that is an opinion, but there was just a
question and I wanted to explain.

Friedrich Kittler
At least, Im more interested inthe best network
Ive ever found is called Farmen, a gigantic
farm of Linux computers, which are unused at
nightbecause their users need to sleep
sometimes, the freaks. The machines simply
continue, and in the end, for films like Titanic,
endless virtual images of sea storms have been
generated that nobody has filmed and which
have never existed; they were computed. That is
the best high-performance computer networking,
I think.

Wolfgang Coy
Well, I would rather they calculate more Zen
prime numbers, but okay, please, they like to
calculate the Titanic too.

Friedrich Kittler
I used that example specifically because it
connects to art and media art. Its not a made-up
story, its true, and I would like for a second to
throw out into this great hall the question of
whether such anonymous, industrial as far as
Im concerned even commercialproducts of
computer art do not deserve our respect?

Otherwise, the impression is that media or

computer art is an extension of the individual
artist with other, commercially available products.

Wolfgang Coy
I cant see so well with the lights, was there a
question? Yes.

Audience member
Yes.

Wolfgang Coy
Could you stand up so that the audience has a
rough idea of where you are?

Audience member [in English]

In the last session, we had a discussion about
media art and about how the word media art
became less interesting. There was a citation
from you in that session, saying that media
determine our situation. And I was thinking:
could you say, for example, that algorithms are
defining our situation today, and I am thinking in
a way of how the logic of the game, for example,
is penetrating into the world of theater, into the
world of art, so that in a way there are algorithms
that are working inside artworks in different
ways? So would this be a way of restating and
updating your opening on your book from 1986?

Secondly, in that book you also predict the end

to media, because the difference between
different media is erodingand also the end to
the concept of the medium. Is it possible to ask
you how you look upon those predictions now,
20 years later?

Friedrich Kittler
Yes, I would like to try to answer. Twenty-one
years ago, when I wrote that sentence, I wasnt
really interested in theater and play and things
like that, but in the fact that the cable telegraph
played a key role in the war in 18701871, the
early wireless radio in the First World War from
191418, and the battle between radio encoding
machines and British computers (and their
eventual victory) in the Second World War. That
was the situation at that time. The fact that now
every G.I. in the American army has their own
laptop follows the logic of this progression.

Thats why the media that determine our position

should still be on the lookout for the industrial,
military, political complexesand not so much
through the small window that the art world
offers us, it seems to me. The seriousness of the
assumptions or hypotheses from that time have
not changed much. I think its already been
almost 20 years since the founding father and
head of Intel predicted a battle for our attention
between the computer monitor and the television
screen. Battle of the eyeball, it was called. The
television and film industries laughed themselves
sick over yet another nonsensical prediction from
one of these Intel company founders. And today,
after the World Cup, we all have to face the fact
that he was right. And it is exactly that point
where the individual sense-fields of these
connected media flow into this universal medium
conceived by Alan Turing. Except the landline
telephoneI think Im the only user that still has
one of those.

Wolfgang Coy
So, we of course have to admit that last week Bill
Gates also thought the end of television was a
possibility. So thats probably settled it.

Friedrich Kittler
That means there is a job for the Helmholtz-
Zentrum as well, when everything works in bits
and bytes and zeros and onesat least works
acceptably to end-users. Then the question
arises of whether there are actually any specific
characteristics of different sense-fields and
media. For example, whether you would have to
trywhich cant possibly be imagined this
eveninga kind of algorithmic minimal
configuration of what a picture is, or what music
is, and not just in the popular neurophysiological
sense that is dominant in the press at the
moment, but also in the sense of an assertion
about a things being. So, I still hope that
Immanuel Kant is wrong that when it comes to
beautyfor beauty at least, if not for the sublime
there are some things that can be
mathematically analyzed in fields like music,
images, sculpture, and architecture, as in the
complexity-theory approaches attempted by
Birkhoff and continued by Max Bense. Are you
skeptical?
Wolfgang Coy
I am skeptical because I dont see it, but Bense
did write a wonderful foreword for his
Informationssthetik. The last sentence says
something like, It may be that none of what we
say works, but if it were to save us from the
dreadful drivel of the culture section in the
papers, that would be a tremendous advance. In
that sense, I would agree.

Would anyone like to offer an opposing view on

information aesthetics?

Audience member
I would like to ask again briefly, in terms of
understanding, and ask you about speculation
from the area that you raised, which is difficult to
respond to. You spoke at the end about Mahler
and about the task of the artist, in order to
demonstrate the eternal in the finite. In a way,
Mahler still belongs to a succession of musicians
who somehow failed at the end, who are unable
to complete their tenth symphony as the pinnacle
and conclusion of their work. And, you would
know more about this, but a pupil of his, like
Schnberg, said in the eulogy, If Mahler had
written the tenth, we would have heard
something that would have changed our world
much more fundamentally. Im wondering why
now, on the topic of algorithms, you refer to this
tradition of failure. Does something resonate with
you in the fact that the Linux computer you
brought upwhich has to be connected before it
can workcould have helped somebody like
Mahler complete this intention in the tenth in a
different way, whether he succeeded or not?

Friedrich Kittler
That is a difficult questionIm not sure what you
mean by failed? Failed as a musician? Failed as
a husband and cuckold? Dying of a broken heart,
as it were, because of that woman?
Wolfgang Coy
But still prominently immortalized in her
biography, so

Friedrich Kittler
Could you not answer that, from the first sketch
of the first movement, it was almost finished, and
the drafts for the other movements of Mahlers
tenth symphony, which so many good musicians
tried to complete over the last 80 years since his
deaththat something like a structure emerges,
which is not a failure, but calls for its completion?
This is not something that every building, work,
film, or piece of music does, but large fragments
seem to be able to and would more likely be an
indication that unfinished is a pain in which
something is concealed, as Greek sculptors said
of the veined marble in which Apollo was hidden.
As far as beauty and art are concerned, I would
at least try to maintain this semi-platonic
perspectivethat there are responsibilities there,
which have already been written into Mahlers
fragments. There is just musical logic, a notion
firmly held by no less than Adorno.

Wolfgang Coy
But when you mention marble, and go back to
your lecture, then all completed music is within
pi. We only have to reveal it.

Friedrich Kittler
So then lets start looking now.

Wolfgang Coy
Yes.

Friedrich Kittler
So, Ill take that lovely example again from
Against the Day, Pynchons last novel, because
nobody actually knows it. The (sex-) heroine of
the novel, this Russian mathematician, believes
more so than her teacher, David Hilbert in
Gttingenthat information about prime
numbers and their seeming chaos is so encoded
in the Zeta function that we become acquainted,
so to speak, with physical constants. So bold is
the lady of the novel. And then the novel
becomesand this is not uninteresting in
discussions of art and poetryso recursive that it
starts thinking about itself: I am a historical
novel. I am set before the First World War and
describe what everything is like during the
catastrophe of the First World Warand how,
above all, the grandiose powers of European
anarchism are destroyed between high-
capitalism and Bolshevism. One-half of the world
is capitalist and the other half is Bolshevist. I am
a novel that knows and perceives more than just
the coarsest features of history, not like the silly
historical novels a l Gustav Freytag or Felix
Dahn. I am a novel that does everything right. The
taxis that drive armies to the Battle of the Marne,
and so on.

Its all correct. You find no mistakes and you get

the impression that Pynchon is trying to build a
time machine in 1,085 pages. A time machine
that goes back to being a conventional historical
novel. Just as the heroine is able to report prime
numbers from the Zeta function, Pynchon had
the story given to him in order to almostor not
even almostreactivate the power of this
anarchism in 2006. In the novel he plays the
same game that his heroine plays before she
resignedin mathematics, or between
mathematics and physics. It seems a fascinating
possibility to think that,to go beyond the
humble, undemanding scope of mere metaphor
and comparison into realms where novels and
systems of equations and algorithms are subject
to the same conditions of seriousness. That may
sound very poetic.

Wolfgang Coy
Well have to wait a bit until all 1,085 pages have
been processed but I think there is another
question.

Audience member
Hello, I have an educational question. You gave a
very dense kind of introduction to the
mathematical philosophy behind computation.
How important is it, in your opinion, for an artist
or media theorist dealing with computers,
computer culture, and the effect that computers
have on our perception, to have this kind of
background, this kind of education? How deep
does a computer artist, net artist or media artist
need to go into mathematical theory, in order to
be able to say something real or unreal about the
way we are being affected?

Friedrich Kittler
Nice question. I dont want to make rules for
media and net artists, and Id like first to be a bit
critical of my profession or vocation. Professors
of media history or media theory who have never
used even a little Pascal algorithm or have never
unscrewed the cover of their machineI simply
dont trust them. And I can only offer a report on
what its like for media artists. Ten years ago I
was at a computer art exhibition in Chicago, at a
cold lake in the Windy Cityand it was
depressing to see how many HTML applications
were being presented as great computer art.
Thats something that anyone could do now.

And after these dull screens on whatever kind of

communication signs were spinning, paradoxical
or meaningful, random or senseless, in Chicago I
heard an electric guitar in the distance. And I
followed this sound because I love electric guitar.
I went into a room and there was a steel guitar
lying on a steel block. It had steel guitar strings,
and the strings were being played by a steel hand
that was being controlled remotely by a
computer. On another table there was a
microphone, a Fourier analyzer and, as I
discovered, a Kohonen network. I asked the
programmer and builder, who was from
Hamburg, how it had been programmedand he
said, in plain C. Respect.

What kind of device was it? And why was it so

much more fascinating than the image and
screen programs built in ignorance of computer
music and mathematics? This guitar started
playing by itself at seven oclock every morning
completely random notes. But the Kohonen
network that the designer had put into the
feedback path was programmed to improve over
the course of the day, to play like an electric
guitar from Windy City Chicago Blues. At noon
when I was there, the designer said it was playing
the blues half right, still with mistakes. In the
evening, when he turned it off, it would be the
perfect Chicago blues guitaralthough the
drums and saxophone to go with it had
unfortunately not gotten through US customs.

And that is real computer art, in contrast to

entertainment electronics. To sum it up: ordinary
communication between average people is not
something that justifies duplication. Every sunset
and coral reef and guitar are a thousand times
more beautiful. And to the earlier question you
would probably have to say, out of love for what
exists, it is worth learning mathematics and
physics. The more we ourselves know about it
and the less only web encyclopedias and
professors know about it, the better, as the
Greeks would say, life is. Fully Zen. The
Japanese were so enthusiastic about tape
recorders, when they were still made in Germany,
that they said, You know, we used it very
differently from you. You record a whole Mahler
on the tape, from beginning to end, or an entire
Wagner, but we do something else. We get up at
three in the morning, climb the holy mountain,
Fujiyama, and record bird songs.

Wolfgang Coy
So, if there are no more questions, I think this
meditative element would make quite a nice
conclusion. But if there are still any pressing
questions, that I cant see well from up here
because the light is veryyes, theres another
question.

Audience member
I still have one question. When I listen to you talk,
I wonder why you seem to doubt the artist.
Because, yes, that is very to the point, of course,
but when you say that there was a blues guitar
that learns to play perfect blues by the evening,
and that behind Mahlers composition there is
nothing but an algorithmif, with more powerful
computers, this principle could be expanded or
extrapolated, it could be possible to produce
almost any kind of art with a machine. Are you
telling these people that theyre going to be
unemployed in a hundred years?

Friedrich Kittler
Could you say the last sentence again?

Audience member
Are you telling these people herewell, these
people will all probably be dead in a hundred
yearsbut their childrenthat as artists they will
be unemployed? Will art as a human endeavor no
longer exist? Its provocatively formulated, but I
cant help wondering.

Friedrich Kittler
I cant help wondering either, but I would like to
make a distinction between unpredictable
conceptual discoveries in art, or even in
mathematics, and the sort of applications that we
are all capable of. A simple example: you can
teach people to draw or paint pictures in correct
perspective, but it took a certain brilliant Leon
Battista Alberti to come up with the idea of
geometric perspective construction in the first
place, which then defined all the paintings in
Europe for 400 yearsuntil just before Picasso
and George Braque. And I think this form of
opening doors, doors of perception as Jim
Morrison as others before him spoke of it, will still
exist in a hundred years, because there is still so
much to solve, also in computer graphics, for
example.

Portrait of Leon Battista Alberti.

Portrait of Leon Battista Alberti.

In a way, that is as inventive and unpredictable as

a new principle of painting or composing
Ligetis clusters, things like thatjust as
unpredictably. A new algorithm is suddenly found
and can be used to finally calculate what is most
trivial and optically beautiful in the Californian
world. So far, to my mind, this remarkable David
Hockney-esque dappled light on the bottom of
sun-drenched swimming pools is only calculable
if the concrete blocks are all perfectly flatall five
and if it were a bathtub, for example, it couldnt
be calculated. There needs to be another leap in
the progress of algorithms; someone has to
invent something as ingenious as Alberti did,
defining the essence of the image then a whole
flock of artists will follow. Perhaps I was mocking
them a little tonight, because they are sometimes
disturbingly similar to one another, like all those
paintings of bellowing stags above sofas in the
nineteenth century.

Wolfgang Coy
But you can still practice a bit? So that you can
get there? I mean, there is a certain problem: I
understand your desire for radical change and
new ideas very well, but how do get into a
position to do it? Is there a path leading there?
And doesnt this path possibly consist of digital
stag paintings?

Friedrich Kittler
Didnt you yourself recently

Wolfgang Coy
Stags?

Friedrich Kittler
No, no, no, you spoke positively about the fact
that when quantum computers really work, that
would be a quantum leap. It is not true, as far as
Im aware, that these quantum computers are
simply the fruit of linear technical progress. They
are the result of the explicit, theologically justified
protest of Albert Einstein; they have had powerful
enemies. That is a point that is probably also
relevant as to why the great upheavals arent
more frequent.

Wolfgang Coy
I didnt.

Friedrich Kittler
You didnt?

Audience member
Yes, um, Im not so good at math, so I wont be
able to formulate my remark as a question.
Nevertheless, I have a tiny Johann Sebastian
Bach machine inside me, and when I ride a
bicycle I whistle melodies that are incalculable. I
know the construction principles and, from the
components and new improvisations, it whistles
itself. As every bike ride ends, this game ends
too. It goes on practically independently of me
like here, during the lecture, together with me.
And if I didnt know these famous final notes in
the Art of the Fugue, during which, according to
legend, the pen fell from Bachs hand, the end of
every bike ride and the corresponding stopping
of this little Bach-whistling machine would be
incredibly unsatisfactory.

And it is probably also here when we are talking

about art, again, my desire is to reconnect with a
satisfaction, or a beauty or a sadness of endless
processes, that computers are not known for
handling well. Finished processes that always
remind us of somethingif Glenn Gould hadnt
played those final notes so beautifully, and they
werent so stuck in my head, the end of every
bike ride while whistling would be so sad. I
always find that is a great thing about art: to find
models, so to speak, to deal with this finiteness.
Thank you.

Friedrich Kittler
To that, I can only say, Yes, yes, yes, like Molly
Bloom in the last sentence of a certain novel.

Wolfgang Coy
And because that is the last sentence of a certain
novel, could we take that as an indication that it
was perhaps also the last sentence of this event?
Or is there still an urgent need to speak?

Friedrich Kittler
I could live with that very happily, if you can too.

Wolfgang Coy
Then, our thanks to Friedrich and the audience.
We thank the audience for not going for blood,
and I wish you a pleasant evening.

1. Editor's note: Muammad ibn Ms al-Khwrizm is

believed to have been born around 780.

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Related events:

Keynote 3: Friedrich Kittler: Finiteness of

Algorithms
03.02.2007, Panel

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Finiteness of Algorithms
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