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How Media Became New
On August 19, 1839, the Palace of the Institute in Paris was completely full with
curious Parisians who came to hear the formal description of the new
reproduction process invented by Louis Daguerre. Daguerre, already well-known
for his Diorama, called the new process daguerreotype. According to a
contemporary, "a few days later, opticians' shops were crowded with amateurs
panting for daguerreotype apparatus, and everywhere cameras were trained on
buildings. Everyone wanted to record the view from his window, and he was
lucky who at first trial got a silhouette of roof tops against the sky."
10
The media
frenzy has begun. Within five months more than thirty different descriptions of
the techniques were published all around the world: Barcelona, Edinburg, Halle,
Naples, Philadelphia, Saint Petersburg, Stockholm. At first, daguerreotypes of
architecture and landscapes dominated the public's imagination; two years later,
after various technical improvements to the process, portrait galleries were
opened everywhere — and everybody rushed in to have their picture taken by a
new media machine.
11
In 1833 Charles Babbage started the design for a device he called the
Analytical Engine. The Engine contained most of the key features of the modern
digital computer. The punch cards were used to enter both data and instructions.
This information was stored in the Engine's memory. A processing unit, which
Babbage referred to as a "mill," performed operations on the data and wrote the
results to memory; final results were to be printed out on a printer. The Engine
was designed to be capable of doing any mathematical operation; not only would
it follow the program fed into it by cards, but it would also decide which
instructions to execute next, based upon intermediate results. However, in contrast
to the daguerreotype, not even a single copy of the Engine was completed. So
while the invention of this modern media tool for the reproduction of reality
impacted society right away, the impact of the computer was yet to be measured.
Interestingly, Babbage borrowed the idea of using punch cards to store
information from an earlier programmed machine. Around 1800, J.M. Jacquard
invented a loom which was automatically controlled by punched paper cards. The
loom was used to weave intricate figurative images, including Jacquard's portrait.
This specialized graphics computer, so to speak, inspired Babbage in his work on
the Analytical Engine, a general computer for numerical calculations. As Ada
Augusta, Babbage's supporter and the first computer programmer, put it, "the
Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves
flowers and leaves."
12
Thus, a programmed machine was already synthesizing
images even before it was put to process numbers. The connection between the
Jacquard loom and the Analytical Engine is not something historians of
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computers make much of, since for them computer image synthesis represents just
one application of the modern digital computer among thousands of others; but
for a historian of new media it is full of significance.
We should not be surprised that both trajectories — the development of
modern media, and the development of computers — begin around the same time.
Both media machines and computing machines were absolutely necessary for the
functioning of modern mass societies. The ability to disseminate the same texts,
images and sounds to millions of citizens thus assuring that they will have the
same ideological beliefs was as essential as the ability to keep track of their birth
records, employment records, medical records, and police records. Photography,
film, the offset printing press, radio and television made the former possible while
computers made possible the latter. Mass media and data processing are the
complimentary technologies of a modern mass society; they appear together and
develop side by side, making this society possible.
For a long time the two trajectories run in parallel without ever crossing
paths. Throughout the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, numerous
mechanical and electrical tabulators and calculators were developed; they were
gradually getting faster and their use was became more wide spread. In parallel,
we witness the rise of modern media which allows the storage of images, image
sequences, sounds and text in different material forms: a photographic plate, film
stock, a gramophone record, etc.
Let us continue tracing this joint history. In the 1890s modern media took
another step forward as still photographs were put in motion. In January of 1893,
the first movie studio — Edison's "Black Maria" — started producing twenty
seconds shorts which were shown in special Kinetoscope parlors. Two years later
the Lumière brothers showed their new Cinématographie camera/projection
hybrid first to a scientific audience, and, later, in December of 1895, to the paying
public. Within a year, the audiences in Johannesburg, Bombay, Rio de Janeiro,
Melbourne, Mexico City, and Osaka were subjected to the new media machine,
and they found it irresistible.
13
Gradually the scenes grew longer, the staging of
reality before the camera and the subsequent editing of its samples became more
intricate, and the copies multiplied. They would be sent to Chicago and Calcutta,
to London and St. Petersburg, to Tokyo and Berlin and thousands and thousands
of smaller places. Film images would soothe movie audiences, who were too
eager to escape the reality outside, the reality which no longer could be
adequately handled by their own sampling and data processing systems (i.e., their
brains). Periodic trips into the dark relaxation chambers of movie theaters became
a routine survival technique for the subjects of modern society.
The 1890s was the crucial decade, not only for the development of media,
but also for computing. If individuals' brains were overwhelmed by the amounts
of information they had to process, the same was true of corporations and of
government. In 1887, the U.S. Census office was still interpreting the figures from
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47
the 1880 census. For the next 1890 census, the Census Office adopted electric
tabulating machines designed by Herman Hollerith. The data collected for every
person was punched into cards; 46, 804 enumerators completed forms for a total
population of 62,979,766. The Hollerith tabulator opened the door for the
adoption of calculating machines by business; during the next decade electric
tabulators became standard equipment in insurance companies, public utilities
companies, railroads and accounting departments. In 1911, Hollerith's Tabulating
Machine company was merged with three other companies to form the
Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company; in 1914 Thomas J. Watson was
chosen as its head. Ten years later its business tripled and Watson renamed the
company the International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM.
14
We are now in the new century. The year is 1936. This year the British
mathematician Alan Turing wrote a seminal paper entitled "On Computable
Numbers." In it he provided a theoretical description of a general-purpose
computer later named after its inventor the Universal Turing Machine. Even
though it was only capable of four operations, the machine could perform any
calculation which can be done by a human and could also imitate any other
computing machine. The machine operated by reading and writing numbers on an
endless tape. At every step the tape would be advanced to retrieve the next
command, to read the data or to write the result. Its diagram looks suspiciously
like a film projector. Is this a coincidence?
If we believe the word cinematograph, which means "writing movement,"
the essence of cinema is recording and storing visible data in a material form. A
film camera records data on film; a film projector reads it off. This cinematic
apparatus is similar to a computer in one key respect: a computer's program and
data also have to be stored in some medium. This is why the Universal Turing
Machine looks like a film projector. It is a kind of film camera and film projector
at once: reading instructions and data stored on endless tape and writing them in
other locations on this tape. In fact, the development of a suitable storage medium
and a method for coding data represent important parts of both cinema and
computer pre-histories. As we know, the inventors of cinema eventually settled on
using discrete images recorded on a strip of celluloid; the inventors of a computer
— which needed much greater speed of access as well as the ability to quickly
read and write data — came to store it electronically in a binary code.
In the same year, 1936, the two trajectories came even closer together.
Starting this year, and continuing into the Second World War, German engineer
Konrad Zuse had been building a computer in the living room of his parents'
apartment in Berlin. Zuse's computer was the first working digital computer. One
of his innovations was program control by punched tape. The tape Zuse used was
actually discarded 35 mm movie film.
15
One of these surviving pieces of this film shows binary code punched over
the original frames of an interior shot. A typical movie scene — two people in a
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48
room involved in some action — becomes a support for a set of computer
commands. Whatever meaning and emotion was contained in this movie scene
has been wiped out by its new function as a data carrier. The pretense of modern
media to create simulation of sensible reality is similarly canceled; media is
reduced to its original condition as information carrier, nothing else, nothing
more. In a technological remake of the Oedipal complex, a son murders his father.
The iconic code of cinema is discarded in favor of the more efficient binary one.
Cinema becomes a slave to the computer.
But this is not yet the end of the story. Our story has a new twist — a
happy one. Zuse's film, with its strange superimposition of the binary code over
the iconic code anticipates the convergence which gets underway half a century
later. The two separate historical trajectories finally meet. Media and computer —
Daguerre's daguerreotype and Babbage's Analytical Engine, the Lumière
Cinématographie and Hollerith's tabulator — merge into one. All existing media
are translated into numerical data accessible for the computers. The result:
graphics, moving images, sounds, shapes, spaces and text become computable,
i.e. simply another set of computer data. In short, media becomes new media.
This meeting changes both the identity of media and of the computer
itself. No longer just a calculator, a control mechanism or a communication
device, a computer becomes a media processor. Before the computer could read a
row of numbers outputting a statistical result or a gun trajectory. Now it can read
pixel values, blurring the image, adjusting its contrast or checking whether it
contains an outline of an object. Building upon these lower-level operations, it can
also perform more ambitious ones: searching image databases for images similar
in composition or content to an input image; detecting shot changes in a movie; or
synthesizing the movie shot itself, complete with setting and the actors. In a
historical loop, a computer returned to its origins. No longer just an Analytical
Engine, suitable only to crunch numbers, the computer became Jacqurd's loom —
a media synthesizer and manipulator.
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