1. The Mission of the ZKM

The ZKM | Centre for Art and Media is a museum. As such, it has two intergenerational contracts: it collects the works of art of living and dead artists and it presents the works of living and dead artists in its collection in exhibitions. As a museum, the ZKM functions as a support system that makes sure that works of art do not vanish and disappear; it is also a distribution system that makes sure that works of art are not only collected, stored and restored but also presented in public, by lending them to other venues or by publishing catalogues showing them. The classical museological functions of a museum are part of the mission statement of ZKM. But the ZKM is more than a museum! It is called a centre, because as part of its contract with the generation of living artists it also supports them by helping in the production of artworks. To make this possible, the ZKM makes available a research and development environment where the artist-in-residence can realise his or her ideas with the help of ZKM’s programmers and technicians, and can develop and produce new work.

The ZKM operates like Borromean rings,Footnote 1 supported by the three pillars of its work. One pillar of the ZKM is collecting and archiving, storage and restoration. The second pillar is exhibitions and presentations, lectures and events. The third pillar is research and production, development and innovation.

Why is this third pillar necessary? It is a consequence of a certain tendency of modern art, which can be called delimitation; this delimitation has to do with the arrival of machines and media in the field of art.

The ideal of classic art was that each discipline of art is isolated and is defined by certain borders, by clear differences. One of the most fundamental distinctions was formulated by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his famous publication ‘Laokoon oder Über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie’ (‘Laocoon: or, The Limits of Poetry and Painting’) from 1766. In this essay Lessing divided the arts according to space and time. He stated that the art of painting and the art of poetry could not be compared. Poetry, for Lessing, is the art of words following each other successively in time; painting is the art of form and colour ordered next to each other, side by side in space. Painting and sculpture are therefore the arts of space, and music and poetry are the arts of time. Aesthetics in the Classical era perceived each fusion of the arts as a decay. But in the aesthetics of the Romantic period onwards we can observe a correspondence of the arts, a convergence of the arts and even transgressions or crossovers. As long as the image was defined as a painting then it was a clear two-dimensional representation of space. But with the arrival of film images developed and started to run. Cinematography is not only the scripture of motion, it is also the art of the moving image. The image learned to move – more precisely, images in succession learned to deceive the human eye and to generate the illusion of motion. For this generation of illusion, speed was necessary to triumph over the newly discovered laziness of the retina. This speed was delivered by moving wheels as parts of a vision machine (camera and projector). Wheel technology, machine technology, created the moving image; that image that created the illusion of motion. In this very moment the image was not only part of space, it was also part of time. The images were not ordered side by side in space, they successively and sequentially followed each other in time. Film is therefore a time-based art form. The moving image created by the video system or the computer system in the following decades is also a hybrid of time and space. Being an image it is part of space; being a moving image, it is part of time. So we have the astonishing fact that, over the last one hundred years or more, the distinction between painting and poetry has been dissolved: poetry can become visual, a part of space; painting can become time-based.

In a media museum, the classical distinction is not possible any more. Following the development of modern art is part of the mission statement of a museum of modern art, and above all this means the rise of the moving image in various technical carrier media. Therefore, in modern art we have an expansion of arts and at the same time a convergence of arts, either of which is a transgression of classical limits. This delimitation tendency is strongly enforced by the rise of machines in the field of arts: the ‘photographic machine’, the ‘film machine’, the ‘video machine’, the ‘computer machine’. As a consequence the machine-assisted moving image entered the museum, especially in form of installations. Each museum of modern art worthy of its name has a wing of so-called time-based art – that is, film and video. Time-based art entered the museums through machine art and media in the twentieth century.

But we should not restrict the idea of time-based art to the visual arts. A short reflection should teach us that there was always music as the prime example of time-based art (even according to Lessing). Music is the mother of all time-based arts. Therefore, why should music be excluded from the museum? Why should all the new forms of organised sound, of sound art, of music installations and so forth that have been developed in the twentieth century be excluded from the museum? If the museum accepts time-based art in visual forms, should it not break the classical hegemony of the visual arts and accept also the mother of all time-based art: music? The ZKM is the only museum in the world that has taken this step. The ZKM has music presentations permanently in its collection, includes musical installations in its temporary exhibitions, and will give access to its music collection: for example, IDEAMA, the International Digital Electro Acoustic Music Archive, which was initiated in 1988 (the aim of IDEAMA’s collection is to preserve the most important and most endangered early works of electroacoustic music – up to about 1970 – and to make these works publicly available). Therefore, the ZKM has not only an Institute for Visual Media but also an Institute for Music and Acoustics. In all three pillars (collection and archive, exhibitions and presentations, research and production) music plays an equivalent part when compared to the visual arts. The ZKM is the first time-based art museum with music as integral part of the collection and exhibitions, a genuine museum of modern art, because modern art has developed and learned a lot from sound art and avant-garde music.

2. Apparatus Art and Modern Art

The ZKM is the only museum in the world (in my opinion) whose mission statement follows essentially and completely the mission of modern art. This can be described as a path to the absolute or as a path to autonomy. But this autonomy does not unfold without supporters such as the machine and the media.

Vincent van Gogh wrote ‘the true painters are those who do not create local colours (van Gogh Reference Van Gogh1885).’ This search for the absolute colour, for the pure colour, which follows its own logic and was not obliged to represent the local colour of a real object, was the beginning of modern art’s path to the absolute. The liberation of colour from its obligation to represent the real colour of an object, the so-called local colour, led to the liberation of the painting from its obligation to represent reality. After the conquest of absolute colour, painting could become abstract. The abstraction of absolute colour, the insistence and triumph of the autonomous value of colour (higher than the value of the colour of the represented object), led ultimately to the ban of the object, to the objectless, abstract, non-representative painting. With the autonomous value of colour being primary began the autonomy of modern art in the nineteenth century. The exclusive insistence on the intrinsic quality of colour ushered in abstraction. Painting became an abstract autonomous world of colours and forms, rejecting external references. Naturally, these steps have been accompanied by a lot of theory and scientific methodology. The use of colour was studied scientifically by the Impressionists. Since then, scientific aspects and methods have been part of modern art. Therefore Georges Seurat said, ‘I paint my method’, and Camille Pissarro called himself 1887 ‘a scientific impressionist’. Science and methodology brought with them autonomy. We can assume that this development of painting to autonomous worlds of colour and surface, lines and forms, and the grounding of painting on a scientific method and depersonalisation was influenced by photography, the machine production of images.

As a consequence of this autonomy of colour, other constitutive elements of painting such as light, screen, brush and material also became autonomous. The constitutive elements of painting also became absolute and were emancipated from each other. Further stages of modern art in its search for greater autonomy, creating the emancipation of its constitutive elements, were the preoccupation with the autonomous value of light (for example Zdeněk Pešánek, the father of light kinetism, who introduced real neon light as an art object in 1933) and the preoccupation with the autonomous value of the material (from Vladimir Tatlin to Joseph Beuys). In his preoccupation with the autonomous value of material, Tatlin had come close to machine art, parallelling the machine art of the abstract avant-garde film of the 1920s.

Through the gradual emancipation of all of its elements as autonomous values and autonomous methods, art began to produce worlds of its own. The declarations of independence of colour and form on which the autonomy of modern art was based entailed new aesthetic strategies such as depersonalisation, deletion of the artist’s signature and scientific methods of production.

Machine and machine-supported media art is not only a logical consequence of the visual arts, it is indeed the prerequisite of modern art. In 1839 (following the invention of the daguerreotype) Paul Delaroche put it somewhat ambivalently: ‘From today painting is dead.’ This, of course, refers to historical painting. The introduction of machines into the world of art revolutionised art and founded modernity.

Photography brings a new definition of the author into play, which is irreconcilable with the classical definition of the author as deus artifex, as the one and only god of creation. Already the father of modern photography (i.e., the positive/negative procedure), W. H. Fox Talbot pointed out an axiomatic disappearance in his first publication (Fox Talbot Reference Fox Talbot1839). The disappearance that he was referring to was that of the pencil (or of the hand) of the artist. In a letter written in 1839 he describes what replaces the artist: the automation.

The device makes the picture – by itself (itself is ‘auto’ in Greek). The photographic device is thus an automatic and autonomous machine. By means of the autonomous mechanism of this device an image is made without the artist. The machine has become a rival of man in creating a work. The machine as an autonomous producer provides a first and fundamental model for all the autonomy movements that followed in modern art.

The first stage of the ‘autonomous’ image was the machine-supported production of images in photography (1839). The transmission of images over long distances (telegraphy) by means of the scanning principle, the dissolution of a two-dimensional image into a linear sequence of points in time, took place at about the same time.

The separation of messenger and message in the electromagnetic age (James Clerk Maxwell, 1873; Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, 1887; Guglielmo Marconi, 1896) made it possible to produce signs without a body or material in a telematic culture. The telephone, telecopier and ‘electronic telescope’ (TV system, developed by Paul Nipkow in 1884) are systems for transmitting sound as well as static and dynamic images. The machine-supported generation of images was followed by the machine-supported transmission of images (second stage). Machine-moved images, film, were the third stage. The discovery of the electron and the cathode-ray tube (late 1890) provided the basis for the electronic production and transmission of images. The magnetic recording of the image signals by means of the video recorder (1950s) combined film and TV (image storage and emission) in the new medium of video. This fourth ‘stage’ increased the possibilities of manipulating the image by means of machines.

The fifth stage – the machine-generated, calculable image of the computer – not only unites the characteristics of all the four stages of technical imagery but also reveals new characteristics: virtuality and interactivity. Interactive computer installations and simulations facilitate the illusion of the ‘animated’ image as the presently most advanced stage of development in the art of the technical image. The interactive ‘animated’ image is perhaps the most radical transformation of the understanding of image in the western world. The scandal of machine-supported art, from photography to the computer, uncovers the fiction that art is a place for human creativity, unique individuality. Machine art mocks this bourgeois illusion in an unrelenting way. Fox Talbot already sensed this. Even though he explicitly states in the title of his first paper that the traditional tools of art had disappeared and that the image was now made by the machine itself instead of the artist, he sensed an ideological resistance to the exclusion of the subject. Instead of calling his main work The Pencil of the Machine he gave it the misleading title The Pencil of Nature ¹ (Talbot Reference Talbot William1844) and this in spite of the fact that he understood the autonomous value of photography. Talbot does not mention the machine, the raison d’être of photography. On the contrary, he transfigures it in an ideological fury to a work of nature, if not of God. This way the sovereignty of the bourgeois subject remains untouched, at least in ideological terms.

The autonomy of the photographic machine was the first model of ‘autonomy’ to trigger the logic of modern art, which consisted in the progressive development of its autonomous elements. The three phases included 1) analysis and shift of focus (emphasising or neglecting a specific aspect), 2) emancipation and absolutisation (cancelling an element or asserting its absolute primacy), 3) substitution and exclusion (exchanging or replacing an element). In modern art this was reflected in the development of different ‘own’ worlds, from the intrinsic quality of colour to those of light and material. The autonomous world of apparatus stands at the beginning and at the end of this development. From the outset media art endorsed the concept of autonomy of its world, its values and laws. In this respect it is part of the prerequisites, history and future of art. The world of the apparatus as a world unto itself does not just follow the logic of modernism, it has created the conditions and context of modern art. This is what accounts for the self-referentiality of modern art. As Fox Talbot alludes to, machine art did away with the dualism of image and object, because in photography the apparatus is explicitly inserted between them: the machine becomes the tertium comparationis, a third element [image 1]. Whereas the artist’s hand could traditionally be neglected as a machine, this was no longer the case in photography. In a second stage, apparatus art eliminated the object and images could be generated by machines only. Here is where the autonomous worlds of images began to emerge [image 2]. The classical ontological aesthetic [image 3] became a semiotic aesthetic. [image 4] The world of apparatus continues what painting began, what it was forced to do by machines and what painting was unable to fulfill: the emancipation of all elements from art, giving rise to various worlds with intrinsic laws and qualities. By the same token, media art is a continual (postmodern) redefinition of the project of modernity. Non-identity, context, interactivity and observer have replaced identity, text, closure and author.

3. Information Art and the Noise of the Observer

From the sequences of corollaries that redefined the constitutive elements of modern art in their search for more autonomy, in their search for emancipation the most important changes concerned the role of the observer and his or her emancipation – that is, the possibility of the observer interacting with the artwork or participating in its creation.

If we wanted to consider, as we have done up to now, the natural sciences as the key science of the modern world, it may perhaps be permissible to transfer the problems of information, of entropy and noise, from physical systems to social systems, and there, too, inquire after the relative relationships between information, entropy and observation. Classical communication theory has neglected this question of energy dissipation and the problem of the observer. Quantum physics has acquainted us with the fact that in observing systems and objects we must not dismiss the role of the observer. Niels Bohr promulgated the famous theory that the act of observation in turn influences the very object of our observation. Archibald Wheeler went even further by saying that a phenomenon is a phenomenon only if it is also an observable phenomenon. Here, the state of information of the observer is of central importance. A state noted by the internal observer is different from that which ‘objectively exists’ and can be observed from the outside. The gedanken-experiment of Maxwell, the so called Quantum Demon therefore describes the problem of the noise-generating observer within information systems. (The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) first formulated this thought experiment in 1867 and presented it to the public in his book Theory of Heat (1871). The experiment meant to encourage questions about the possibility of violating the second law of thermodynamics, which ensures (through statistical improbability) that two bodies of different temperature, when brought into contact with each other and isolated from the rest of the Universe, will evolve to a thermodynamic equilibrium in which both bodies have approximately the same temperature.)

What quantum theory has described for physical systems can also be applied to social systems. Here, too, the deciding factors are the state of the information of the observer, his knowledge of his own condition and a distinction as to whether he is an internal observer who is a part of the observation system, or an external observer outside the system he is observing. The theories of quantum physics on the dependency of a system’s information level on the observer are also valid for social and cultural systems. A quantum theory of cultural theory is sorely needed. We must give up the traditional historical notion that there is a pure and objective description of the occurrences in the world of the mind, where the observer’s contribution to the phenomena under observation can be disregarded or subtracted. For, on the contrary, in the world of the media in particular, Wheeler’s Theorem applies that only an observed phenomenon is a true phenomenon. Only what is represented in the media also exists, and the form in which it exists in the data space equally depends on the position of the observer. Thus, the critic and the theoretician of culture act as real-life observers. The observed object’s signal becomes inseparably mingled with the observer’s own signal or noise.

In a nutshell, art theory as media theory would be an information theory based on quantum physics, which might be more appropriate to the practice of a trade in information and works, their placement and displacement, their publication and suppression in the postindustrial information-based capitalist society, than is the classic idealist theory, where the influence of the observer (critic, curator, theoretician, editor) on the matter being observed – and on the information, which is only actually constructed and codified by means of the act of observation – has been denied or neglected. Information and the observer can no longer be divided. The noise of the observer, the indeterminacy-relation between information and observer, is not arbitrarily reducible. In the present world – in which, from medicine to economics, access to information and the dissemination of information are gaining an ever more fundamental and central importance worldwide – the above-mentioned limitations are particularly noteworthy, since quite obviously there is a danger: firstly, of mistaking noise for information and, secondly, of not eliminating this noise with any increase in the amount of information, but of increasing it, in accordance with the theorem of endo-physics^, according to which there exists only internal observer (Rössler, Reference Rössler1998). Therefore it can be the case that the internal observer does not know that he is an observer and takes his own noise for the information from the situation under observation.

Entropy is the measure of the mass media. Will the digital data-highways become a part of this information bottleneck, of this entropy; or will they form further correlations and co-variances between the observers, as would be necessary? Will the telematic society at last try to counteract its suppressions of information, through the correlations and co-variances of the observers via worldwide networks? The postmodern society is information based. The dogmas of the information society are: there is more information than ever; information is generally more easily accessible than ever; information is being exchanged more than ever. Do these bytes for the soundbite generation make humanity any cleverer or any more knowledgeable? Is, in fact, the exchange of information decreasing? Don’t people, experts aside, know less about one another than ever? Isn’t an information implosion and an information bottleneck developing in the digital datanets?

The global datanets must not be understood merely as multimedia data banks and communication channels, where texts, images and sounds are transported and processed. These data-networks also permit new forms of communication and new communication partners, such as, for instance, communication with software agents equipped with artificial intelligence, which are not unlike prototypes of subjects without a physical body. Forms of communication become possible between real people in virtual spaces and between virtual people in real spaces. The noise of the observer and the communication partner can be employed constructively and alter the structure, and thus also the message of communication, at each individual location. One-dimensional communication between two partners with two different interpretational worlds is broken up into multidimensional communication with multiple interpretive means. Multiplayer media enter the field of art. This loss of mutual control and definitiveness can be experienced as a form of liberty.

The ZKM as a centre for art and media tries to be a competence centre for the sciences of the image, for the sciences of sound, for the sciences of the artificial. It is a museum for all media and of all media, knowing not only that the computer is the universal medium (or a universal machine, as Alan Turing called it), but that today we live in a postmedia condition, where everything is and becomes a medium. Painting, photography, music, sculpture: old and new media fuse and converge. Now with the World Wide Web, we have new constitutive elements of art aspiring for emancipation. In the machine age, painters lost their monopoly for image creation, because camera machines could make pictures. In the age of the web, artists lose their monopoly for creation, because everybody can generate his or her own artwork with the help of machines and disseminate them on the Internet. The paradigm of the twentieth century was photography. The paradigm of the twenty-first century will be the web. The ZKM is a centre and a museum that decisively tries to understand the consequences of this new, global paradigm.