Reboot.Fm presents:
ENIAC NOMOI
Length, 27:57
Languages: English, French, German, Greek
The acoustic results of the cooperation between artist, Joulia Strauss, and scientist, Martin Carlé: this work traces early computer sounds to ancient Greece. Additional scientific discoveries make the work all the more compelling.
The mathematical operations of the first calculation machine in history (ENIAC) to be called a ‘computer’ are differentiated through as yet unheard rhythms, frequencies, and melodies, which will be released as sound for the first time during THE ENIAC NOMOI. In so doing, the project seeks to prove the extent to which the epistemological existence of time-critical computer simulations are, in fact, rooted in ancient Greek dramaturgy and art. This sound perspective on cultural history becomes accessible by figuring it as successive knowledge structures with technical laws (NOMOI) governing their generation and culminating in simulation technology which moulds Being in contemporary life. Our choreography re-stages the diagrammatic notation of the historic ENIAC programmes in three acts and executes them in sound. This offers unique insight into the historicity of Being. In the clarifying environment of synthetic sculpture, the musical measures (NOMOI) of the first electronic computer (ENIAC) will provide a revelation: that the common origin of human beings and the poetic is a spring flowing at the foundation of technology. This fundament now ascends to regions of the living and divine nature from which it has heretofore been excluded. In contemplating the foundation of the evolution of Being, we do not seek a vanishing point in the past or bemoan “the forgotten Greek identity of art and craft in the concept of techné”. Rather, our thought must finally understand and commence with a recognition that the distinction between nature and art is rendered increasingly irrelevant by virtue of the processual entanglement of the symbolic with time.
http://www.medienwissenschaft.hu-berlin.de/~mc/ENIAC_NOMOI_eng.php