INFOSSIL II
A Conversation between Peter Weibel and Michael Saup, Karlsruhe, 2002
This is the first ever and long planned release of our conversation back in 2002 in Karlsruhe about dreams, growing up and the gift of death.
Saup: Where I grew up, I couldn’t talk to anyone. I therefore went into the virtual, into the future or the past. Navigating in the void was the central basis of survival.
Weibel: I also created my own worlds as a child. Perhaps the prerequisite for becoming an artist is that you automatically start looking for other worlds. There was no one I wanted to talk to. On the contrary, I tried to withdraw from the whole social community. The normal outside world was rather disturbing for me. You also secluded yourself early on?
Saup: yes.
Weibel: … and talk to yourself all the way back over centuries.
Saup: The first medium I consciously used was dreams. After that it was music, then my father’s camera, which was in a closet. I stole it at night and then exposed short scenes in my room. Around 1980, I started working with computers. I saw that I could hack, but that I didn’t have to know how to program at all to do it. I can just interfere with the coding that’s there. I can destroy it and something new happens. That fascinated me. All that was a help to escape from now or to build a road to the future.
Weibel: That you started with dreaming fits in with my theory that media and technology spring from a morphology of desire. Wishes, desires, longings seek some form of expression, a shape in which they articulate themselves. So maybe the media only continue the work of dreams. One communicates with things that are neither spatially nor temporally there. Through media, I can bridge the distance, the dislocation. Dreams do just that: they make the absent present. One dreams and thereby creates new experiences for oneself.
escape from the program [of experience]
Weibel: But experience also forms a prison. For example, if I offer bread to a person five times and he beats me for it each time, then I simply know that giving bread means being beaten. You can’t get rid of that experience. A cat that has jumped on a hot stove top will not do it again.
It would actually be better if you could erase that experience, even at the risk of getting burned again. But then one can always encounter the world anew: with this impartiality, with this optimism. In this way, however, people become skeptical and distrustful. They are locked into their experience. I keep trying to erase that experience. The price is very high, but I don’t want to be locked into that experience, into that prison.
Saup: interesting idea …
Weibel: You create a story for yourself. Then you become prisoner of this story, experience aims to avoid pain and harm. At the same time, this limits my ability to have new experiences. My horizon becomes narrower and narrower, and the older you get, the worse this becomes.
Thank God, young people have little experience. Due to lack of experience, they plunge into adventures that those more experienced advise them against. But since they are not prisoners of history, they do it and it goes well.
Saup: The prison of experience is particularly tragic because local experience is naturally applied to the global. Experience keeps you from knowing anything at all that is outside your local culture.
Weibel: You become a prisoner, a prisoner of the particular. In another place, in other cultural circles, the individual might act quite differently. But the experience of multiplicity is blocked. I do not believe in the experience of the universal. There are few constants. There is only the multiplicity of differences. But this multiplicity is not made accessible to one, because one binds oneself too much to the local particular experience, which one has made here and now.
Art should make it possible to erase experiences by allowing new experiences to be made. But this rarely succeeds.
escape from the program [of nature]
Weibel: There is knowledge that evolution has imprinted. The ground squirrel knows how to react to a rattlesnake without ever having seen a rattlesnake. It’s that chip. The animal’s reaction is not learned; rather, the historical experience is genetically imprinted. This is the only way nature can allow its creatures to survive. The animals are prisoners of the historical experience.
Saup: The program is …
Weibel: We are prisoners of the program, but we want to be more. If we want to be human beings, we have to pay the price of deleting experiences again. Then we have to delete the program. But only very few people do that, because it involves risks and because it can lead to harm. It would actually pay off. In order to develop as a human being, it would be necessary to leave precisely this programming, as nature has made it.
escape from the program [of culture and history].
Weibel: Of all the historical art production in the world, only three percent remains.
Saup: Remaining in the sense …
Weibel: Physically, as material. People produce pictures and sculptures, but since no one takes care of the objects, they disappear, are thrown away, rot. Only three percent remain.
Saup: That’s interesting.
Weibel: In principle, that’s frightening, because culture aims to preserve what has been experienced. That’s the only reason why people write books. Because they want others to benefit from their experiences and thoughts later on. Culture has in reality only the one sense, namely to hand down experiences. However, if you now take the idea further that it is important to also erase experiences, then perhaps it is not such a bad thing that only three percent of art remains.
Saup: (laughs) …
Weibel: It’s not about doing away with historical thinking. You need history and experience. But this almost cruel insight into the survival of works of art shows that one must not only accumulate history and experience, but that it must also be possible to erase historical experience.
The best part of the New Testament is about forgiveness. The Lord’s Prayer says ‘and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us’. Forgiveness means nothing more than really erasing the experience. That’s why I’m interested in this Christian program. How can I get out of the experience, out of the history? By simply saying, I erase what you did to me.
forgiving the program
Weibel: It’s somehow a bit unpleasant to say this. But when you make art yourself for many years, you become less and less receptive to the art of others. When you hear music, can you just bob and dance to it, or do you involuntarily analyze whether this or that sequence is well done? How do you feel about the music? Can you consume as well as analyze at the same time?
Saup: I enjoy it when someone builds something up musically and then completely surprises me with an absolute about-face. I try to let as little information as possible enter me unconsciously. I don’t like to be manipulated by things that I don’t think are good.
Weibel: I can no longer listen to the official music, on television and on the radio, because it is so predictable. There is hardly any music left that can surprise me. That’s why I no longer want to spend my time sitting down and listening to nothing but music for an hour.
Saup: I think that now a moment of forgiveness would be appropriate again. When I go to a club, for example, I always try to get to the bottom of the program, the general program: the program of reproduction and the game around it. Music is a manifestation of this program, actually a very beautiful one. I have decided to forgive the whole transparent program, which also has music in it. Ultimately.
Weibel: I find it very interesting that you are actually always the analytical observer. You talk about the transparency of the evolutionary program, the DNA, so to speak. You’re actually always interested in seeing through the program.
Saup: Yes.
Weibel: And this program can be both a genetic code and a musical code. Basically you look at everything as program code, be it music, be it pictures, be it people, be it behavior, you try to see through the code. However, you forgive the see-through. That’s what allows you to reconcile with the program in the first place. Otherwise you would have an enmity towards people, the world, objects, animals. This enmity would extinguish you. You forgive nature for the transparency of its flawed program.
Saup: That’s beautiful … (laughs)
Weibel: And by forgiving the program, I can actually go on living and working again. In what ways did the media offer you ways to push this transparency and forgive at the same time? Did you find help from the media?
Saup: I haven’t found any help from the media in forgiving …
Weibel: Rather in fighting?
Saup: I could program myself, I could practically let the images themselves affect me in any order or the sounds or the lights. Through this, I recognized how others try to program me, or, to put it more kindly, suggest patterns of behavior to me. I see rhythms and patterns that make me slow down or think faster and so on, that which chemical substances can also do.
Weibel: The media actually helped you master the enmity, the chasm between you and the world, by showing you how you are programmed by the world through the sense organs.
Saup: Right.
Weibel: in Hollywood cinema, with its overwhelming aesthetics, you are constantly overwhelmed with signals like a lab rat and are supposed to react accordingly. That gets on my nerves. That’s not art. Through your interface, body, brain, thoughts, you feel others trying to program you.
You have learned with the help of the media to increase the transparency of the programs of this world. You have seen that you can program yourself, navigate yourself. This has helped you to free yourself from the violence of the world that always wanted to program you.
The media shows that the world is a controllable thing. And in doing so, you also take the force out of the world. You see through the program and make a counter-program. You show that the weight of the world is only a fiction with which it tries to crush me. This is possible if you don’t use the media to depict the world, and if you don’t, like Bill Viola, create Hollywood aesthetics that also, unfortunately, only want to overwhelm with special effects. I feel as uncomfortable in his installations as I do in Steven Spielberg’s films.
Saup: I agree with you completely.
Weibel: In reality, the media should show how the program of the world or of nature works. They should make it transparent. Because that gives you the opportunity to reshape the program.
Saup: That’s right.
Weibel: I think that’s what your own art is about. You needed music and images not only to recognize the transparency of the program, but also to be able to change the program yourself. As a counterweight, so to speak. You forgive the program its transparency, but the media are instruments of warfare.
Saup: Forgiveness was a lesson that lies outside the media.
transcending the program [of death].
Weibel: Death is the engine of evolution. It can only function if individuals and entire species die out. Without death, an incredible dynamic would also be lost on a historical level. We would still have the 134-year-old Tsar of Russia. But when people disappear, new systems and ideas can emerge.
However, I do not fight for death, but try to limit it: we humans participate in this evolution so briefly that we cannot even observe it. There is a huge play being played on stage and we see nothing of it. That’s why I would like us to be able to extend this tiny window, these eighty years, a little bit. So that I can understand a little more of this play.
Through the media I can expand the horizon, go beyond the limits that evolution has set for me. If the media actually already start dreaming, then they have exactly this task: namely, to try to stretch this tiny window so that I can see a bit more of evolution. For example, I can simulate what dinosaurs looked like or create a picture of the world 100 years from now.
Saup: It’s about the fossil and the infossil. An e-mail or two minutes of music pulled from the net costs about 500 grams of coal. Coal is the ancient memory of the world. How could the dinosaurs ever have imagined what they would one day donate energy to? This mental step is unimaginable. It would be interesting to ask what our present infossil noise, when fossilized, will donate energy to.
Weibel: Your art is deeply anchored in this desire to overcome space and time. The fossil is the remains of evolution that transcend death. Coal, which is thousands of years old, is the source of energy for today’s culture. It succeeds here, so to speak, to jump beyond our time radius and to fall back on experiences and information that nourish us today. The ability to extract energy from the fossil has been a tremendous cultural achievement. Something that is actually dead, and passed by evolution, can be used again for life. These are actually already the first medial processes. It’s very interesting that you relate media practices to the fossil. The fossil fuels show that the media have the tendency to skip the laws of evolution, the core of which is death.
Saup: So it was and so be it.
Peter Weibel was born in Odessa in 1944 and studied literature, medicine, logic, philosophy, and film in Paris and Vienna. He became a central figure in European media art on account of his various activities as artist, media theorist, curator, and as a nomad between art and science.
From 1999 until 2023, Peter Weibel was Chairman and CEO of the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and since 2017 director of the Peter Weibel Research Institute for digital Cultures at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
On March 1, 2023, he passed away in Karlsruhe after a short serious illness at the age of 78.
Michael Saup is an artist, activist, instrumentalist, coder and filmmaker. He has acted as professor of digital media art at HfG/ZKM Karlsruhe University in Germany and as the founding director of the Oasis Archive of the European Union. He is the co-founder of the Open Home Project, a humanitarian initiative to help people being affected by nuclear disaster. Amongst others, his work has been awarded by the Ars Electronica and the UNESCO Commission. Michael Saup’s work focuses on the underlying forces of nature and society; an ongoing research into what he calls the “Infossil Archaeology of Future”. His work, often in cooperation with other artists, has been shown widely in exhibitions, festivals and on stages around the world. He currently lives and works in Berlin.