The simulations of the fin de siecle were time snippets and time syntheses of analogue material, of small picture frames, called moving pictures, Kintop. But the raw material remained picture frames, analogue recording media, at best the result of an electro-chemical process.

Now the pictures themselves are taken apart and computed, in dots or graphs, vectors and pixels and can be bent, rotated, dissolved and folded on all axes. Now audio tracks are electronically hacked and cut up to 40.000 times a second, and the amplitude and condenser values of such an audio bit in the magnitude of a 40th of a millisecond are recorded in 8 or 12 units. An unimaginably fast and unimaginably massive process called digitalization. In order to record a minute of stereo tone, voice, or sound track with regular commercial technology, a mountain of 1,6 million bits arises in my pc, which printed in book form, would arnount to an 800 page epic novel. Per minute!

All low frequency signals, be they moving, fixed, doubled, sounds, images or type characters; simply everything quantifiable can be arbitrarily encoded, digitalized and thereby simulated, regardless of whether they are rockets faster than the speed of sound, or only our obviously very slow hearing and seeing realities. Digitilization means: Only that which is quantifiable is real. An axiom that weighs heavily upon the most difficult inheritancy endowed to us by the dialectic of the enlightenment.

We are standing at the beginning of this world of digitilized simulations of everything in our regular daily and working lives. We should learn to understand that the pictures, the sounds or bits that are stored in these simulation systems, are always both values and symbols. They are therefore more than they appear: values and contents, and symbols of other values and contents simultaneously.[1]

Digitilization therefore simulates the expanding mechanized desires in our imaged, sound recorded and codified world. Digitilization is however also a product of that stage on the path of harnessing the electromagnetic spectrum that was and remains a military strategy. Medial proliferation is the name of its present imperative. Today, the world is connected by hundreds and thousands of satellite channels that have long since solved the linear transmission problem from the beginning of our radio medium. The proliferation of communication media that are based on a simple system of codification, namely the digital; this makes every conceivable time multiplex and mechanised exchange from medium to medium possible.

The aim of the game is simply: where there is one image, to want more, where there is one sound channel, to establish further. This is what the cloak of invisibility in our media mix looks like today. This is the progress of communication in our societies since the 60's, that is at present primarily concerned with expanding the tange of exploitable frequencies, and this means in plain language: in more and more radio and TV programmes materializing. An expansion, as mentioned, that directly and immanently arises out of the mechanization of communication which first appeared in civil broadcasting in the reeording systems of the 60's and 70's, multitracking and frequency analyzing.

Its receptive counterpart among listeners and viewers is the dull desire for more, more, and yet more that presently dominates the media scene. Almost pseudo-archaic rites of a potlatch frenzy are gaining ground, while only the newest gags of an expanding simulation are bartered. In the field of electronic communication there is but one bad imperative when the door has swung open so widely: more, more, and yet more.

Thus the introduction of the commercial media in Germany (the dual system), was dictated by technical considerations, as ZDF (Second German Television) director Stolte says.[2] In Austria this is quite similar. What reasoning for this introduction should be labeIled economic or cultural, when real technical simulation machines demand to be conlinuously readdressed because of their inner nature?

This process of medial expansion has hardly gotten out of control. On the contrary, it controls itself so weIl that no censorship could do better. Today, each of us is forced to work in systems of mechanized communication, should we choose not to follow Botho Strauss' hermit ideology, just as no musician can help but use and submit to the computer-based self-dissection of his music. And thus we are all apart of the technically forced expansion of the electronic simulation worlds.

An additional result: Electronic media operate on all transmission channels almost identically to military signal and command data flows - the Gulf war was good evidence. CNN, the satenite channel, could stay albeit at first alone - on top of the war developments because this was the first complete satellite war.[3]

The Marine Corps, the tank and artillery battalions in the sands of Desert Storm also used regular commercial Laptops and Portables to graphically illustrate their battle plans and points of attack in the course of their Air-land Battle Doctrine, and set up a network of transmission cables and satellite disks in order to destroy the follow-on forces, the enemy's second wave.[4]

This demonstrates the new quality of the military-industrial disposition of networked digital systems: the completely openly proclaimed coexistence of civil and military signal flows on one and the same channel fabric causing lhe military no qualms. Since digital information streams are no longer analogue in nature, the recipient of such messages stands before a mountain of rows of numbers, before an arbitrarily large number, which is practically impossible to decode without a decoding key. The transmission and reception of digital data streams thus also bring the Marconi Problem, namely that reception always also meant interception, to a highly practicable solution for the military. Only exorbitant super-computers would allow an enemy to reconstruct every single transmission protocol, extremely diIficult for developing countries like Irak, whose every electronic reception capability had previously been bombed for weeks, and impossible for the electronics buff of a no longer existent revolutionary labour movement.

Computer networks of this magnitude, which transmit the position of individual soldiers in real time over ten thousand kilometres to the command centres in the Pentagon via satellites and digitilization, had already been in action during "Desert Shield", the simulation phase of the Gulf War. Plans have been devised in America to also use these precise communication systems for guidance systems in police work, e.g. in the war on drugs.

Certainly beyond such direct military involvement, we stand in Germany, Austria and Europe on the threshold of the introduction of a new broadcasting system which is intended to take over control and management of important civil functions in our lives: Its name is DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) and it will go into wide scale testing in 1995. [5]

At first 6 stereo radio channels will be able to broadcast in co-channel transmission, which means: Digital radio can be listened to from Rosenheim to Flensburg without changing your dial. That will initially be channel 12 in the second television band, which is intended for DAB across Europe. The co-channel transmission characteristics of digital communication signals should then also find their way into the VHF range.

But digital radio means: transmission is control; namely that the data package sent, which will be processed by a new generation of intelligent receivers, contains not only the audio data and values of the transmitted music and speech; but also an arbitrary number of parallel controlling signals which can allow the arbitrary separation of music from words, loud from quiet, pop from classical, radio drama from feature, news from commentary; each piece of audio information will be codifiable, and therefore the receivers of such radio transmissions are in fact small programmable computers. Whereby the end of radio is heralded, the end of the one way transmission of a source from a transmitter to a receiver. [6]

At night you leave your car's digital radio turned on in the garage, and in the morning you will discover that all the warning lights are blinking: and in the small display that such equipment has, stands: traffic hopeless today. A small printer, like taxis already have for bills, could at the same time print out a ticket for the next train, sponsored by BMW; which in turn triggered by the same channel, would already be running more often to bring all the other BMW drivers to work on time. At the train station, a nice little breakfast package and hot coffee await you courtesy of BMW's own catering company. This would be the introduction to the most harmless of all possible scenarios from the future of our western industrial nations, which incessantly advance toward transportation chaos and ecological catastrophies and need paramilitary guidance systems like DAB and others in order to not experience, like some American cities in the recent past and cities in the east today, sudden nihilistic doomsdays. New plots for coming dramas in radio art are coming out of the twilight: they are waiting to be written, and that means: to be programmed.

Wolfgang Hagen Translation: John Hausler