Editorial

Reality, it is generally held today, is merely a construction. Depending on their symbolic contents, both brains and computers generate their own realms of activity: the hammer in the head makes a nail of the world, bodies become results of genetic programs, politics is reduced to the clinical strike – these are the profits of symbolic capital.

However, time and again, reality does impose itself on virtual worlds. Only those who believe in reality will actually wrestle real events from all this meaninglessness. Symbolic forms need meat if they are to be transformed into lust, pixels need eyes to be shaped into faces. That is the contradiction: every concession to virtual realities, every attempt to merge with edited worlds is doomed to failure because of the contrasting natures of the body and systems based on the processing of symbols. It is precisely the interface, that dimension which has been created as a bridge to the systematic administration of symbolic and imaginary capital, which marks the fundamental difference. The difference between nerve endings and the administration of symbols is generated by the information without which nothing would be amusing, no illusions about technology, no administration of human capital would be possible: the absolutebit.

Humansense(s) can not blame this limited-ness on machines. We simply can not shake off reality. It is reality alone which we have learnt to transport via symbols. In order that paper machines and computers can administrate and emulate reality, what we call reality has to become data. In contrast with the rather more leisurely era of magic, industrial society has developed rational systems for developing symbols. So, how is man, his behaviour, his gestures, his industriousness, transformed into data? Jo Krausse describes the origins and development of modern diagramatics, the interplay and interweaving of maps and tables, of cartography and statistics. Peter Fibich takes the example of the prisoners\' triangle worn in Nazi concentration camps to show how simple geometry can be employed to mark man, to help us to remember the almost industrial process of mass murder, and to repress this memory. Stefan Wachter has used his mathematical skills to develop machines to register, interpolate and interpret human movements. And graphic designer Pierre di Sciullo designs a computer language for Tuareg nomads. Although the Tuareg have an alphabet which is older than all European systems of notation, it is only with this new tool that they can take part in the administration of the occident.

Jörg Petruschat