In the beginning it was the code

The huge show "Open Codes" at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe is dedicated to the signs that make up not only the digital world.

The signs called code are, according to the scriptures of diverse religions, the most powerful use of text in human history. Holy Scriptures give believers instructions, instruct codes machines. Not a few machines - almost all machines in the meantime. Codes are source texts from which artificial worlds emerge, they create images, films, sounds, music, they control robots, determine transport and communication, analyze our data, recognize us humans and make our homes "smart". Most recently, codes even teach themselves, one calls the "deep learning", "deep learning". In October, the artificial intelligence "Alpha Go Zero" within three days of the Japanese game of Go alone from the set of rules and from countless matches against himself - so well that it was the previous version "Alpha Go", the Best human player has beaten in the past year, defeated 100 in a hundred 100 games.

Yes, the codes that drive into the chips empower matter to become intelligent, they enliven things through information. This is a huge threshold exceeded. This writing belongs to the world. Sorry, people!

At the same time, we do not know exactly what they are. They are not the individual lines in which they are stored and stored. The code itself remains ominous, remaining intangible behind the processes it initiates, controls and controls. So what is code? This maximum question is dedicated to a project in Karlsruhe that can hardly be called an "exhibition" anymore. In the "Center for Art and Media" there, the ZKM, "Open Codes" was created as a multiple institution called the "Knowledge Platform", which is the exhibition, laboratory, workspace, lecture hall, snack bar, symposium, training facility, lounge and conference room. You can also play table tennis and kicker there. An enormous project and the attempt to make the all-determining codes finally tangible with the help of art and science.

The oldest codes at all include alphabets and number systems. They serve the communication, but also the storage of information. Writing creates culture. Always. However, the Karlsruhe long-term installation, which can be visited free-of-charge until August of next year, is dedicated to the historically and culturally variable, conceptual assignment of codes.

Artworks and scientific works based on both analogue and digital codes are presented. The platform also gives room to produce codes yourself. Programmers and researchers should be able to exchange views here. For the meetings of hackers, the beautiful name: "Algorave" (Algorithm + Rave) was found.

Researchers can now transfer the information from a movie about bacteria

From the Morse code to the genetic code, the barcode and binary code in Karlsruhe are returned - and immediately back. Because the signs of the code always need a medium in which they are formulated, but it does not always have to be the same. Speech can be converted into Morse code, which can be transmitted as sound or light signals. In "Open Codes" the work "Rhythm of Shapes" by Chikashi Miyama can be seen and heard, in which digital photographs such as scores are used and "enlightened". In order to demonstrate the lack of form and place of the code, which is perceptible only at the moment of its updating, the "Narcissistic Machine" by Michael Bielicky and Kamila B. Richter directs the gaze back to the perceiving viewer. Its digital image is algorithmically multiplied until it dissolves in a color abstraction as in nothingness. Narcissus in the code hysteria.

More recently, researchers at Harvard Medical School in Boston have incorporated into the genetic code of bacteria the digital information of both a black-and-white photograph and a historical film sequence, and can transmit it across generations of tiny creatures. Now, what applies to the genetic code applies to the infinite and lossless copiable computer code: it is copied from carrier to carrier, survives all of them and is therefore - immortal?

Of course, that's not easy thinking. The more than 200 objects and installations from art and science shown in Karlsruhe do not give quick answers; they want to be studied, not merely considered.

It just looks like kitsch thunderstorms when the decadent chandelier made of colorful Murano glass by Cerith Wyn Evans is replaced by a chapter from a standard work on astrophotography. That's - sure - snobby disco. On the one hand. But it's also a quasi-symbiotic work of code, computer, book text and the light of the chandelier. And that's why the work corresponds to many ambiguous, transcendent-oriented works that attract the ZKM director Peter Weibel like hackers bitcoins (even in this digital currency is worked here in a corner). Director Weibel is a mathematical esthete, a man who thinks (and talks) faster, as source text is read by the machine to which the theorems of occidental philosophy, contemporary as well as classical, ever-shimmering thought-mosaics coincide. Which, in other words, itself seems enlightened by the explosion code. "God is the first programmer, he created the code," Weibel says about the whirling through the digital area and then: "Man is just an annoying peripheral device." He just says so.

To wander through the Karlsruhe arrangement with Weibel is a parforce march through mathematics, algorithms and about the "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica" by Isaac Newton from the year 1686. Everything is represented here, in the Newton you can virtually browse. But even without Weibel one experiences an association thunderstorm that illuminates all the cognitive spheres between René Magritte's painting "La trahison des images" ("ceci n'est pas une pipe") from 1929 up to the current 3-D print. Here one encounters the really fundamental change in the semi-ologies of the old and new codes, between the painting and the computer-controlled printing: in the analogue world, there was no possibility of making a sign out of a sign; a real pipe was not a painted one Whistle, as Magritte set forth. Digitization, on the other hand, can transform data into actual things with 3D printing. In the work of Morehshin Allahyari, for example, one can once again admire the first encoded, then three-dimensional printed reconstructions of artifacts from the ancient city of Hatra, which IS 2015 had destroyed. With it - Tusch and drum roll! - the sign has become its sign. Code became a thing. That should give bucket enough for Semiotikseminare.

Here's even the wallpaper code, for the room you're sitting in

But the fact that we biomaterial people are now absorbed into various codes is also confirmed by the work "You: R: Code" by Bernd Lintermann, which welcomes the visitor like a "Rite de Passage" right at the entrance. Lintermann shows the entrant in the step transformation to his digital shadow: From the mirror image, in which he still recognizes himself, he is transferred with each image station more and more into a pure data body. One experiences oneself as genetic code, then in the form of a bar code, in which scarcely more than a strip aura remains. The fact that we are "code", as the title of this work says, means not only our genetic makeup, but also our status as a dataset in the various digital manners. For the operators of large networks, for example, who identify us on the basis of our electronic traces and no longer need a "copy" of us.

"In simulations, the sign is indistinguishable from reality." No, this time is not a sentence by Peter Weibel, it comes from the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who would certainly have liked the scenery. The quote is woven into a three-by-four-foot tapestry depicting a scene from a computer game, a shooter. The character becomes reality, not only in simulations, the show teaches.

No, their arrangements are not formed for a contemplative educational excursion to digital. They do not want that either. They form a tour d'horizon to codes in their many forms. But even so, "Open Codes" wants to clear the idea that the intangibility of code also means its incomprehensibility. The world is no longer just evidenced by the restlessness of things. It is coded. How incredibly diverse these codes are, is already demonstrated by the extensive web presence: open-codes.zkm.de.

At some point you sit in a harmless sitting area, looking at their confused wall decoration full of letters, numbers and signs and thinking: Thank God, here is finally only art! But then you realize that this wall decoration is the source code for the room you are currently in, a work by Karin Sander. Because, of course, architectural designs are also produced today with computer programs, the rooms are simulated before they are actually built. If you would feed this "wallpaper" code into a computer again, then it would simulate the identical room, even the color of the seat cushions would be the same. Have mercy on us, code! But where are you, who swallowed us?