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Technol6gos in Being
 Thinking IMedia

Series Editors

Bernd Herzogenrath

Patricia Pisters
Technol6gos in Being
RadicalMedia Archaeologyand
the ComputationalMachine

Wolfgang Ernst

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
NEW YORK• LONDON • OXFORD • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
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BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks

of Bloomsbury Publishing Pie

First published in the United States of America 2021

Copyright© Wolfgang Ernst, 2021

For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xii constitute an extension of

this copyright page.
Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray
Illustration© Paolo Sanfilippo

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Names: Ernst, Wolfgang, 1959- author.
Title: Technol6gos in being: radical media archaeology & the computational
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Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. I Series: Thinking media;
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 Contents

List of figures ix
Preface X

Acknowledgements xii

1 Introduction: Radical media archaeology 1

Media Arche:Locating primary scenes of technology 1
A remark on techno-mathematical competence 8

Part One Radical media archaeology as a method of media science,

and as techno-logical practice
2 Towards a more radical understanding of media as
technology and logotechnics 15
1binking media from within 15
Rethinking 'technology' beyond Heidegger 18
Techno-mathematical implementations: Disembodied l6gos 21
Archeand l6gosof electronic media 22
Materialist media archaeology 25
Radical technoanalysis: Theory and method 28
3 The hands of logos:'Digitality~ literally 30
Relieving the optical signal from human subjectivity: Case
study photography 30
Beyond anthropocentrism in the 'hands on media' approach:
'Manipulation; and technology 33
Typewriting: The de-coupled relation of the hand to writing 34
When l6gosencounters the machine: The discretizing keyboard 36
Digitalityinstead of the whole 'hand': Fingers and numbers 37
4 Human performance vs. technical operation: Mechanically
informed music from the past 39
Automatic invariance: Baroque music machines 39
Audio-technical 'archiving' of musical presence 41
Phono-graphical analysis vs. hermeneutic interpretation 42
Techno-logical tradition of media music 45
vi Contents

5 (Re)enactments of technologos 48
Analytic media diagrammatics 48
Techno-scenic knowledge: Media theatre 49
Re-enacting the technological past 50
Manual experimentation of time with machines 51
Symbolical re-enactment of machines: From Yugo back
to Babbage 53

6 Technical logification of the optical image 57

Logifiction of the image: The oxymoron of the analogue
'picture element' 57
Escaping the control of logos:Video as a material memory medium 59
Digital logification of the video image 60
Video compression 63
Human and/or machine 'vision': Computer graphics 64
Is there a l6goswithin technical images? Machine vision 68
7 Discretely addressing media artefacts 70
'Post-digital' nostalgia for materiality? Towards a redefinition
of the 'archaeological' artefact 70
Archaeologizing the present: The al6gosof video noise, and
digital sound compression 71
Object and agency of media archaeology: The Restauration of
early television recordings 73
'E.T: as topic of computer (game) archaeology, and
microprocessor ageing 75
Really 'forensic' media archivology: Reading a ROM 78

Part Two Radical media archaeology in close alliance with

operative logotechnics (computing)
8 Technol6gosfrom action: The matter of computation and
the (with)inhuman symbolic machine 83
Machine operations: Redefining the 'human' from within 83
Mechanization of the calculating mind: Karsakov 1832 84
The calculating human as a computational machine 'it'self 86
Where algorithmic reasoning actually takes place: Techno-
mathematical computing 90
 Contents vii

Algorithmic computation in media archaeological perspective 93

How close can computing come to the material world? 99
9 Time-discrete computing as articulation of technologos 104
Listening to computational time 104
Challenging the 'time' axis: Computation 105
Logosin technical being: Actual computing 105
Counting (and) time 106
Time-discrete technical procedures: Cinematography, computing 107
10 A new kind of'love for l6gos':Material media philology as
a more radical understanding of software 110
Media philology as critical enquiry of digital humanities practice 110
Operative encounters of logosand matter: Algorithms as 'software' 111
The unexpected behaviour of code 113
'Text' in the age of computer-based literacy: Software 114
Second-order logos?The literary code comment 116
Digital anachronism 117
11 Experimental technologos:Humanities of the digital 118
'Digital humanities' avant la Lettre:Archaeology proper and
techno-mathematical reason 118
Counting by numbers instead of story-telling: The l6gosof
Markov chains in information aesthetics 119
'Hermeneutics' after Shannon: Algorithmic experimentation
of text and speech 120
Rooting digital humanities: Techno-mathematics 122
New methods of content retrieval: Algorithmic data
identification 123
'Active archives' 125
The self-organizing archive 127
Media archivology:
Kittler's case 127
12 lnformatized matter: Computing/or and as architecture 129
Architectural matter and informational l6gos 129
The cybernetization of architecture 130
Architecture in terms of information aesthetics 132
Opening/closing 'gates': The flip-flop 132
Towards an archaeology of digital architectures from within 133
viii Contents

Algorithmicized architectures 135

Architecturally embedded l6gosvs. autonomous algorithmic
thought 136
Computational vs. computing 'architectures' 137
Resubstantiation of code into matter: 3D printing 139
13 There is no 'memory' for technol6gos: Digital storage
beyond the 'memory' metaphor, and its return in/as
machine learning 140
Only in quotation marks: Digital 'memory' from a
technological view 140
Not yet memory, or 'memory' no more? Intermediary
storage, delay lines 143
Neural 'memory', reformulated in technical terms 145
The return of 'memory' in artificial intelligence 147
A media archaeological prototype of machine learning:
The 'perceptron' 150
Human and/or nonhuman sorting of images by association:
PocketsFullof Memories 153
14 Against metaphysics in artificial intelligence: A reminder
of its technological ground 156
The neocybernetic model and its electro-technical a priori 156
'From' machine analysis 'to' statistical AI? Neural nets and/or
the algorithmic approach to intelligence 160
How 'deep' is machine intelligence? 'Emergent' artificial
knowledge and the metaphysical risk 163
When the human voice is revealed as technol6gos:The
anthropomorphic allure of machine 'learning' 166
15 Preliminary conclusions from the question concerning
technol6gos 171
Arche-l6gos,technically revealed from matter itself 171
Does technol6gosstill matter? Discussing the limits of
technological analysis 173
Technol6goswithin the Anthropocene 176
For a techno-logically renewed media materialism 179

References 183
Index 204
 List of figures

All photographs of technical objects have been taken from the

Media Archaeological Fundus (MAF) and its conceptual sister in-
stitution, the Signal Laboratory (SL), at the Department of Media
Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin.

1 Electromagnetic relay, materially implemented into its

symbolic code: The circuit diagram (Phylatex Physik-Gerate,
No. 15574, 4.01) 9
2 Same device, viewed from below 10
3 Large electric power switch 16
4 Logical circuitry disclosing itself by ageing: Cracked inte-
grated circuits (AY-3-8500) on an original motherboard of
the video game PONG (1973) 18
5 Electron tube, emanating from an antique radio set 24
6 Mignon typewriter, around 1910 35
7 Educational cathode ray tube (Crookes Tube) model in action 52
8 Mechanical typewriter (trade mark Olympia), with training
instruction, and manual 115
9 Magnetic ferrite core computer memory unit 141
10 Ultrasonic quartz crystal unit from PAL colour TV (for
64 microsecond delay of a single video image line) 144
 Preface
The Structureof InvestigatingTechnol6gos

Concerning technologos,this book is still an effort. In radically media

archaeological ways it traces the momentum which unfolds in the operative
being of technologies. Its analytic approximations to technologosensue in the
form of preliminary case studies towards a well-defined theory. Oscillating
between a weak and a strong interpretation of technologos,this book finally
suggests that this media-epistemic object may not simply remain a heuristic
hypothesis, but emerge as an event (if not singularity) itself.
This investigation is structured by two sections which unfold their
technical argument with an emphasis on media archaeology, and computing
as actual scene where technologoscomes into machine being. Part One,
'Radical media archaeology as a method of media science, and as techno-
logical practice', proposes 'radical' media archaeology as a method to
address the core questions concerning the technical implementations of
analytic, diagrammatic or mathematical logos.Concrete encounters between
reasoning logosand technical matter are discussed, for both 'analogue' and
'digital' media. Media archaeological analysis is applied to technological
practice, with a focus on signal-transducing artefacts. Critical analysis of the
technological condition requires the identification of core scenes of technical
reasoning in its temporal (electro-)physical materializations. Its central issue
is technologosin being. Part Two, 'Radical media archaeology in close alliance
with operative logotechnics (computing)', deals with epistemic ruptures
which arise in the escalations from analogue technologies to operative
logotechnics (computing), with a focus on the decisive difference between
abstract computation and actual computing in technologies defining the
present condition. This section displays the close alliance between 'radical'
media archaeological thinking and the analysis of computing.
In its mosaic structure and thematic case studies, the argumentation
pays respect to the morphogenesis of technologosas it unfolds in technical
media. With regard to the continual transformations of media, technologos
cannot be reduced to a single, conclusive definition, but is assumed to
be an epistemic engine that drives such transformations by redefining
itself. Since its heterochronicity withdraws from a narrative sequence of
arguments, the composition by chapters is rather modular than linear. The
various subchapters act as almost autonomous arguments. This is due to a
 Preface x:i

conscious decision. The question concerning technology, if it is not reduced

to a merely functional understanding of media as 'extensions of man' or
tools for human communication, requires an adaptive, flexible approach.
The thematic kaleidoscope of paradigmatic cases, and operative modes,
in the encounters between engineering reason and technical matter, is a
tactical approach. In its open, sometimes even unfinished, form, it invites
for an ongoing refinement. In order to provoke the enigma of technol6gos,
various thought experiments need to be enacted, towards a more radical
apprehension of technol6gos.Technol6gos,which cannot be reduced to
alphabetic representation, crystallizes in its various material and processual
metonymies. In analogy to the production of a hologram, the interferences
between the theoretical reference 'laser' beam and the direct observational
beam reflecting from the technical object result in an image of technol6gos
in its spectral information. The argumentation gains strategic coherence by
the applied media archaeological method and is biased by analytic curiosity
throughout.
 Acknowledgements

Having learnt about the book series title Thinking Media, in its double
sense of media as agency and as object of thought, the author immediately
felt inspired to address his concept of technol6gosto this program. I am
grateful to Bernd Herzogenrath for his spontaneous encouragement to turn
this spontaneous idea into a book manuscript. Further thanks go to John
Durham Peters and Jussi Parikka for having an encouraging look at the first
design of this book.
The Faculty of Cultural, Social and Educational Sciences at Humboldt
University, Berlin, has generously granted me a sabbatical to write the core
of this book. Many occasional readers have helped to improve my somewhat
unidiomatic English - while the staccatostyle of argumentation remains
the author's responsibility. David Friedrich has helped with the formal
editing. Jochen Viehoff, Stefan Holtgen, Thomas Fecker, Johannes Maibaum
and Philipp Schafer, with a perfect media archaeological eye, provided the
photographies of technical objects for the figurative illustration of my textual
arguments. The patience with which the editorial team of Bloomsbury
Academic has responded to the author's idiosyncrasies has been a pleasure.
I express my gratitude to Stefan Holtgen and Jan Claas van Treeck from
the Media Theories staff at Humboldt University for critical readings and
discussions of single chapters of the book.
There have been several academic occasions (lectures, workshops
and conferences) and institutions where I had the chance to present and
discuss single chapters and aspects of this book: Universita degli Studi di
Urbino (Centro lnternazionale di Semiotica e Linguistica), Ecole Normale
Superieure Paris, Orpheus Instituut in Ghent, ETH Zurich, University of
Copenhagen, Eotvos University Budapest (Digital Humanities Centre),
University of Liverpool (London branch), University of Cambridge (Churchill
College), University of Glasgow, Columbia University in New York, Bilkent
University (Department of Communication & Design) Ankara, New York
University (Berlin branch), SAGEpublishing (TCS journal) London, MAGIS
International Film Studies Spring School at Gorizia (University of Udine).
For such opportunities, my thanks go (among others) to Heloisa Amaral,
Silvana Mandolessi, Palk6 Gabor, Alfredo Thiermann, Ulrik Ekman, Mike
Featherstone, Scott Lash, Andrea Mariani, Arjun Appadurai, Andreas Treske,
Ramona Braun, Timothy Barker, Guerino Mazzola.
Finally, this book is dedicated to Ana-Olja. The day may come when she
will have acquired the language skills to read her father's mind from this text.
 1

Introduction
Radicalmedia archaeology

Media Arche:Locating primary scenes of technology

Radical media archaeology is hereby proposed as a method of investigating

media as technologies, with its epistemic focus on time-discrete, symbol-
processing mechanisms. Its thematic thread is technol6gos:the hypothesis
that there is a self-expressing quality of technical objects, beyond, below
and across their simply functional assemblage. Going in medias res, the
operative unfoldings of technical reason in matter, and as actual machine,
are the core drama of technological culture. Radical media archaeology, with
its ambition to derive epistemic insights from within technological devices,
is its proper mode of analysis. The quality 'radical' can be interpreted in a
multiple sense. First, it grounds media processes in their material technical
scene. Second, it goes to the roots, which is their conditioning techno-logical
archive. Third, it returns to beginnings - but less in terms of historic causality,
rather of the micro- and macrotemporal horizons which unfold between the
time-critical momentum and ahistoric invariances. Bypassing historicism,
media archaeological analysis of media time is a reminder of its symbolic
and technical operators. Such operators cannot be reduced to the 'historic'
moment when they became explicit, but immediately create a media-epistemic
temporal field of its own. Finally, 'radical' media archaeology is understood in
the sense of the square root '✓' (from Latin radix),to symbolically point at
the mathematical factor without which no understanding of contemporary
technologies is possible. In that sense, media archaeological analysis cannot
be reduced to a 'post-digital' aesthetics and nostalgia of media as tangible
hardware, but confronts its algebraic challenge as well.
Mathematics and logics are the constitutive forces in algorithmicized media
culture. They separate techno-logical operations from simple mechanical
tools. On the other hand, each of its actual operations still takes place in
100 per cent 'analogue' materiality and/or energy. While in information
aesthetics, it is its logical (in)formation which negentropically turns a physical
2 Technol6gosin Being

signal into a technical sign (Bense 1965: 218), the technol6goshypothesis

discovers such signification from within matter. As expressed by Friedrich
Kittler, '[i]fyou leave out the part of engineers who write little structures on
silicon you see one part of matter calculating the rest of matter' (Gane and Sale
2013: 324). On the level of microchip production by means of lithographic
masks, the relation between mathematics and engineering becomes transitive
in direct interaction. There is not only an abstract homomorphy between
chip design and its physical materialization, but 'a complete correspondence
between the mathematical model and reality' (Korte 1991: 35), mapping
technol6gos.Mathematical calculation in the process of diagramming and
individualizing microchips literally results in calculi,since 'chips are in fact
nothing but pebbles of quartz' (Korte 1991:36). So-called floating logical gates
are embedded in silicon oxide, as electronically programmable matter, and in
this concrete encounter, the symbolical regime is vulnerable to physical noise,
such as the intrusion ofalpha particles (Rhein and Freitag 1992: 92). Even if the
mathematical definition of an algorithm does not pay respect to its practical
executability on a real machine, in terms of technol6gos,there is no absolute
dichotomy between the 'material-free' abstract formula or algorithmic script,
and its brute physical configuration. There is an intimate interrelation instead.
The techno-mathematical calculus already includes the material aspect, in
true media adequacy. Its extreme is analogue electronic computing which
literally calculates with the physical qualities of matter and energy, such as
potentiometers and voltage, themselves. Mathematical reasoning here finds
its equivalent in an electro-physical operation (Korn and Korn 1956).
Media archaeology stays close to Foucault in the sense that he took
propositional logics, instead of cultural history, as the foundation of his
Archaeologyof Knowledge,defining 'the operational field of the enunciative
function and the conditions according to which it reveals various units (which
may be, but need not be, of a grammatical or logical order)' (Foucault 1972:
106). Concerning technology, though, in the more strictly defined sense of
operative diagrammatics, there is no matter-free mathematical operation,
but always its machine concept. Software studies and a refreshed materialist
approach join in. Radical media archaeological analysis, even if it is close to
the perspectives of speculative realism, more radically insists on the inductive
grounding of l6gosin technical matter, in its concrete instantiations, rather
than lofty philosophical deductions which metonymically muse about the
essence of technology without ever coming close to the machine in detail.
Can l6gosmake matter 'think' by its (in)formatization, that is, by engineering
and computing? In its etymological sense, l6gosnot only refers to speech
and discourse but to counting as well. L6gosas archetypal mental, oral or
textual cultural articulation becomes operational, even autonomous, in its
 Introduction 3

nonhuman technical embodiment. While alphabetic writing is still passive

literature, alphanumerical coding becomes a speech act (so to say) in
actual computing. Such a media thinking cannot be reduced to free human
thought, but has to become a (paper) machine itself, a symbolic emulation
of the operating machine (Holtgen 2016). As a materially inscriptive,
archaeographical articulation (Hiller and Holtgen 2019) logoscomes into
being as technologos.The blueprint of a thermodynamic machine, or the
circuit design of an analogue electronic device like the video image recorder,
becomes materialized in the actual apparatus, where it is forced upon
hardware and regulates the signal flow. While the symbolical notation of a
concrete machine is its abstraction, resulting from assemblages of concrete
enunciations, the computational Turing machine is a model mechanism,
where logosappears unbound from its limitation to the human brain. In
terms of the machine-like procedures ofreasoning, according to Turing 1937,
the algorithm is a machine, already. But technologoscan never be reduced to
an abstract universal, it always requires concretization. The heroic epistemic
enterprise of a '[l]ogic, in constituting itself as a formallanguage with absolute
rigour, breaks its links with the real world' (Thom 1983: 288). The difference
between the concept of an 'abstract machine' and Rene Thom's notion of logoi
as stable entities which provide for structural stability in pattern formation
(Thom 1983: 175; Guattari 2011: 11 f.) is its physical existence. There is no
technology that is purely 'digital', material- and energy-free information in
essence - just like the monetary value is always materialized, be it in the
coin, the bank-note or its electronic equivalent in bitcoin cryptocurrency.
Matter is assigned a different agency when it becomes mathematically
informatized instead of simply technically formatted. In principle already
(en arche),an algorithm requires material grounding, with its particular
determinations, in order to become operative. This can be many kinds of
matter, such as the integrated circuits of computer microchips. If its actual
implementations obviously make a physical difference in terms of speed
and reliability, for computational reason, this literally does not 'count'. On
discrete-state machines, Turing remarks: 'Strictly speaking there are no such
machines. Everything really moves continuously. But [... ] in considering
the switches for a lighting system it is a convenient fiction that each switch
must be definitely on or definitely off' (Turing 1950: 439). While in theory,
there is no evident limit to the degree of complexity of behaviour that may
be acquired by the diagram of a neural net, their actual development 'will
depend to a great extent on the environment (including the physical body) in
which it is embedded, the[ ... ] channels with which it is provided' (Minsky
1954: 6). Material implementation itself here is understood in a micromedia-
ecological sense, where logosactually encounters matter and energy (such as
4 Technol6gosin Being

silicon and electrons). The difference in speed which can be achieved by fully
electronic computing against (electro-)mechanical, or even handwritten
calculation, is time-critically decisive. This literally 'counts' for the definition
of computation itself, when it comes to define what is algorithmically
'calculable by finite means' (Turing 1937:230).
Media archaeology refers to the technical archein two ways: as an analytic
reduction of complex technologies to their critical principles (the logocentric
abstraction) on the one hand, and as investigation of their irreducible rootsin
operable matter on the other. A material substrate of highly integrated digital
media technology can be identified indeed: the compounds silicon dioxide
and its element silicon, used in micro-transistorized media for computing
purposes. The archaic electronic tube returns, functionally, from within
silicon. While the transparent qualities of glass culminated in optical media
interfaces such as the television 'tube' or the optical computer terminal, the
material glass element within in its electronic apparatuses remains opaque,
and its microchip processes are even intentionally hidden to intuitive
human-to-machine interaction. Media archaeological investigation therefore
opens this 'transparent black box' to give an insight in the usage of glass,
its compounds and derivates within digital media (Holtgen forthcoming).
Radical media archaeology, in its almost scientific approach, differs from
rather discourse-oriented media and communication studies. It investigates
the storage, transfer and process of media data on the media-theatrical
microstage where there is no human interference, first of all. Here, so-called
information becomes pure energy and matter, located within crystal grids
(Holtgen forthcoming). The techno-logics of so-called immaterial or even
virtual media realities sooner or later remind of its material ground.
Actual technologies are understood here not as merely functional
applications for mass media culture, but as operative knowledge theory. Ian
Bogost gives the name 'carpentry' to philosophical practice which gets its
hands 'dirty' with material technics such as soldering electronic condensers
and transistors on a conducting plate, as opposed to the way Bertrand
Russel and Alfred North Whitehead, in their Principia Mathematica,
'investigated the logicist view of mathematics by doing mathematics' (Bogost
2012: 92). Radical media archaeological investigation, when it comes to
circuitry design and computer programming, necessarily embraces both.
The essence of technol6gos escapes when the concept is logocentrically
reduced to pure mathematical reasoning, theoretical computation, or the
'abstract' symbolical machine. The tracing of encounters between logos
as a philosophical, mathematical or engineering model, and matter as
its physical medium, results in an actual microlaboratory of the technical
world from its own perspective, and in a true machine phenomenology.
 Introduction 5

Such implicit technological eigenknowledgedeserves to be uncovered and

articulated explicitly by media archaeological maieutics. Even Simondon
who carefully distinguishes 'technics' from 'technology' tends to reduce the
latter to 'a philosophical logos or meta-theory technics' ('Translator's Note'
to Simondon 1958/2017: 15). Technologosas technologically autonomous
operativity cannot be reduced to performativehuman reasoning; the mind is
not simply seized by technics, but acts as technics itself (Stiegler 1998: 193).
Technology is both thing- and think-knowledge, referring to noumenonand
phenomenon,material substance and diagrammatic concepts. The harmonic
ratio of the musical octave can be expressed numerically as 1:2, with regard
to the spatial extension of a monochord string. But it is a sonic being only
in its vibration, addressed by the frequency as magnitude of the vibrational
time event. Even this number remains symbolical. A different kind of
mathematics, d'Alembert's wave equations, addressed the physical dynamics
of the vibrating string, its media technologos(d'Alembert 1747: 214-49). As a
material becoming, it has an operative, co-originary existence, which cannot
be reduced to a mere derivation of the symbolic regime, but rather requires
the physical computing model approach.
While the ideal logos,be it the 'word', or an abstract algorithm, almost
metaphysically refers to a metareality, the actually articulated 'speech', and
its alphabetic expression, is a matereality. Technologos,as the becoming of
media functional enunciations, requires matter to take place, from 'logical'
reasoning in philosophy, to actual computation, which allows the Resource
Description Framework, as logosof the Semantic Web, to become explicit
machine 'reasoning'. The technical formations of matter relate to logosas
machine, while the concept of informatizable matter escalates in computing.
The differential wave equation, or the circuit diagram, which corresponds
to the phenomenon of the oscillatory electrical circuit, enables its symbolic
description, but is a signal event only when inductance, resistance and capacity
occur in concrete elements and are acted upon by an external electromotive
force as a function of the time t, such as the voltage from a dynamo, or due
to electric waves (Courant 1938: 503). It remains an enigma that the same
differential equation mathematically describes the oscillations of a mechanical
string and electromagnetically induced oscillations, even if they belong
to independent physical regimes (which is the condition of possibility for
analogue computing). Technologoshides in its temporary media metonymies.
Once the cultural archive, after its digitization, becomes accessiblefor software
to process its data, such material is techno-logically enabled to 'speak' for itself.
The encounters of logoswith technical matter occur on two levels: the
external academic and the genuinely techno-logical one. Academic theory
reflects media practices, and analyses the individual or social effects of media
6 Technol6gosin Being

on humans, along with a historical genealogy of the entanglements between

knowledge and technique a literal 'historical techno-logy' (Dotzler and
Roesler-Keilholz 2017: 10). More fundamentally than mediology, though,
technol6gosconcerns the genuine technical event. Sometimes, technologies
themselves act as active agents, even archaeologists, of generating knowledge
about media. One condition of possibility for the close academic analysis, that
is, the academic reasoning on television as 'cultural form' (Williams 1975),
has been video technology in the strict sense. For 'live' television programmes
to be academically examined, its recording for slowed down and time-axis-
manipulated replay was required. Therefore, in the 1970s, Friedrich Knilli
at the Technical University in Berlin acquired a costly AMPEX 1000A Two-
Inch-Tape-based video recorder. Different from celluloid film recording
directly from a TV monitor, the video signal preserves its technical identity
with the scan-line-based television image. Video recording thus made
television studies possible from within the medium.
The most precise form of encounter between l6gos and matter is
its actual technological realizations. In the case of convolutional 'deep'
machine learning and self-adaptive backpropagation algorithms, although
they result from human programming, such technical realizations seem
to escape logical comprehension from the human side, in favour of an
l6gosof its own. A media science, with media archaeology as its method,
insistently 'grounds' the investigation of technical things in actual matter and
discovers its principal sources of action rather than historical 'beginning'
or temporal 'origin'. There is a very 'old European' philosophical desire to
know the essence of technical things even if there is no immediate functional
application, like Heinrich Hertz's experimentation with electromagnetic
wave transmission, retrospectively triggering 'radio' in 1886. The beginnings,
causes and elementary units (archai,aitia and stoicheia}of technology are
the targets of media archaeological analysis, as has been defined for scientific
knowledge in the very first sentence of Aristotle's Physics (Book I). How
close can such analytic l6gosget to what unfolds within the technical (mate)
real? While media archaeology tries to get as close as possible to understand
the relevant technical details, its main task is to turn this knowledge into
an explicit media theory, identifying aspects which are of relevance to non-
engineers as well, in a broader sense.
The relations between reason and the physical, technical world have
long been discussed in occidental and other cultures, but they have been
anthropocentrically restricted. While questions like the embodiment of l6gos
in actual flesh, and the relation between mind and matter, have concerned
philosophy and religion (Liddell and Scott 1843/ 1996: 1057-9), in information
engineering, the 'word' over an arbitrary finite set of symbols (an 'alphabet')
 Introduction 7

becomes flash in the language ofhardwired electronic data processing. Media

theory avoids getting lost in metaphysics. It delimits the question to techno-
logical encounters which actually take place and are therefore observable in a
controlled way. Even if such processes escape their immediate perception by
human senses, there are technical devices such as the 'logic analyser' or the
multichannel storage oscilloscope which measure the digital signal events
within a system circuitry by electric clips and render them visible for human
cognition by timing diagrams. The neologism of a technologos,with its take-
off in media operative matter, cuts short and, at the same time, dislocates the
vast discussion on the nature of logosin the history of ideas. Technologos
is an actual, rather than simply conceptual, recurrence of Heraclitus'
philosophy of a supreme logoswhich is not internal to the physical world
but still structures it (McLuhan and McLuhan 1988: 36-7). It dwells within
the technical world indeed - but this time not a unspecified 'ether' or energy
(like electricity), but as knowledge-governed electronics and 'information'
(Donner 2017). Its operations are defined (sometimes 'vetoed') by their
grounding in the (mate)real and diagrammatic constraints. The focus of
media archaeological investigation is not on the human (performative), but
strictly on the technological, therefore: operativeaspect of this fundamental
theme. Conceptually, technologosis no derivation of a primary pure mind, but
fundamentally intertwined with matter and operativity from the beginning.
Against a theological or philosophical concept of pure, unprocessed spirit
(German Geist),media archaeology assumes that it only comes into being with
its structuralization by articulative logos.Rather than generally discussing
the 'mind', radical media analysis therefore concentrates on operative logos,
which is understood as rule-governed, syntactic connections between
material symbols, such as syllogistic machines. The (re-)mechanization of
Ramon Llull's ars combinatoriafrom around 1300 is both retrospective and
prospective media archaeology (Vega et al. 2019). The methodical claim of
media archaeology is that such analysis inductively starts from the concrete
techno-logical case, rather than lofty speculative theorems. Gregory Chaitin
(2006) has brought 'speculation into computer science' by identifying Omega,
a discrete infinity of real numbers, 'to explain how uncompressible quantities
enter the sequential order of 0s and ls at the limit of computation' (Parisi and
Portanova 2011). The question concerning technology requires such 'radical'
investigation, with a focus on the epistemic insights which can be created
from close analysis of non-discursive technological objects.
With digital computing, media matter has even more radically become
logifiedin the techno-mathematical sense; from there results a privileged
affinity between mathematical (computational) reasoning and rigid media
archaeological analysis. Different from anthropocentric apprehensive
8 Technol6gosin Being

'understanding' of analogue media signal messages as physiological 'massage'

of the senses (McLuhan and Fiore 1967), computational media require to
be thought as machine. The very term 'technology' literally refers to both
scientific analysis and material action itself. Kittler insists: ' "Thinking" or
"understanding" media requires mathematical information' (Armitage 2006:
34). With 'machine learning' based on artificial neural nets, does l6gosfinally
unfold from operative matter itself? And to what degree does a neural net
'compute' functions of signals rather than discrete numbers or symbols (von
Foerster 2003)?
In times of global 'cloud' computing, 'deep' machine learning and
'speculative realism', precise technological analysis resists the temptations
of being lost in metaphysics. Radical media archaeology insists on a critical
rooting of such discourses in what actually happens as the microscenes
of techno-logical media theatre. The identification and archaeographical
description of the interlacing of l6gos and matter in exemplary media
technological scenes are first attempts towards a more comprehensive
ontology of technol6gosin being.

A remarkon techno-mathematicalcompetence
Sensitivity for epistemogenic scenes in electronic engineering and computer
science is a precondition for tracing technol6gos.In difference to most media
studieswhich perform a discourse-related media-cultural analysis, radical
media archaeology rather aims at what might be called a media science.
Technical and mathematical precision from within technology is required
for such an enquiry, which admittedly is only partially 'radically' fulfilled in
this present text form. It remains debatable to what extent it is possible, in
principle, to identify the diagrammatic machine behind actual coding, or
engineering, in spite of, or rather because of, not being practically skilled in
programming or electronic design. In a kind of media-epistemic uncertainty
relation, a sense of technol6gosflashes up, but at the same moment escapes
in media practice, while its formulation rather depends on its conceptual
apprehension. A more technologically informed microanalysis of the actual
processes, such as microchip fabrication from silicon as the active matter of
information society, or of software code as the literal script of micromedia
theatre which is enacted in so-called digital culture, gratefully relies upon
carefully selected case studies published within, or associated with, the
media-scientific community. The present text is dedicated to their media
archaeological brilliance. This is mandatory in order to discuss, for example
the clash between performative cultural techniques of counting (with literally
 Introduction 9

'digital' fingers) with abstract number theory which, in turn, triggered

numerical rematerialization as operative computing (Siegert 2019). Radical
media archaeological analysis actually identifies the scene where such logos
takes place in technical media, such as the digital Multimeter Fairchild Model
7000 (1969), a high-precision analogue-to-digital converter (Westphal 2019).
Gilbert Simondon delicately differentiates thermionic tubes over pages in his
seminal analysis of the modes of existence of technical objects (Simondon
1958: Part I). When such a technical individuation is precisely analysed
and re-synthesized as diagrammatic and actual electric circuitry, media-
epistemological questions arise: How can a digital impulse result from an
analogue signal at all? What in terms of the Turing machine conceptually
looks like a logical abstraction (Turing 1937) materially unfolds as a veritable
techno-logical drama. The 'digital object' is not just informational but
material. Symbolic binary logic can be enacted as a physical event, as actual
technical unit.
'The great thing about logic gates is that they are about less logic than
electronics. Cognitive science doesn't get this, which is more than an

Figure 1 Electromagnetic relay, materially implemented into its symbolic

code: The circuit diagram (Phylatex Physik-Gerate, No. 15574, 4.01), viewed
from above. From: Media Archaeological Fundus, Humboldt-University
Berlin, Department of Media Studies. Photo: Thomas Pecker.
10 Technol6gosin Being

Figure 2 Same device, viewed from below.

affordance, but the schema [... ] of digital thought itself 1 The material
concretization of Boolean truth tables into electrified matter is not simply
a mechanization of philosophical logical reasoning (such as a syllogism),
but (in terms of hylomorphism) requires medium adequacy. A symbolic
form only takes place in, or more radically: as (in)formatizable matter.
Operative logos,in order to become media-operational in time-intensive
intervals of movement or phases, here roots in counting as material action
(Aristotle 2001: IV, § 218-19). The time integral of condensers, cross-
related circuited transistors (flipflops), time-giving electronic counters and
differential amplifiers force the circuitry to change from undefined states
(their natural analogue condition) to either/or decisions, which then become
functional for binary 'O'/' 1' calculation, within an infinitesimally short time
(Westphal 2019: 109). Here, the 'time of non-reality', as it has once been
termed by Norbert Wiener (Pias 2009), which for fractions of a second
occurs between alternative states, literally counts in switching devices - be
it electro-mechanical relays or electronic elements. Their actual decision is
true random when it immediately derives from the inevitable thermic noise.
Binary reasoning is challenged by its material condition - which is mastered
by electro-technical logos.The electronic triode does not simply amplify a flow
of electrons, but allows to govern a strong current by application of a small

1
Electronic communication by Scott Lash, 23 March 2019.
 Introduction 11

one at an additional grid. All of the sudden, the energetic device transforms
into a logical unit. Such applied cybernetics operates with inherent qualities
of matter and energy itself, eliciting its implicit technol6gos.
Technology leaves future reconfigurations in the relation between l6gos
and matter open. In the media archaeological sense, radically detailed studies
of such configurations, ranging from mechanisms to time-critical micro
events, still keep the epistemological vanishing point in mind. Only this
qualifies as essentially media-scientific research. When analytic l6goscomes
close to the actual technical scene, it seizes the moments when technol6gos
flashes up.
 Part One

Radical media archaeology as a

method of media science, and as
techno-logical practice
 2

Towards a more radical understanding of

media as technology and logotechnics

Thinking media from within

A thorough understanding of media needs to include a concept of materiality

that focuses on nonhuman agencies as well (Herzogenrath 2015). While
recent academic media studies explicitly understand media in the wider
context of cultural techniques, discursive formations and ecologicalsystems,
and do not exclusively reduce them to their technical a priori anymore,
the present investigation, in an almost antithetic (re)turn, even more
radically grounds media analysis in the technological apparatuses and their
operational units, such as relays, transistors and hard- and software. Media
archaeology locates the scenes where reasoning l6gosand informatisable
matter interfere - be it functional operations or ,in unintended frictions.
What is symbolically expressed in the alphanumeric code of 'digital' media
actually exists as electric voltage; against several voltages which ideally
count as 'One', there is not even a real 'Zerd, but always a ground bias, more
appropriately termed 'high' and 'low' in communication engineering. Only
logos(counting as measurement) abstracts them into a binary 'O'/'1' alphabet.
A 'bit' as information unit exists only conceptually. Its media theory becomes
operative with the electromagnetic relay to perform the opening or closing
of logical gates. L6gos is not simply 'embodied' here, but exists in this
double-bind. In terms of a technical grammatology, there is no immaterial
logos,but always already its material and/or energetic trace. An abstractly
formulated algorithm, at first 'logocentric' sight in the Aristotelean tradition,
seems autonomous from its various concrete software implementation in
computing machines. But understood as stepwise procedure, it already has
to become, or rather is, a machine, which depends on a material scene (even
in the brain) to take place as such. Computation is always intertwined with
the physical event; in so-called computing, this is signals which are wired
within circuitry. Computational 'thought', here, does not simply equal, but is
identical with electric switching - operative diagrammatics. Charles S. Peirce
has designed the first electric circuit as an instantiation of logical reasoning,
16 Technol6gosin Being

biased by a battery: 'I think electricity would be the best think to rely on [... ]
where the circuit may be open or closed. [... ] This is like multiplication and
addition in logic' (Peirce 1976: 632).
Norbert Wiener once questioned the almost canonical division in
German engineering theory between Stark- and Schwachstromtechnik which
systematically sets apart electric energy transmission from microenergetic
communication media. In electronics, as it is materially defined by the
electron tube, the decisive energy employed to direct current itself is rather
microenergetic. Logosintervenes: '[I]n that moment circuits oflarge power
are used to transmit a pattern or to control the time behavior of a machine,
power engineering differs from communication engineering only in the
energy levels involved' (Wiener 1942/1949: 3).
The very same thermionic tube, which in its individuation as triode
was meant to amplify and modulate current, could be (mis-)used as a
binary switching device (flip-flop) without ever alternating its technical
essence. Voltage for the amplification of signal transmission between the
in- and output of a system, by arbitrary negative feedback coupling as
intervention of engineering logos,can be turned into automatic self-control

Figure 3 Large electric power switch. From: Media Archaeological Fundus,

Humboldt University, Berlin. Photo: Jochen Viehoff.
 Media as Technologyand Logotechnics 17

(Volz 2019: 127-8). At the same time, the thermionic tube could logically
be replaced by a materially completely different, but functionally equivalent
device: the discrete semiconducting transistor. Its miniaturization as field
effect transistor (MOSFET), embedded into silicon, is not simply a technical
escalation; binary logoshere is not imposed upon matter in an instrumental
sense (media formation), but embedded and literally highly integrated within
(media information), going literally in medias res. When does binary logos
(Boolean logics) become invasive to matter itself? The triadic elements
'source', 'drain' and 'gate' of MOSFET result from a layered chip-producing
process, where photo-lithography (with its sequential masking, UV-lighting,
'developing' and corroding) turns the conventional meanings of 'etching' and
'photography' upside down, archaeographically burning an ideal logothetic
superstructure into a material basis. In reverse, the very same UV light is
applied to erase logical code in the Electronic Programmable Random
Access Memory chips (EPROM) as applied, for example for computer game
cartridges.
Within a microchip, the so-called signal layer conducts the current
between the units from within. Logical and material connection here merge
into one. But the closer the media archaeological gaze (which is media-active
here itself, the raster electron microscope) looks at the logificated structures
of an Integrated Circuitry (or at the grove of a gramophone record in Shellac),
the more they entropically dissolve into matter itself - until the energy of the
observing medium itself interferes with the observed matter. This essentially
corresponds with the fragility of semiconducting devices in monolithic
technology as such, which superimpose the functions of a conductor and an
isolator as the technofunctional equivalent to binary logics. All of the sudden,
a few atoms more or less make a critical difference for the function of the
embedded transistors at all, undoing any categorical logos/matter dichotomy.
For humans, phenomena like 'memory' and operations like 'thinking'
are conceived as an internal process that is purely mental. But when the
mind is in the mode of logical reasoning, its mechanism becomes technics.
For technological materialism, there is always a material basis of mediation
which induces reasoning from within - cognitive technology. Therefore, a
genuine media philosophy worthy of the name cannot simply write about
media but identifies the philosophical qualities and impacts from within each
medium technology. The media archaeological premise is to think through
media. 1 While for previous autonomous mass media like film and radio,

1
A core assumption of the 'Thinking Media' book series; https://www.bloomsbury.com/
us/series/thinking-media (accessed 5 November 2019).
18 Technol6gosin Being

Figure 4 Logical circuitry disclosing itself by ageing: Cracked integrated

circuits (AY-3-8500) on an original motherboard of the video game PONG
(1973). From: Signal Laboratory, Department of Media Studies, Humboldt
University, Berlin. Photo: Stefan Holtgen.

their diagrammatic ratio has rather been hardwired in their technological

artefacts, with algorithmic reasoning in computing, media thinking becomes
even explicit. The 'deep' learning mechanism in currently refreshed Artificial
Intelligence is 'thinking media', based on artificial neural networks. Media
do not only predetermine the present situation (Kittler 1999: XXXIX), but
in the meantime, its technol6gosunfolds and executes within the operative
present. At the same time, 'it becomes increasingly difficult to understand
how a result has been actually derived' (Schoenenberger 2019: IX). Concepts
such as Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) are both a challenge to, and
are challenged by, technol6gos.

Rethinking'technology'beyond Heidegger
Sir Winston Churchill had not been able to attend the official opening of the
Churchill College in Cambridge, in 1964. Instead he wrote a signed letter
(appropriately a typescript) accentuating the need of Great Britain to train
 Media as Technologyand Logotechnics 19

'technologists'. This term shall not be reduced to practical engineeringor

technicians,but extended to the logosof techne.
If technology is not historically conceived as eventual, derivative
by-products of scientific activity, 'but as constitutive of the contemporary
scientific modus operandiitself', the 'technological mode of action is engaged
in the core of the scientific enterprise' itself, acquiring an epistemic function
(Rheinberger 2005: 315), as expressed by Gaston Bachelard in a paper on
microphysics from 1931: 'This noumenology implies a phenomenotechnique
by which new phenomena are not simply found, but invented, that is,
thoroughly constructed' (Bachelard 1970: 18-19).
At that point, a differentiation between technics and technology
itself reveals the double roots of the technological practice. While in the
German original, Martin Heidegger philosophically questioned 'technique'
(engineering), in its translation into English, this became 'technology'
(Heidegger 1949/1977). The shift from technics to technology includes
the noumenon which, according to Immanuel Kant's philosophy, is an
object which exists in intellectual, nonsensual perception exclusively.Such
symbolical objects of logical reasoning, in the case of technology, become
implemented in matter. The difference is expressed in Heidegger's essay
'The Age of the World Picture', where the technical approach to physical
nature (the experiment as core of scientific enquiry) is identified in its act
of numerical measuring, that is: challenging nature by a mathematical
procedure (Heidegger 1938/1977). From the entry of such logosinto the
machine results technology in a precise sense. The difference between an
energetic engine and the computational Turing machine is not simply
mathematized mechanics, but its radical reversal, revealing the mechanism
of mathematical reasoning itself, as expressed by Kurt Godel regarding
Turing's work: '[T]he concept of"mechanical procedure" (alias "algorithm"
or "computation procedure'' or "finite combinatorial procedure") [... ]
is shown to be equivalent with that of a "Turing machine" ' (Godel
1964/1986: 369-70). Logical reason, formalized as algorithm, comes into
existence as operation only (Niickel 2018). It therefore, though, requires
a material medium to unfold - be it by neural connectivity in the brain,
by symbol manipulation on paper or as signal transduction in electro-
physical circuitry. Most formal descriptions of computer architectures
miss the actual media archaeological rooting of the symbolic order (from
programming languages down to the operating system and binary logics)
in solid matter; only here, logical reasoning actually unfolds (Holtgen
2018: 105, note 3). The typewriter, or the calculating-machine, may be
considered as replacement of human thinking by thinking mechanisms
(Sieg 2006) - not in terms of a simple embodiment, or simulation, but
20 Technol6gosin Being

as co-original agency. If a mechanism (from ancient Greek mechane),in

engineering, is a 'tight coupling' (Heider 1959) of rigid elements effecting
each other by transmission, its causation equals a logical one indeed.
It can result in an energetic machine, or a symbolic concatenation:
any artificial 'contrivance', or engine, for operations (Liddell and Scott
1843/1996: 1131). The human performance of algorithmic reasoning, as
cultural technique, is thereby identified as operative indeed. This operation
needs a material scene to unfold in time. Algorithmic thought does not
emerge abstractly in the human mind, but when it is coupled to mental or
material writing techniques, such as pencil, eraser and square-patterned
paper. There is no abstract machine in the pure logical sense, but an actual
apparatus. Algorithmic reasoning becomes autonomous software once it
is implemented into a nonhuman mechanism. As formal reasoning, l6gos
does not simply come into the machine, but inextricably is machine as
operational matter. Any archaeology of the computer and its programming
practice oscillates between these two poles. Almost like a transistor itself,
the mechanical materiality and electronic energy at the same time enable
and resist the idealism of a pure algorithmic thought.
David Hilbert's metamathematical formalism resulted in a non-
referential, non-semiotic use of mathematical signs and operators. Once
characters become simply operative, they are engineerable, resulting in
Turing's conceptual paper machine for calculating algorithms in 1936.
While simple mechanics has been able to implement simple calculating
rules, a program in terms of computation is able to start, control and finish
calculations according to its own technol6gos.Only then calculating tools
become technological machines (Kittler 1997).
Media archaeology analyses the negotiations and reciprocity between
the techno-logical mathematization of machines and the logotechnical
mechanization of mathematics itself - from cultural techniques of counting
and mechanical calculators as bodiless technique, to technology as
materialized l6gositself. The logicof engineeringis one aspect of technology,
while another one is the engineeringof logicsuch as the building of logical
machines. Philological and historical aspects of computer archaeology on the
one hand, with its scientific and engineering aspects, ask to be integrated
with an archaeological enquiry of its almost ahistorical logical procedures,
replacing the historicist quest for temporal origins (the conventional sense of
arche)by the mathematical square root symbol itself.
The archetypal emplotment of media archaeology is not simply an
antiquarian love for the ancient artefact, but also the romantic desire to
revive it 'through a transhistorical operativepractice' (Sobchack 2011:
324) which correlates with Heidegger's reading of ancient Greek techneas
 Media as Technologyand Logotechnics 21

'a "revealing" that not only "brings forth" but also makespresent' (quoted in
Sobchack 2011: 324). In the philosopher's own words: 'Ifwe look at Things
just "theoretically", we can get along without understanding readiness-
to-hand. But when we deal with them by using them and manipulating
them, this activity is not a blind one; it has its own kind of sight, by which
our manipulation is guided and from which it acquires its specific Thingly
character' (Heidegger 1927/1962: 98). Technology is not primarily a way of
making or doing things, but rather itself an archaeological action: 'a way of
revealing things that precedes the making' (Inwood 1999: 209). The essence
of technology is the Gestellin being: an operative framework, like a 'mill'
- which is accidentally was the term Charles Babbage used to describe
the central processing unit of his nineteenth-century full-mechanical
protocomputer, his Analytical Engine. Mathematical reasoning does
not precede but co-evolves with the materiality and the actual coding of
computing techniques. This once led to mathematizing material machines
first, as calculators, and then to mechanizing mathematical procedures
itself.

Techno-mathematical implementations:
Disembodied logos.

The media archaeological perspective liberates the term 'embodiment' from

its narrow organic restriction and concentrates on the moments where
technical design or mathematical reasoning is radically implemented in
the physical world and, thereby, becomes temporal beings. The very term
'implementation' tries to avoid the anthropocentric interpretation of
embodiment (Finn 2017: 26-32). In a similar way, instantiation refers the
idea that in order for a property to exist, it must be object or have a substance.
This is not limited to human bodies: in computer science, the 'instance' refers
to any running process, and in the object-oriented programming paradigm
specifically to an object as an instance of a class. On its functional level, the
description of an operative system is a diagram. Operative diagrammatics
is the physical embodiment of symbolic languages. A world of difference
takes place when this diagram is embedded in physical matter. In computer
science, implementation names the realization of a technical specification or
algorithm as a software program. When a piece of computer hardware can
interpret the logosof a programming language directly (in a transitive way),
that language is machine code. So-called native code compilers compile a
program into machine code. While in mathematical abstraction, codes are
22 Technologosin Being

universal, in the moment of their techno-logical specification the body or

matter in which they are running makes a difference. An 'instance' defines
any runningprocess, specifically an object as an instantiation of a class - an
'embodiment' from an operative media archaeological point of view.

Arche and logosof electronic media

The term 'archaeology' itself is indicative in its two components: arche
and logos.An archeis never simply a beginning; it is a massive rupture, a
leap forth, 'implicitly anticipating whatever springs from it' (Inwood 1999:
152). The archeof technical knowledge starts from an analysis of its present
objects, rather than from ancient Greek philosophy. It may, then, 'radically'
return to some necessary, but not sufficient, roots of thought in Aristotle as
the precursor of media theory.
Arche shall not be reduced to the study of beginnings (Liddell and Scott
1843/1996: 252); it as well expresses the lasting impact, the ongoing rules
and order resulting from that origin. In Aristotle's scientific philosophy,
'archemeans, at one and the same time, beginning and control [... ] origin
and ordering' (Heidegger 1998: 189). Heidegger emphasizes the unity that
oscillates between the two, in a kind of historic-archaeological double-bind:
thinking structure and time. The archaeological act of revealing precedes
logos;the very term 'archaeology' is disrupted by that epistemic gap.
Media archaeology, as a field of study and a method of enquiry, strikes
epistemic sparks from within technology. Implicit knowledge as the logos
which is embedded in material technical devices (Baird 2004) cannot easily
be transformed into narrative description. A notorious case for technological
reasoningwhich never loses touch with actual technological devices are
Simondon's reflections on the thermionic tube. This device gave rise to the
meaning of 'electronics' as intelligent operation itself, different from mere
energetic electrics (which is categorically sometimes confused in McLuhan's
media theory).
Electronics is defined by the subtle, intelligent application of micro
voltages to manipulate current-based events, where the current is not used
for energetic purposes like in a traditional light bulb but to modulate the
flow of electrons within a vacuum glass body itself. Apart from its function
as electronic signal amplifier in analogue media such as the radio, the
thermionic tube has been reapplied as a digital switch for the processing of
information in early electronic computing - the very same technical device,
but in a fundamentally different functional syntax. In chapter one 'The
Medium Is the Message' of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media from
 Media as Technologyand Logotechnics 23

1964, the author points out that the light bulb is pure medium, unless it is
used for informational purposes, such as Morse code in optical telegraphy.
All of the sudden, artificial light emanation becomes logified. With a flip-flop
circuitry consisting of basically two coupled thermionic tubes for binary
switching, the basic unit of information, the 'bit', the evacuated light bulb
re-entered the media theatre, this time not for its electric, but electronic,
capacities. Such persistent, divergent or recurrent signal events of the
thermionic tube escape the linearity of media historiography. Archaeography
therefore aims at alternative modes of writing the being of media in time.
Instead of narrative 'origins' in the historic sense, it indicates other levels
of technological machinic and electronic tempor(e)alities: its governing
principles (arche)and 'archaic' essentials which endure into the present. Any
technology, as long as it is still functional, is radically present when being in
media operation.
Electronic media hardware such as the analogue radio, which has been
familiar until recently, abruptly becomes dysfunctional with digital signal
transmission. Still, antique electronic circuit diagrams remain readable,
in equiprimordial, even ahistorical, invariance towards temporal change -
just like a geometric drawing on an ancient Egyptian papyrus can still be
deciphered as a mathematical argument. It is possible to operativelyreplicate
and thus equiprimordially revive Ferdinand Braun's nineteenth-century
crystal radio receiver in the present indeed, using commercially available
electronic components. One can still follow Braun's design principles
today, even though they were established more than a hundred years ago.
Electric engineering has since progressed, while its logics is still intact. In the
moment of radio signal reception, its technical history is itself suspended in
the actual implementation. Even a receiver of pulse-modulated radio waves
still requires an antenna where electromagnetic signal transduction actually
takes place in physically analogue ways. What gets lost is not the techno-
operative message, but the ephemeral performative discursive content of
early radio transmission. In the case of radio, the electronic technol6goshas
the cultural logos(human speech, the sound of music) as its favourite mass
media content. Not much is known about early radio culture in terms of its
programs; at best there are fragmentary recordings by means of other media,
such as optical sound tracks, wax discs and audiotapes. The performative
(humanly produced) content of 'radio' broadcasting from the past has been
lost to large degrees. But McLuhan directs the analytic attention from the
apparent semantic content of a medium to its true media theatrical, operative
message which is radio's technical articulation. To a certain degree, radio
technology (its apparatus, its infrastructure for broadcasting) has remained
intact over generations, in an almost time-invariant endurance. Its single
24 Technol6gosin Being

Figure 5 Electronic tube, emanating from an antique radio set. From: Media
Archaeological Fundus, Humboldt University, Berlin. Photo: Jochen Viehoff.

electronic components, like the vacuum tube, have been materially, but not
functionally, replaced: by the transistor first, finally by semiconductors in
integrated circuits. The l6gosof circuitry, though, remains intact. Ancient
radios equipped with electron tubes, like from the late 1930s, are in principle
still ready to receive signals with a connection to electric currency and a
sufficient antenna cable. Unlike an authentic medieval document in an
archive that reports news from a bygone era, however, these radios do not
broadcast programs from the late 1930s. The radio era has remained stable
with regard to its technological infrastructure: an epoch that, on a principle
level, has experienced some modifications, but no substantial transformation.
Radical media archaeology is different from historical media archaeology
and the 'dead media' approach. Bruce Sterling's Dead Media Project, initiated
1995 as a mailing list for the Internet, is nowadays dysfunctional itself. Its
memory stays in the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive at https://
archive.erg. Radical media archaeology does not primarily take care of
the heroic age of radio technology as a new 'antiquity', but reminds of, and
insists on, its involvement in the contemporary now. Maxwell's and Hertz's
techno-mathematical laws of electromagnetic radiation persist, more than
 Media as Technologyand Logotechnics 25

ever, in the age of wireless narrow- and broadband transmission for mobile
digital communication devices. Media archaeology, different from media
historiography or the museum, seeks access technologies from the past to the
extent that they still operate in the present. A methodological dilemma arises
here. Can the technologosof a media culture only be identified to the extent
that it has been organized into an archive? Analytic observation is possible
only from a distance. Does the very secrecy of technologosdetermine that
it can be described only in retrospect, that is: when it has been opened
for access and thereby historicized?2 Radical media archaeology, against
historicism, claims that it must be possible to analyse a media condition
while it occurs, in real time. Especially when it comes to the question of
computation, its academic analysis often takes part in the very field which
has generated it, which is primarily university research, and the books in its
libraries. But an in situ analysis is an 'auto-archaeology' (Mackenzie 2017:
XI). This corresponds with actual archaeography, where the diagram of a
machine expresses its operation, or a symbolical description of an electronic
system converges with its actual circuitry. The graphical user interface
versions of software tools such as the Simulation Program with Integrated
Circuit Emphasis (SPICE) fuses writing and wiring, ranging from logosto
matter: from the abstract algebraic formulation of its components to its
concrete physical modelling. In the regime of technologos,the writing about
code and code writing itself increasingly entangle. 'Practically, this is made
possible by working on code and text within the same file, in the same text
editor' (Mackenzie 2017: XII). Still, the limit is defined by the archive: 'The
capacity to mingle text, code, and images depends on an ensemble of open
source' (Mackenzie 2017: XII).

Materialistmedia archaeology
'[T]he materialist approach now widely referred to as German media theory'
(Solomon 2013) takes both the technical (physical) and the mathematical
(logical) aspects of (especially computational) media into account. This
understanding of technology is literally derived from ancient Greek techne,
and logos which is not just 'words' for communication and discourse
but numerical ratios as well. While media, in the 'elementary' sense, are
a precondition for communicative cultural techniques (Peters 2015),

2
As discussed by John Johnston in his 'Introduction' to Kittler 19976, subchapter 'DN
2000: 4-6.
26 Technol6gosin Being

electronic media are artificially formatted materialities for self-controlled

modulation. In addition, digitization translates material artefacts into
data, thereby creating new cultural practices of symbolic interaction. In a
further twist (or mechanical trick), the electronic computer is not simply
the material realization of a symbolic universal Turing machine model,
but its co-originary machine 16gos.While calculating numbers written
with pencil on paper is a symbolical machine already, wired by the human
brain, electro-technical computing is just another - though significantly
nonhuman - 'physical symbol system' (Newell 1981). For Turing, symbol
manipulation (and therefore algorithmic reasoning as well) is not at all
abstracted into an operation of a pure mind, but literally material writing or
'printing' of symbols which, when observed close, dissolve into printer's ink
(Turing 1937: note 5). Like the 'time of non-reality' which occurs between
the two states of binary switching devices, it requires energy to keep such
matter sufficiently distinct for discrete computation. Media theory and
technical matter coincide in the Turing machine, 'where theory is technics
already' (Dotzler 1989: 129). Radical media archaeology turns the familiar,
logocentric hierarchy of symbol processing upside down. The physical layer
of computing, where syntactic symbol processing becomes electric states
in logical gates, is not the lowest, brute force form of the mind controlling
physis (Kramer 1994: 105), but the one to start with, for the analysis of how
logosencounters matter as logification.Only when technically (in)formatized
matter and its observation are separated, technologoscan be articulated in
natural, or mathematical, language. Against this technologocentrism, the
material-discursive phenomenon of diffraction 'challenges the presumed
inherent separability of subject and object, nature and culture, [... ] human
and nonhuman' (Barad 2007: 381).
With technology, the venerable philosophical mind vs. body discussion
becomes experimental epistemology. Not just a model of that question, but
as its actual event, technology allows for precise archaeological analysis. If
machine reasoning as material operativity is not anthropocentrically reduced
to 'embodied' or 'extended' mind, but understood as alternative form of a
nonhuman mind (if not consciousness) itself, matter escapes its metaphysical
reduction to a simple antithesis of logos.
Media archaeology,as a method of media analysis, addresses the structural
(material and logical) preconditions of media practice which Foucault named
as !'archive,such as Internet protocols (Galloway 2004) or the von Neumann
architecture of digital computers. Furthermore, media archaeology is an
aesthetics, the 'cold gaze' of distanced understanding. As an 'archivology', it
is deeply obliged to archival evidence and technological precision (circuit
diagrams and literal source code as source of evidence). There is a certain
 Media as Technologyand Logotechnics 27

nostalgia for the 'analogue' indeed in the media archaeological impulse -

but this should be kept private. In addition, media archaeology - such as
Paul DeMarinis's electroacoustic installations - is an art form. This archaism
reduces contemporary media complexity to its basics, as opposed to the
intangible hiding of data operations in microchips in ubiquitous computing
today which reduce technology to the maximum.
Media archaeology is a gesture of 'open source' in the literal sense. It is
not reduced to its discursive meaning as public usage of source codes in
programming, but actually deconstructs hardware as well, dismantling media
from their designed enframing, unclothing the chassis. In its approach to
the materiality of media, media archaeology is akin to classical archaeology
which deals with the material remains of a culture, but different from the
archaeological discipline, includes 'literary' hermeneutics as well: no
semiotic, but techno-logical decoding. But there remains the risk of getting
seduced by the archaeological metaphor. During the festival An Archaeology
of ImaginaryMedia at De Balie in Amsterdam, in February 2004, it became
apparent that many authors take the term 'media archaeology' at face value,
referring to the 'digging out' of forgotten machine visions of the past, and
of media which were never materialized or which are simply forgotten
today. Media archaeology less about origins and beginnings in the historical
sense, but rather about the arche,the laws governing media in action. Still,
these principles not only are structural but bear a temporal index as well; it
happens that it is at the moment of emergence that a medium most openly
reveals its technological essence, before such structures become dissimulated
by user interfaces.
The 'cold gaze' is a description of the media archaeological aesthetics
indeed, admittedly close to Ernst Jilnger's passion of distance (Lethen
2002) as a characteristic of photographic introspection. German pre-war or
on-war engineering culture still lurks through, just like Heidegger's way of
fundamentally rethinking the categories of technology. In its 'acoustic turn'
(Meyer 2008), the 'cold gaze' is accompanied by unpassionate 'understanding'
of media, listening to their implicit sonicity, that is: time-based signals
emerging from within technologies.
Media archaeology is technocentristic, that is: machine- and code-centred
indeed (Chun 2006: 4). While media phenomenology concentrates upon the
mostly screen-based media effects on humans (for which the opaqueness
of its technology seems almost mandatory not to divert physiological
attention), media archaeology intends to increase media awareness by
making its technology transparent, opening the proverbial 'black box'.
The field of (new) media theory seems split between two very different
approaches: 'Media archaeologists[ ... ] describe the non-discursive practices
28 Technol6gosin Being

of the technocultural archive. Media phenomenologists [... ] analyze how

phenomena in various media appear to the human cognitive apparatus, that
is, to the mind and senses' (Jakobsen 2010: 141). The media archaeological
approach is rooted as much in Foucault's definitions as it is connected with
McLuhan's focus on the technical message of media, rather than on their
semantic content. The archive 'governs the appearance of statements as
unique events', whereas archaeology 'questions the already-said at the level
of its existence [... ] and the general archive system to which it belongs'
(Foucault 1972: 129 and 131). In the media phenomenological definition for
the age of new, that is, electronic and digital media, in an explicit Bergsonean
tradition, the mediated image comes into being in the 'enframing' acts of
the human bodily cognition only (Hansen 2004: 13). In 'posthuman cultural
studies' (Winthrop-Young 2006: 100), radical media archaeology rather takes
the material point of view of the machine itself.

Radicaltechnoanalysis:Theoryand method
Media archaeology is a method and aesthetics of practising media studies.
Its media criticism is positioned between archaeology as academic discipline
for analysing material culture from the past, and the Foucauldian notion of
!'archiveas a decisive set of rules: the technical n6mos, defined by cultural
knowledge, governing the technical conduct and range of what can be
verbally, audiovisually or numerically expressed at all.
Past media can be 're-presenced' (Sobchack 2011) not by their sheer
material presence; they rather require operative re-enactment, operative
presence. The effort to re-enact apparently 'dead' media requires their reverse
engineering. A media-epistemic challenge, though, are the moments when
technol6gositself, not exclusivelyhumans anymore, becomes a media-active
archaeologist of understanding and insight, such as in image-based image
retrieval and machine learning when applied to digitized data archives.
Beyond McLuhan, media are not just extensions of man anymore, but
become epistemogenic themselves.
Since component arche in the term 'archaeology' does not exclusively
refer to origins but as well to structures, well-defined media archaeology
aims at revealing the essential principles which drive media in the techno-
logical sense (both material hardware and symbolic software). Media
archaeology makes salient those technological elements which (beyond the
special knowledge of engineers and mathematicians and computer scientists)
are worth of knowledge beyond experts in a philosophical sense, while at
 Media as Technologyand Logotechnics 29

the same time, the methods of radical media archaeology rather have the
ambition to turn media studies into a media science.
An exemplary analysis of how media come into being, starting from
purely electro-physical research, then extending to concrete technological
implementations and prototypes, and finally resulting in media economic
applications, is Hugh G. J. Aitken's monography on the origins of radio
(1976). Are machines really 'social before being technical' (Deleuze 1988:
13)? Recent science and technology studies place technological development
within a broader discursive and cultural frame of reference. But a more radical
media archaeology investigates to which degree socio- and technol6gosare
commensurable at all. Its analysis focuses on the epistemological momentum
which precedes the subsequent discoveries, on techno-mathematical
constellations rather than their sociological roots. There are conceptual and
physical thresholds, technical limits and data series first. Discontinuities of
media knowledge frequently arise from within the technological devices
themselves, and as paradigm shifts in questions and tools on the research
side, before they become modified into what is commonly known as 'new
media'.
Media, if conceived as physical channels of communication and as
techno-mathematical artefacts which are operated by symbolic codes and
streaming data, ask to be analysed in ways different from texts or works of
art. The archaeological gaze - theorfain the ancient Greek sense of'(in)sight'
- is a way of looking at media objects enumerative rather than narrative,
descriptive rather than discursive, infrastructural rather than sociological,
focusing on the alphanumeric code underlying screen-cultural images.
Images from data remind us of the American Standard Code for Information
Interchange (ASCII), based on a seven-bit structure, which in the early
days of computing was used for transmitting photos and graphics as well,
by pixelling the visual information and translating it into the available
characters. Several art projects refer to this digital Stone Age, such as ASCII
Visionin the works of the ASCII-Art Ensemble (Levin et al. 2002: 372).
 3

The hands of logos:'Digitality:literally

A major focus of cybernetic analysis deals with the coupling of humans to

algorithmicdevices.Theeverydaycyborgis looselycoupledto communication
devices,whiles/he (or 'it') becomestightlycoupledto microchipimplantations.
Computational communicationdevicesin the permanent 'online'mode rather
subject the human to their proper l6gos:the chronotechnical regime. The
tablet computer or smartphone (the neo-German 'Handy') is simply ready-
to-hand; they become technologically'aware'only in moments of breakdown
like the hammer, as discussedin Heidegger'sBeingand Time.
The 'hands-on media' approach as manual relation to technologiesmedia
archaeologically suspends the human subject from its anthropocentric
perspective.The distancingof man from the physicalworld by the intervention
of technical machines, apparatusesand automata, in cyberneticepistemology,
is not necessarilya threat to humanism but has been experiencedas a liberation
of man from its overallsubjectivityas well.Once human hands are on technical
instruments for input or control, a servomotoric coupling takes place, which
replacesthe strong human agencyby subjectingand submergingit to feedback
circuits.The notion of hand-basedinstrument control literallyextendsto time-
axis-manipulation.The focus of media archaeologicalanalysisis on technical
media where the 'digital'oscillatesbetween the discretizationof manual input
(fingers)and the processingof numerical values.
Oncethe performativenotion ofhands which act upon technicalinstruments
is rephrased in the language of engineering,of telegraphy,of typewriting and
of digital computing, human agency itself is redefined. Traditionalmachinic
typewriting radicallydifferentiatesthe hands into its ten discretefingers.With
'digitality'(no metaphor here), the human hand is radicallydiscretized.Finally
the binary code reduces even decimal fingers to just one. What still looks like
a playfulperformativehandicraft in reality is already a techno-mathematical
operation.Even the painterly stroke dissolvesinto pixels.

Relieving the optical signal from human

subjectivity: Case study photography
More than a passive analysis of the technological condition, the media
archaeological approach is an active argument for a non-anthropocentric
 The Hands of Logos 31

approach to technology. The distancing of man from the tangible world by

the intervention of technical machines, apparatuses and automata, from
the perspective of cybernetic epistemology which equally considers animal
and machine as signal processing systems, is not necessarily a threat to
humanism, but can be experienced as a liberation of human being from
its overall subjectivity. Beyond their apparent 'extension of man' function
(McLuhan 1964), technical devices serve as a literal 'emancipation' of the
inquiring logos from its restrictions by the human body, perception and
cognition. William Henry Fox Talbot, a painter himself, explicitly celebrated
the liberation of images from the idiosyncrasies of the human hand, by an
apparatus to let visual nature become self-expressive. Different from copper
engraving of lithography which still is a kind of interpretative 'criticism' of
the reproduced image (leMen 1994), Talbot supplemented the traditional
cameraobscuraby a photosensitive medium for recording optical signals. The
subjective gesture of the human painter is thereby replaced by a mechanism
that has no understanding of an 'image',but archaeographically measures and
photochemically registers the quantum effects of varying light intensities,
which are shaped by an external object, in silver halide crystals. Such
'photogenic drawings' Talbot reads like a scientist, and explicitly remarks that
they 'have been formed or depicted by optical and chemical means alone,
and without the aid of any one acquainted with the art of drawing' (Talbot
1844/1969: n.p.). The objects are thereby not restricted to the idiosyncratic
manipulations which accompany its representation when drawn by hand,
'and considered only in its ultimate nature' (Talbot 1844/1969: n.p.). Such
signal recording, including the alogosof noisy disturbances, derives its media
archaeological aesthetics from suspending the image from the arbitrary
semiotic conventions of culture, while its condition of possibility, the 'force'
of its physical indexicality (Peirce 1998: 5-6), is no more manipulation, but
the materialized logosof the technical enframing. This technical apparatus
escalated into technology with computer graphics: 'Unlike a photograph
of a real world scene, a computer generated shaded picture is made from a
numerical model, which is stored in the computer as an objective description.
[... ]The computer system can be compared to an artist who paints an object
from its description and not from direct observation of the object' (Phong
1975: 311).
Walter Benjamin explicitly compared the surgeon's gaze rather with the
cameraman (Benjamin 1936/1973: 238) - as it has been expressed in and
by Dziga Vertov's film Man with a Camera. The endoscope in medical
inspection goes along with the 'cold' gaze of media archaeology indeed,
which is analytical rather than hermeneutic. There is an analogy between
the media archaeological and the medical observation. With the surgical
gaze becoming more and more dependent on imaging technologies, both
perspectives converge.
 7

32 Technol6gosin Being

Even if the cameraobscura'was a complex social amalgam in which its

existence as a textual figure was never separable from its machinic uses' (Crary
1990: 31), it cannot be reduced to a discursive construct. Media archaeology
insists on the technological event, with its logosbeing the physical laws of
optics which direct and diffract the rays of light through the hole (or lens)
into the dark box. It is this optical ratio, and not the media historical narrative,
which makes the cameraobscuraa precursor of photography, in the media
archaeological sense. There is an irreducible technological determinism at
work for the physical effects which take place in the literally micromedia
theatre of the cameraobscura.The 'inaugural event' (Crary 1990: 31) of a
technical medium is not only fixed to its historical moment of invention, but
its archeis structurally invariant, ongoing and co-originally re-presenced in
all its subsequent technical reformulations.
In 1840, Talbot photographically reproduced a manuscript. At that
moment, the record becomes object of a light processing technique. Such
technical reading of a textual logosby optical media escapes the kind of
hermeneutics to which the culturally coded human reader is inevitably
subject. 'Media looking at media' (Hiller 2019) has nothing interpretative
while it happens, resulting in a media-archaeologically distant, apparatus-
based recognition of a text as an optical character event. Thus photography
'stands outside the realm of sensibility. It has something of a telescopic
quality: one can tell that the object photographed was seen by an insensitive
and invulnerable eye' (Junger 1989: 208), the technical transductions of the
optical signal. Different from the anthropocentric aesthetics of contemporary
'machine learning', machine vision is celebrated here for its radical alterity
when compared with the psycho-physiological idiosyncrasies of human
perception. The human as observing eye and as object of observation is
therefore rather excluded in favour of the machine. Discursive context-
dependency is replaced by apparative observation. Talbot's introduction
to The Pencilof Nature emphasizes that the photographic plates originated
'without the aid of any one acquainted with the art of drawing'. This is a
media archaeological radicalization and discontinuity with artistic mimesis,
semantics and hermeneutics of images: 'The picture, divested of the ideas
which accompany it, and considered only in its ultimate nature is but a
succession, or variety of stronger lights thrown upon one part of the paper,
and of deeper shadows on another' (Talbot 1844/1969:n.p.).1his corresponds
with electronic and digital image scanning today. 'The instrument chronicles
whatever it sees, and certainly would delineate a chimney-pot or a chimney-
sweeper with the same impartiality as it would the Apollo of Belvedere;1

1
Ibid., text to plate II 'View of the Boulevardsat Paris'.
 TheHandsof Logos 33

Such indexical, media-archaeographical 'chronicles' are different from

handwritten dates and texts in medieval times or typewriting, based on
the alphanumerical, therefore: symbolical regime. With photography and
phonography, and culminating in the analogue electronics of radio and
television (electro-)physical signal recording and transmission media, at
least within the medium channel, achieved independence from the cultural
supremacy of the logocentric and iconological regime. The symbolic coding
of signal-based communication, such as in Morse telegraphy, rather occurs
from external, violent interventions of coding logos.Code and signal fuse
only with technologosin being.

Beyond anthropocentrismin the 'hands on media'

approach:'Manipulation',and technology
Claude Shannon, co-author of the mathematical theory which is still the
basis for digital communication engineering today, once built a most literate
machine logic, a cybernetic toy consisting of a box with a switch. If the box is
switched 'on', a hand comes out and automatically turns the switches to 'off',
returning the machine back to its initial state. In that sense, the 'hands on
media' approach and the manual relation to technologies remain ambivalent.
Hands progressively seem to get off instruments by automation. From the
anthropological view, however, the hand-as-tool has always already had a
transient status: It has been both an extension and an externalization of man.
This allows for a direct short-circuit between media archaeological analysis
and prehistoric archaeology. It has been a palaeontologist who described
the evolution of human memory into storage technologies (Leroi-Gourhan
1964).
Once human hands are on technical instruments for input or control, a
servomotoric coupling takes place - replacing the strong human agency by
subjecting and submerging it to feedback circuits. That moment, man turns
into a cyborg, a true cybernetic organism, and becomes part of a closed
circuit (German Regelkreis)in terms of systems theory, becoming nothing
more or less than one (analogue) element within a system circuitry. In any
tightly coupled man-machine configuration, hands do not subjectively
direct and control anymore, but are an integrated part of a system. With
man in such a loop (Ullmann 2016), mental logosbecomes a function of
technologos.The moment a human hand is on the radio tuning knob for
getting reception, man himself gets 'tuned' to the technical medium, its
electromagnetic resonance. While transitive hand-machine relations might
34 Technol6gosin Being

be subsumed under 'cultural techniques' (Parikka and Winthrop-Young

2013) and remains somewhat anthropocentric, media archaeology with its
focus on non-discursive human-machine constellations keeps a more ascetic
distance to the human agency in favour of the techno-mathematical agencies
themselves. For the purposes of such an analysis, the sociocultural discourses
that envelop technological processes are momentarily suspended.
In the German dictionary Brockhaus'Konversations-Lexikonfrom 1894,
the entry 'Manipulation' is defined as artful handling, which extends as well
to technological operations. A few years later, the rival dictionary Meyers
GroflesKonversationslexikonfrom 1908 adds the 'Manipulator', defined as a
telegraphic input device (German Taster).The Morse Code does include not
only the dot and dash which could be monitored electroacoustically but also
the temporal pause between. The haptic extends to the microtemporal gap. But
the hardware telegraph lines which were built to facilitate telecommunication
suffered from heavy signal degeneration across space. When the signal
became too weak, it had manually to be notated for new input; therefore,
a telegram sent between London and Calcutta was frequently subject to
improper transmission by personnel with deficient language facilities. The
solution was their replacement by nonhuman repeater-regenerators: the
electromagnetic (later vacuum tube-based) relay. Today, the binary codes
allows to 'write' by reducing the alphabet to only two symbols which can be
operated by a simple movement of the hand: switching relays on and off.

Typewriting:The de-coupled relation

of the hand to writing
A popular alternative to the ten finger-operated keyboard has been the
typewriter trade mark Mignon which was popular in Europe at the beginning
of twentieth century. In this mechanism, the alphanumeric input is reduced
to a mouse-like pointer which is activated in the 'binary' mode with just two
keys for affirmation and for spacing.
In 1989, Jeron Lanier presented a data glove as an immersive interface for
navigating within virtual space as an extended data manipulation. What still
looks like a playful performance of the hand in reality is already a techno-
mathematical operation. While fingers hack thoughts in symbolical code on
the keyboard of a laptop, the media archaeological logosis aware that most
writing is done within the microprocessors themselves where algorithms
reign. Different from a typewriting machine which is still an instrument, the
computer has already become a transclassical machine (Gunther 1963).
 The Hands of L6gos 35

According to Turing 1937, all operations of a calculating-machine can be

performed manually as long as man is equipped with squared-paper, a pencil
and a rubber gum. But at that moment, man is not authoring the process
in terms of traditional literary writing, but himself is both servomotorically
and mentally subjected to a sequence of discrete states, therefore becoming
a 'paper machine'. The computer is manual in the double sense of symbol
manipulations: Most users still experience and interface this machine by
symbolic input via alphanumeric keyboards. Technol6goshas a material and
an operative body at the same time. On the inner side of a computer, one gets
stuck with the circuitry and internal microchips. While computation, as long
as it is reduced to an abstract process, appears intangible, the manual opening
of the black box called personal computer leads to a more haptic experience
of its technical machine indeed. An intuitive understanding of its algorithmic
machinery, though, requires a different kind of media-philological analysis.
A manuscript once literally meant the handwritten unique document.
In the meantime, the digital signature became legally equal to handwritten
signature. Handwriting radically differs from machinic typewriting.
'Handwriting' has been a common term for both the concrete individual
writing (graphology) and more general for an individu.al style. This gap closes
when the analysis etymologically refers back to the material instrument,
Latin stilus,which both inscribed and erased symbols on wax tablets. With

Figure 6 Mignon typewriter, around 1910. From: Media Archaeological

Fundus, Humboldt University, Berlin. Photo: Thomas Pecker.
36 Technol6gosin Being

the hand on the stilus to notate ideas in the alphabetic code, man already
becomes a symbol-processing machine in the scriptural moment. But only
the printing press inaugurated an epistemology of abstract combinatorics,
resulting in the mathematization of writing. In a deep epistemological
sense, the writing and reading of discrete alphabetic letters preconditioned
scientific analysis and l6goswhich literally is an elementary practice. But
even the Gutenberg Bible emulates the look of handwriting by using types
which express the calligraphic Gothic texture, and therefore dissimulates
the technicality of identically reproducible letters - just as the letters on a
computer screen dissolve into bit-mapped graphics when looked at from
behind.

When logosencounters the machine:

The discretizing keyboard

Martin Heidegger (2009: 301) differentiates ancient Greek techne as

handicraft from machine technique. The development of the sewing machine,
in its autonomous mechanical gestures, emancipated from the original idea
of simply imitating of the human textile knitting. A typewriter is no simple
extension of human handwriting either, but escalates into a mechanism
according to its own material and combinatorial technol6gos.As opposed
to the energetically hand-driven hammer as a tool, a technology is a mode
of control. In that sense, the hammer becomes a technological device only
when it is included in a hammer piano, and is intermediated by fingers on the
keyboard. Media philosopher Vilem Flusser interpreted the Baroque toccata
as musical touch, the literal fingertip on the keyboard (Guldin 2014). One
special key-stroke instrument in the collection of the Museum of Musical
Instruments in Berlin is the Liebmanista,manufactured for a piano player
who had lost most of his fingers in the First World War. By pressing single
keys it allowed for playing whole accords; this is a reduction of the hand to
code. The coupling of the 'digital' keyboard, which is operated by decimal
fingers, to the binary sense of computing took place with the Synclavier
II, an electronic piano as digital synthesizer, which was operated by a New
England Digital (n.e.d.) computer with a VT 100 graphics terminal. The
keyboard as coupling of fingers and mechanism, even if it is still perceived
as 'instrumental', became a sublime cybernetic interface between human and
machine.
The computer keyboard is the technical scene where encounters between
the physical world, and the logical regime, are incorporated. Whenever an
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north by east, and their course was set for south by
southwest.

Pant stared at the compass.

“Whew!” he whistled. “At that rate, we’ll be back where

we started from in due course of time.”

Then a new thought worried him. He, too, had

remembered the dust in the fuel tank. It must be
running low. He could not tell their exact position, but
believed they were far nearer to a small group of islands
which they had sighted shortly before the storm struck
them than they were to their destination.

Immediately there was set up in his mind a tense

conflict. “It’s better to keep going in your present
direction and to seek safety with a fresh supply of fuel
from those islands you just passed,” said his native
caution. “You have no right to turn back, for if you do
you are sure to lose the race,” said his instinctive loyalty
to the cause of another.

Loyalty won the day, and with mouth grimly set he [156]
gradually turned the plane about. Skirting the fringe of
the storm, he sent the plane speeding on her way.

Gradually the smoke of battle—the mists that lay low on

the horizon—disappeared, and they emerged into the
glorious sunlight. The ocean lay a glittering mass of
jewels beneath them, jewels that sparkled on a robe of
emerald green. The sky, a vast blue dome, lay spread
above them, while a few white clouds skirted the
horizon. Behind them, like the uplifted head of a terrible
sea-dragon, the storm still reared its masses of tumult
to the heavens.
“That,” said Pant through his mouthpiece, “was the
worst I ever saw.”

Johnny Thompson threw back his head and laughed. A

merry laugh it was. It was easy to laugh when they
were free.

For an hour the plane held steadily on its course—south [157]

by southwest. It was a wonderful journey. Weary as he
was and prone to fall asleep at his post, Pant enjoyed it.
Here and there they passed flocks of sea-gulls that rose
screaming from the sea. Once they raced for a few
miles with a honking wedge of wild geese. The presence
of this flock made Pant think they must be near some
land. What land it might be he could not even guess,
but the thought cheered him.

For an hour, an hour and a quarter, an hour and a half,

they sped on. Both boys had forgotten the question of
fuel. Johnny was puzzling over the name of the contents
of the chests on the wreck; Pant was wondering about
the fate of the ship they had sighted in the storm, when
there came a hoarse rumble from the right-hand engine,
and the thunder of their drivers was lessened by half.

With trembling hand Pant threw the lever out. The other
motor was still going, but he realized that it would be
but a matter of moments until that one also was dead.

Instinctively, as if preparing to run away from the [158]

ocean, which, having been lashed by the storm, must
still be rolling in great, sweeping waves that would
wreck their frail craft the instant she touched its surface,
he tilted the plane’s nose to a sharp angle and set her
climbing.
They had been traveling some three thousand feet
above the sea. Now they climbed rapidly. Four
thousand, and five thousand, six, seven, eight, nine
thousand. They were now entering a filmy cloud that
sent long waving arms down to clutch them. Now and
again they “bumped,” dropping straight down a hundred
feet, then rising again. It was a glorious experience,
even if it might be their last.

With ears alert, as are the ears of a man expecting the

sentence of death, Pant awaited the last hoarse cough
of the engine.

Finally it came; a grinding whirr, a tremor running

through the plane, as a shudder runs through the form
of a dying animal, then all was silence.

It was such a silence as none of the three had ever [159]

experienced. For hours they had listened to the scream
of the storm, to the roar of breakers, to the thunder of
their engines. For another hour and a half they had
listened to the engines alone. Now there was utter
silence; a silence so intense that, had a feather been
falling from a sea-gull’s wing, it seemed that its passage
through the air might be heard.

The plane had broad, spreading wings. It would float

with easy grace to the very surface of the sea. But
then?

There was plenty of time to think now. No one cared to

speak. Their minds were concerned about many things.
Life as they had lived it lay spread out before them like
the pages of a picture-book. All the past moved before
them. They came to the end, at last, and thus to the
question of the ship in the storm and the wreck on the
desert island. Had the ship escaped from the storm?
Was the wreck still intact, or had it been destroyed by
the waves? Would the wreckers find the treasure? What
then?

Slowly the plane drifted down. Eight thousand feet, [160]

seven thousand, six, five, four, three.

Suddenly Pant moved in his seat. Seizing his tube in his

excitement, forgetting that they might easily speak to
one another since the sound of the engines was gone,
he shouted:

“Listen!”

Johnny threw open the door of the cabin and sat

listening.

“I only hear the waves,” he said.

“Two kinds of sounds, though,” smiled Pant; “a steady

wash and a thundering.”

“Yes, I hear them.”

“The thundering means land.”

“Eh?” Johnny gazed down toward the wide circle of the

sea. “But where?”

It was true. From this point in the air, though they could
see for many miles, only the unbroken expanse of dark
green waters met their view.

“There!” exclaimed Pant in triumph. He was pointing to

a long line of white. “That’s surf. Some coral island
there. Surf’s breaking over it. If we can make the lee of
it we’re safe.”

He brought the nose of the plane about until it pointed [161]

toward the white line. Silence followed—a silence that
could almost be felt. Only the murmur of vast waters
and the distant thunder of the breakers, like the falls of
a great river, disturbed that silence. Their lives
depended on the length of a single glide.

Johnny Thompson opened two small round windows,

portholes to the cabin. The Professor, sensing the
tenseness of the situation, without fully understanding
it, did likewise. Then the three of them watched the
rolling ocean as it rose up to meet them.

Now they appeared to be a mile from that white line of

foam. They were twenty-eight hundred feet in air. At
fifteen hundred feet they appeared to be scarcely half a
mile away. Beneath them rolled the treacherous waves;
before them the breakers roared. Just over that crest of
foam there lay a narrow bay, still as a millpond. Could
they make it? Pant lifted a trembling hand to his
forehead to brush away cold perspiration. Johnny stirred
uneasily. Only the Professor was silent. Motionless as a
sphinx, he watched the ocean spin along beneath him.

Gradually as they sank lower and lower objects became [162]

distinct to them. The north end of the island appeared
to rise some twenty feet above the sea. The south end
was lower. The whole of it was lined with a fringe of
palms.

“Better turn her a bit south,” Johnny suggested. “It’s

lower there and less chance of a smash.”

Without a word Pant followed his directions.

Lower and lower they drifted. Closer and closer came
the island. For a time it seemed that they must
inevitably drop into the sea. Then it appeared that they
would miss the ocean but drive into the palms.

A hundred feet in air they swept on. Catching his [163]

breath, Pant unbuckled his harness. Johnny and the
Professor followed his example. The next second, with a
strange, land-like breath of air sweeping up to them,
they passed over the very fringe-tops of the palms. One
moment later they were standing up in their craft, which
gently rose and fell with the water. Without a word they
solemnly shook hands.

There are moments in the life of every person when he

feels himself so closely welded to the life of some other
one that only death can separate them. Johnny felt that
such a time had arrived in his life. He and Pant were
already inseparable. Now, by this simple, silent
handshake, they took the Professor into their narrow
circle. They had suffered in peril together.

They were now on a narrow island of the Pacific in a

seaplane without fuel, and with provisions for but a day.
Come what might, they would stick together until the
end.

Their first precaution was to bring their plane as close in

shore as the shallow water would permit, then to
anchor it securely. After that they unfolded a small,
collapsible boat and prepared to make their way ashore.

“Inhabited or not?” smiled Pant.

“If inhabited, cannibal or otherwise?” Johnny smiled [164]

back.
“I hope we are not to tarry here long,” said the
Professor.

“We’ll tarry until we discover some fuel, and I don’t

think green palm trees will be of much use,” said Johnny
seriously. “Have you anything to suggest?”

The Professor seemed inclined to take these remarks as

being in the form of a joke, but seeing that Johnny was
serious, he said, as his brow wrinkled:

“It is really very important that we be on our way. We

cannot be more than a hundred miles from our
destination.”

“Perhaps not even that,” said Pant, “but they may be

very hard miles to travel.”

“If we only were there,” sighed Johnny. “There is sure to

be coal on the wreck.”

“But, since we’re not, let’s explore our island,”

suggested Pant.

“And sleep,” said Johnny. “I’m about to fall asleep as I

walk.”

“Better bring the rifles,” suggested Pant. “Doesn’t seem [165]

likely that there is a single living soul on this island—it’s
no more than a coral rock sticking up out of the sea;
can’t be two miles long—but you never can tell.”

Johnny brought two rifles from the plane. After rubbing

the moisture from their barrels, he slipped a handful of
cartridges in each, and set them up in the bow of the
boat.
Pant had already gathered up an armful of sacks and
cans, enough food for a day ashore. Throwing these
into the bottom of the boat, he exclaimed: “All aboard
for no man’s land.”

Then all climbed in. Johnny took the oars. Ten minutes
of rowing brought them ashore.

It was a strange sensation that came to them as they

stepped on solid ground once more. They had been
swinging and tossing about for so long that solid earth
seemed unreal—only part of a dream.

“Don’t see a sign of life,” said Johnny as he glanced up

and down the beach, then into the depths of the palms.

“Here’s a bit of bamboo that looks as if it had been cut [166]

with a knife,” said Pant.

“Might have drifted in,” suggested Johnny. Other than

this they found no sign of life.

After a brief consultation they decided that, simply as a

matter of precaution, they should make the rounds of
the shore before settling down to sleep.

Night would be coming on in an hour, so, after partaking

of a hasty repast, the two boys, armed with the rifles,
struck up the beach to the right. The Professor was left
to keep an eye on the plane.

Nothing eventful happened until the boys had made

three-fourths of their journey. As they had expected,
they had found no sign of human life on the island.
Night was falling; the sea was growing calm after the
storm; they were looking forward to a few hours of
refreshing sleep when, of a sudden, as they rounded a
clump of palms, Johnny sprang backward, and,
clutching his companion’s arm, dragged him into the
deeper shadows.

“Wha—what is it?” stammered Pant. [167]

“A camp fire on the beach, and men, six or eight of

them, I think, sitting about it. Natives, I should judge.”

For a time the boys stood there in silence. It was a

tense moment. Each in his own way was trying to solve
the problem that had suddenly thrust itself upon them.
Should they show themselves to the natives, or should
they try to discover some way to escape from the
islands?

“I don’t think,” said Pant, as if talking to himself, “that

we can get off the island without their aid.”

“A ship might appear,” suggested Johnny.

“Not likely,” said Pant. “We’re too far off the beaten path
of sea travel.”

“All right. C’m’on,” said Johnny, as he led the way out

into the open where the camp fire gleamed.

[168]
 CHAPTER XII
FLYING KNIVES

The two boys approached the strangers with rifles

loosely slung under their arms, as if they had just come
from hunting. The men about the fire showed no signs
of surprise. They did not leap to their feet nor attempt
to glide away. They merely turned their heads at the
sound of footsteps, then sat there watching as the boys
approached.

Pant took the lead. He had lived among men of many

climes, and would doubtless be better able to
understand these strangers. Reaching the edge of the
circle he sat down by the fire, motioning Johnny to do
the same.

For several moments the little group sat in silence. Out [169]
of the corner of his eyes, Johnny studied the strangers.
There were five heavily-built, raw-boned fellows with
dark skins and thick lips. They were dressed merely in
breech-clouts. There were two small brown boys with
the squint eyes of Orientals.

“Couple of Japs and their serfs,” was his mental

comment.
Presently one of the Orientals dug from the ashes of the
fire two roasted sweet potatoes. These he offered to the
guests. After that he supplied each member of his own
group in the same manner.

Johnny noticed that there was a little pile of these

potatoes on the beach, also two brown hempen sacks
full of some commodity. These sacks were tied tightly at
the top.

They ate the potatoes with great relish. After that they
were given water to drink.

When they at last attempted to engage the strangers in

conversation, they found them quite incapable of
understanding English.

Finally Pant, growing tired of the effort, rose and strode

down to the beach where the brown sacks were lying.
He thumped one of the sacks, then lifted it from the
ground.

“About a hundred pounds,” he muttered. Then, turning, [170]

he walked back to the group by the fire. He had taken
one hand from his pocket. In its palm reposed a shiny
ten dollar gold piece. He pointed to the sack he had
lifted, then offered the gold to the smaller of the two
brown boys.

The boy reached out his hand and took it.

The act was repeated in reference to a second gold

piece and the remaining sack. This offer was also
accepted.

“They know the value of gold all right,” he smiled. “I

have bought two hundred pounds of rice. Let’s get it on
our backs. I think if we cut right across beneath the
palms here we will about strike our camp.”

With the sacks of rice on their shoulders, they trudged

on for a time in silence. At last Johnny spoke:

“What do we want of all this rice?”

“Three people can live a long time on two hundred

pounds of rice.”

As he stepped out again into the moonlight he gazed [171]

about him for a time, then in a musing tone said:

“I wonder where we’ll be to-morrow night. It’s going to

work all right. The only question is, how many miles do
you get out of a hundred pounds of rice?”

The next morning, after they had taken their bearings,

Pant said, “Far as I can make out, we’re something like
a hundred and fifty miles from the wreck. Question is,
will our fuel carry us that far?”

“Our fuel? What fuel?” his two friends echoed.

“Yes,” smiled Pant, “we have some fuel—two hundred

pounds of it.”

“The rice!” exclaimed Johnny. “I hadn’t thought of using

it for that.”

“Well, perhaps we’d better not,” said Pant, wrinkling his

brow. “It’s all that stands between us and starvation.
Our brown friends left the island last night. What’s
more,” he went on, “I don’t know how much carbon
there is in rice. Do either of you?”
They both answered in the negative. [172]

“Well, there you are,” said Pant. “You see, if we can’t tell
that, there is no way of guessing how far two hundred
pounds of rice will carry us. It may let us down after
we’ve gone fifty miles and clump us right into the
ocean. And the next time we may not be as fortunate as
we were this time in finding a safe harbor. Then again,
we might land safely in the lee of another of these
islands, only to find ourselves without a single mouthful
of food. So you see there’s something of a hazard in it.”

The Professor rose and began to pace back and forth.

He was very plainly agitated. For fully five minutes he
did not speak. Then he turned to face the boys.

“The need of haste,” he said slowly, “is great. Nothing in

the world, it seems to me, could be much more
important. But you have risked your lives for the cause;
I will not press you to do so again. You must decide for
yourselves whether we shall take the venture or not. As
for me, I am ready to go.”

Pant and Johnny looked at one another. Pant read [173]

Johnny’s answer in his eyes.

“Fair enough.” He sprang to his feet. “We go.”

A half-hour’s time was consumed in grinding a quantity

of the rice, then they were away. The remaining rice
might be ground and fed to the engines as they
traveled.

Pant was again at the wheel. On his face there was the
strained look of one who constantly listens for some
dread sound. They were flying low. Now and again his
gaze swept the sea. Twice he dropped to an even lower
level, as he fancied he caught the rush of waters upon
an unseen shore. Each time he climbed back to their old
level and they sped steadily onward.

Fifty miles were recorded, then seventy-five. A hundred

stretched to a hundred and twenty-five.

Suddenly Pant’s brow cleared. He climbed to a higher [174]

level. The engines stopped all at once. But this was
because he had thrown back the lever. As they glided
silently down, there came to them the old welcome
sound of breakers. Johnny Thompson, leaning far out of
the cabin, swept the sea with a pair of binoculars.

“Over to the right,” he exclaimed.

“Land?” asked the Professor.

“An island; ours, I think. A rocky promontory to the

south, flat to the north, just as the sailors described it.”

“Thank God! We have made it!” The Professor brushed

cold perspiration from his brow. “I was afraid—afraid of
many things.”

The motors were again started, only to be shut off five

minutes later. Then they began the delightful circling
journey which was to bring them to a safe harbor and
their goal. This time there was no trying uncertainty;
there was still fuel in their tank and they knew
something of the place to which they were coming.

“I hope we don’t have to.”

“We’ll go back and try for some sweet potatoes in the

morning. I think perhaps I’ll find another use for the
rice.”
“What?” [175]

Pant did not answer. “Funny bunch, those brown boys,”

he mused. “Don’t savvy English, but they know Uncle
Sam’s money, all right. It’s that way all over the world.”

The island was very narrow. They soon found

themselves on the beach facing the bay where the
“Dust Eater,” as they called the seaplane, was anchored.

It was decided that they should take turns at the watch,

three hours to the watch. This would give each of them
six hours of sleep and fit them for whatever of fortune
or misfortune lay in their immediate future.

The Professor took the first watch, Pant the second.

Pant had hardly begun to pace the beach on his watch
when there sounded across the waters the quick pop-
pop-pop of a motor. His first thought was of the “Dust
Eater,” but immediately he laughed at his fears; the
popping was made by a much less powerful motor than
those belonging to their seaplane.

The sound came from toward the south end of the [176]
island. Racing down the beach, tripping over sand-brush
and bits of drift here and there, he managed to arrive in
time to see the tail-light of a motorboat fast
disappearing out on the sea.

“The Orientals and their men!” he exclaimed

disgustedly. “It was stupid of us not to keep track of
them. They might have given us a lift to the very island
we’re bound for. We were too played out to think clearly,
though, and now they’re gone.”

He walked slowly back toward their camp.

“Since that’s settled,” he thought to himself, “it’s time I
was trying something else. I’ll get at it at once.”

Arrived at camp, he cut open one of the large sacks of

rice and poured a quart of it in an aluminum kettle.
Placing the kettle in the bottom of the canvas boat, he
shoved off and was soon at the door of the cabin on the
“Dust Eater.”

For a moment he paused to gaze about him. He had [177]

never seen anything quite like the night that lay spread
out before him. The moon, a great, yellow ball, hung
high in the heavens; the sea, now calm, lay sparkling in
the moonlight, while the palms shot skyward, a blue-
black fringe on the garment of night.

He had little time for such reveries, however. There was

work to be done.

Once inside the cabin, he took up a trapdoor in its floor

and, from the space beneath, drew out a strange
circular arrangement. To this he attached wires running
from a line of batteries hung securely against the walls.
He next poured his quart of rice into a small hopper at
the top of the circular mechanism. There came a snap-
snap as he threw in a switch. A whirling grinding sound
followed. Presently, from a small tube, there began to
pour forth a white powder, finer than the finest flour.
This he caught in the kettle.

“Ought to work,” he mumbled, as the white pile in the

bottom of the kettle grew to a sizable cone.

When the machine gave forth a strange new sound, as [178]

of a feed-mill running empty, he snapped off the switch.

“Now we’ll see,” he murmured.

Taking up the kettleful of white dust, he walked back to
the fuel tank of the plane, and, with the aid of a funnel,
poured in the powder. After screwing on the top, he
went back to his old place at the wheel.

He pressed a button here, threw a lever forward there,

and at once there came the thunder of a motor. Quickly
he threw back the lever. “Don’t want to wake them.” He
stood up and peered shoreward.

Satisfied that his companions had not been disturbed,

he returned to the cabin and put things to rights.

“Wreck’s to the southeast,” said Johnny. “I can see it

plainly. Look’s queer, though; all white, as if there had
been a recent snow.”

A moment later, as they circled lower, he laughed and

exclaimed: “Sea-gulls!”

It was true. The ship, but recently a staunch sea-craft, [179]

had become a roost for sea-gulls. Literally thousands of
them rose screaming into the air as the “Dust Eater”
gracefully glided into the waters of the sheltered bay.

There is no mystery in all the world greater than a

deserted wreck. An old house, an abandoned mill, a
cabin in the forest, all these have their charm of
mystery, but the wreck of a ship, laden with who knows
what treasure, and abandoned by her master, a wreck
so remote from inhabited lands that it has not been
visited since the night of its disaster, here was mystery
indeed.

So eager were they to board the craft that they could

scarcely wait until the plane had been made fast and
the canvas boat lowered.
One question troubled Johnny: The seamen, taken from
the wreck, had reported no native inhabitants of the
island, yet some might have been hiding out in the
rocky portion of the place, for this island was some
three times the size of the island they had just left.

As he climbed up the rope ladder which still dangled [180]

from her side, and sprang upon her deck, slippery with
guano deposited by the gulls, he kept a sharp watch for
any signs of depredation done to the ship since she was
deserted. He found none, and no signs of life on the
main deck, but as he went down the hatch, he fancied
he discovered the faint mark of a bare foot on one step.

Their first thought was of the four chests.

“Was your brother’s berth on the main deck or below?”

Johnny asked.

“That I cannot tell,” said the Professor.

“Probably main deck,” said Johnny, “but you can’t be

sure. You take the larboard side of the main deck, and,
Pant, you take the starboard. I’ll go below and see what
I can find. Some of the staterooms will be locked. We
can search the open ones first, and pry the others open
later if necessary.”

As he sprang down the hatchway, he fancied he heard a

sound from below. For a moment he was tempted to
turn back. Then with “Probably only a sea-gull,” he
dropped on down and began making his way along a
dark companionway. He had not gone ten paces when
he heard a soft pat-pat of footsteps. The next moment
a sharp exclamation escaped his lips.
From the door of a stateroom had appeared a brown [181]
head, then another and another.

Suddenly some object whizzed past his head, to strike

with a sickening spat in the wall behind him. He did not
need to be told it was a knife.

The door of a stateroom stood open beside him.

Instinctively he sprang inside and slammed it shut. He
was not an instant too soon, for a second knife struck
the door. Such force had been used in its throwing, so
keen a blade it had, that the point of it struck through
the wood the length of Johnny’s little finger.

“Well, now what?” he murmured.

And then he thought of his companions. How was he to

warn them before it was too late?

[182]
 CHAPTER XIII
THE MYSTERY DEEPENS

For a single minute Johnny Thompson remained behind

the closed door; then his fear for his companions drove
him forth. Throwing the door wide open, he made a
dash for it. Down the companionway and up the hatch
he raced at full speed.

The Professor was the first person he came across.

“Where’s Pant?” he gasped. “Natives on board—

murderous fellows!”

“Where?”

“There!” A black form appeared on deck. “Dodge!”

exclaimed Johnny, setting the example. “They throw
knives!”

It seemed, however, that this precaution was

unnecessary, for the black man sprang to the gunwale,
then leaped overboard. He was followed rapidly by two
others.

[183]
Pant had heard something of the commotion, and now
came hurrying around the corner of a cabin.

“Natives,” explained Johnny. “Bad ones!”

“Better get to the rifles,” breathed Pant. “Can’t tell how

many of them.”

He leaped for the rope ladder. In another minute they

were rowing rapidly for the “Dust Eater.” As Johnny
climbed to the cabin on the plane he looked back.
“There they go!” he exclaimed.

It was true. A long, slender canoe, manned by four

husky native paddlers, was shooting over the water at
an incredible speed. They were striking boldly out to
sea.

“Guess they’re as afraid of us as we are of them,”

smiled Johnny.

“Think that’s all of them?” asked Pant.

“Yes, that’s one more than I saw,” answered Johnny.

“We came at a fortunate time,” remarked the Professor.

“They doubtless belong to another island and have
discovered the wreck in passing. The whole tribe will be
along presently to loot it.”

“In that case,” said Johnny, “we’d better work fast.” [184]

“And get away before they come,” said Pant. “Good

idea. Plenty of coal to grind up for fuel. Perhaps we can
get away before dark.”
After securing the rifles they hastened back to complete
their search, confident that the treasure chests would
be in their hands in short order.

In a cabin formerly occupied by the chief steward,

Johnny found a master key, which expedited their work.
With his two companions standing guard, Johnny was
able to unlock one stateroom after another in rapid
succession. One glance in each was enough to satisfy
him that the chests were not to be found there.

When they had made the entire rounds of the main

deck, and had discovered no chests of any sort, their
hopes fell a trifle. There remained, however, the lower
deck. To this they hastened. When this search proved
fruitless, they stood for a minute silently looking at one
another.

“The hurricane deck!” exclaimed the Professor. “The [185]

officer’s cabin!”

Thither they rushed. Here again they were unrewarded.

“What could have happened?” asked the Professor in

consternation.

“You don’t suppose he changed his mind and shipped

them as cargo, do you?” asked Johnny.

“I hardly think so,” said the Professor, “yet all things are
possible.”

“It’s my opinion that those natives carried them off,”

said Pant.

“Didn’t in that canoe,” objected Johnny. “Saw right into

it. Wasn’t a thing. Might have hid them on shore,
though. I suggest that we go ashore and do a little
searching, and prepare some sort of meal. There’s food
down in the galleys—canned stuff and the like.”

Leaving the Professor to keep watch, the two boys

hurried down below, to reappear a few minutes later
each with a dishpan full of cans, jars and cartons of
food of every description.

“Won’t starve, anyway,” panted Johnny. [186]

“Yes, but whatever we do we’ve got to hurry,” said Pant.

“Those natives will be coming back. Then there’ll be no
staying on the island for us. Natives are all right when
there are plenty of white men about to make them be
good, but give them three white men and a shipload of
loot and them about a hundred strong, then see how
quickly the white men disappear.”

Hurriedly they dumped their supplies into the canvas

boat, then paddled rapidly for the shore. They were
soon partaking of a hearty meal as they sat upon the
fallen trunk of a giant palm in the shade of a delightfully
cool grove.

Johnny could scarcely finish his meal in his eagerness to

explore that region of the island close to the shore.
Before the others had finished eating, he hastened
around the end of the grove and came out upon the
shore close to an out-jutting rocky cliff. At the base of
this cliff he paused in astonishment. Back a little from
the beach and against the end of the cliff was a rude
cabin built of drift-wreckage from the ship.

With much hesitation he approached the door of the [187]

cabin, which was a real door taken from the ship.
“Some white man; no native built that,” he murmured
as he knocked on the door.

Getting no answer, he knocked again; this time louder.

Still no response. Having turned the knob he was
surprised to find that the door was not locked. Pushing
it back, he looked within. Then, quickly closing it, he
raced back to camp.

“Come see what I have found!” he exclaimed. “There

must be at least one survivor of the wreck who did not
escape with the ship’s crew. There is a cabin built of
driftwood at the end of the cliff!”

“A cabin! A cabin!” exclaimed the others, as they sprang

up and prepared to follow him.

An inspection of the cabin convinced them that it had [188]

been occupied for some time and had been but recently
abandoned, if, indeed, the builder might not be
expected back at any moment. Some garments of an
oriental design hung upon the wall.

“Wonder if he’s a Chinaman?” said Johnny.

There was a well-built bunk on one side of the room,

and on the opposite a wood-burning stove improvised
out of empty gasoline cans. There was a small table, a
ship’s chair and a box of dishes, also a handmade set of
shelves well stocked with ship supplies.

As the Professor rummaged about one corner of the

room his hand fell upon an object which immediately
absorbed his attention. For a few minutes he stood
staring at it. Then he whispered to himself:

“Could it be possible? If it only were!”

To the boys he said nothing, but Johnny saw an
unaccountable new light of hope in his eyes. “I wonder,”
he said, “if this man could have discovered the chests
and brought them ashore for safe keeping?”

“I have been wondering that myself,” said the Professor.

“It’s worth looking into.”

“In the meanwhile, where is he?” asked Pant. [189]

“The natives may have done for him,” suggested

Johnny.

A cloud passed over the Professor’s face. “Let us hope

not,” he said quickly. After a moment’s thought, he
added: “We must search the island thoroughly. We must
find the chests and that man.”

“Do you know,” he said suddenly, drawing an object

from his pocket, “that is the razor I learned to shave
with when a boy? It was my father’s—an old-styled one,
called a ‘pipe razor.’ There was never a better made. I
found it in that shack just now.”

The two boys stared but asked no questions.

A few minutes later, while the Professor was gone for a

bucket of water, the boys held a brief consultation. “It’s
all right to search the island,” said Johnny; “I don’t like
the idea of owning up we’re beaten myself, but how
about those natives?”

“It’ll be pretty bad if they once land,” said Pant, “but [190]
perhaps we can prevent them from landing.”

“I don’t see how. We couldn’t attack them before they

had done us any harm.”
“No, we couldn’t, but there may be a way to stop them.
Time enough to think about that once they come in
sight.”

“And then there’re those chaps who claim the wreck

belongs to them.” Johnny’s gaze wandered far out to
sea, as if he expected to catch sight of a coil of smoke
drifting there. “If they weathered the storm, they’ll soon
be down upon us.”

“Can’t do anything about that, either, until it happens,”

said Pant.

“All right then, we’ll take up the search. I fancy the

Professor will want to be one of the searching party. Will
you stay with the camp, or shall I?”

“I’ll stay.”

“Say,” said Pant, a moment later, “it’s funny about that

razor he found!”

“Yes, it is. Probably his brother had it on board, and this [191]
sailor, or whoever he is, this survivor, took it off and has
been using it.”

“Maybe so,” said Pant in a skeptical tone of voice.

“Seamen are very superstitious about razors belonging
to dead men, though.” If he thought any further along
that line, he at least said no more about it at that time.

Several hours later, just as the two searchers were

returning from a long and fruitless tramp over the
island, and were being cheered by the odor of coffee
boiling over an open fire, Pant suddenly pointed to the
open sea.
“There they come!” he cried.

Low on the horizon there appeared three long, low

sailing vessels.

“Natives!” said Johnny in dismay.

“That’s what,” agreed Pant; “and what’s more, we’ve got

to do something about it quickly or they’ll be swarming
ashore with murder in their eyes. We’ve got to get to
the plane.”

“Will you go along?” asked Pant, pausing to address the

Professor.

“I thank you,” said the Professor. “I don’t blame you for [192]
seeking safety. As for myself, I shall stay here until I
have succeeded in proving certain conclusions I have
come to, or else have disproved them.”

The boys rushed on down to the beach, then pushing

the canvas boat off, rowed rapidly toward the “Dust
Eater.”

“I am afraid,” said Pant, “that our professor friend

doesn’t understand us very well.”

“And I fear I don’t understand this move very well,

myself.”

“You will shortly.” They had arrived at the seaplane.

“You take the wheel; I’ll stay in the cabin.”

Though surprised that he should be requested to fly the

plane, Johnny asked no questions, but, taking his place
before the wheel, set the engines in motion and soon
found himself gliding out over the sea.
“Sail straight out over them,” ordered Pant through the
tube, “then hover there as best you can. Not too high
though.”

Johnny followed instructions and was soon directly [193]

above the three large canoes. He could see the natives
plainly. There were twenty or more of them in a canoe.
Great, swarthy fellows they were, dressed in all manner
of apparel, from a full suit of white duck to a mere
breech cloth. They were heavily armed. Johnny was a
little startled to note that many of them carried rifles.
The plane was not out of range of a good rifle. The
natives, apparently stupefied at the appearance of this
gigantic bird, were staring upward, making no
movement. Even their paddles were idle.

Presently a wisp of smoke rose from one of their

canoes.

“That’s strange,” Johnny thought to himself.

The native nearest the spot leaped to one side, and [194]
there were frantic efforts to quench the little fire that
had started in the side of the boat. While this was being
accomplished, however, with all the natives bunched at
that end of the boat, a second fire broke out in the
other end of this canoe. This fire gained some headway
before it was discovered. The boat began to leak. The
natives flew into a panic. Some of them leaped
overboard and swam toward the other canoes.

When a third blaze appeared in the boat a panic

followed. Every native in the canoe forsook her.
Plunging into the sea, they made haste to reach the
remaining boats.
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