INTERVIEW WITH Horst Hörtner

HORST HÖRTNER Media Artist, Researcher - In conversation with ROLAND URBAN

ACTUALLY, WE SHOULD HAVE STARTED THE DAY BEFORE YESTERDAY.

If you recapitulate the history of digitalisation, what do you think have been milestones?

No matter if you take digitalisation in concrete terms - the digitisation of analogue data – or what resonates with the term, namely Artificial Intelligence and the “humanisation” of the machine, in both cases you have to go back to the Middle Ages. Digitalisation did not begin with Leibniz, even though he made a significant contribution. It began with the artificial reproduction of music. The first machine in this context was developed in the 9th century in the Arab world. A flute player had rings around his fingers that, via ropes and rolls, were connected with needles. When he played the flute the needles were lifted or lowered, thereby producing a pattern on wax wax cylinders. In this way the melody was transferred on to the wax cylinders and a mechanical reproduction of the music was created (...)

Full text available at:

https://issuu.com/fsse/docs/tagungsbuch_2020_en