> The computer is founded on a principle of generalized equivalence.
> Indeed, in order for the world to be considered "computerly," or
> digital, it must be reduced to numbers, to calculable data and codes.
> Data can be translated from one form to the next due to this axiomatic
> reduction to a common language. This infinite translation reiterates
> the westen fantasy of a "mathesis universalis," or universal
> mathematical language epitomized by the digital code of the computer,
> a language that does not need to introduce itself to an external world
> because it all occurs on a screen.
>
> MY LAST TAPE proposes an ironic way to explore the domain of this
> translation. I scan a text, The Last Tape of Samuel Beckett. I change
> the .TXT extension of the file for the .PRG extension, used for files
> under COMMODORE 64. With a conversion program I translate this file in
> an audio file that I reproduce on a magnetic tape that I play on an
> old computer COMMODORE 64.
>
> Between the choice of the text, as arbitrary as the mathesis computer
> universalis, and the final product, a tape is achieved. What is it
> that the translation and the relation between the analogical and the
> numeric?
>
> Krapp, in The Last Tape, says that the earth could be uninhabited.
> This possibility, as she hypothesizes, considers the past ("what was")
> as well as the future ("what will occur," like the unthinkable
> explosion of the sun of which Jean-Francois Lyotard spoke). It is a
> eco-logical answer to the anthropomorphic ego-logy of the data
> processing.