Location: Paradiso, Weteringschans 6, Amsterdam
Language: English
Tickets: €10,00 (discount €7,50); presale via the Sonic Acts website: www.sonicacts.com
The international Sonic Acts Festival and the Stedelijk Museum proudly present the kickoff of the festival with a keynote lecture by George Dyson (US/CA) about time in the digital universe: No Time is There. The lecture is organized within the framework of the Temporary Stedelijk 3’s Stedelijk @ program.
Because counters have come to be known as clocks in the digital universe, it is easy to believe that time in the digital universe is equivalent to time in our universe. Nothing could be further from the truth, as Dyson will explore in his keynote address. The lecture is inspired by Dyson’s forthcoming publication Turing’s Cathedral, on sale from March 6 2012.
The digital universe – now growing by more than 5 trillion bits per second – goes back to a 32-by-32-by-40-bit matrix that took form in 1946. “Decisions between elementary alternatives, and enforcement of these decisions are initiated not with reference to time as an independent variable but rather according to sequence,” explained Julian Bigelow, the architect of this 5-kilobyte matrix, in 1949 (before it was customary to refer to these elementary alternatives as bits). “Time, therefore, does not serve as an index for the location of information,” he added, “but instead counter readings are used.”
More information about the speaker
George Dyson is an American and Canadian historian and philosopher of science and the future. The son of physicist Freeman Dyson, George grew up inside one of the most fervid hotbeds of scientific research in the Atomic Age. He spent his early adulthood living in a tree house and designing and building Aleutian kayaks (chronicled in his book Baidarka: The Kayak, 1986). His 1997 book, Darwin Among the Machines, made a case for the Internet as a growing organism, an evolving life force. In 2002, he published a story from his extraordinary childhood, Project Orion: The Atomic Spaceship 1957–1965, about the drive to build a nuclear-powered rocket aimed at Saturn. His forthcoming book, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe, is the fruit of years of research into the history and future of computing.
About Sonic Acts Festival
Sonic Acts XIV – Travelling Time is a four-day festival of concerts, performances, lectures, presentations, and exhibitions taking place at and in cooperation with Paradiso, de Balie, Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ, NIMk, SMART Project Space, STEIM, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and public space in Amsterdam during February 23-26, 2012.
Titled Travelling Time, this year’s festival offers an intense experience of time and explores radical ideas relating to this complex and ambiguous concept. Ongoing technological developments continually change our notions of time. Communication networks operate at light speed and computers process data in real time without human mediation, resulting in a gap between machine time and the human experience of it. Music and the other arts enable us to investigate the nature of time by making the concept tangible, and by changing or intensifying our experience of time. Art is a time machine. Sonic Acts XIV is a journey through time.
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Cover of Turing's Cathedral, George Dyson, appearing in 2012