He/she who has taken the time to read my profile page and my praise of Gottlob Frege, has gotten to know me and my passions for a bit. In this case, you know that I am quite fond of the formalities behind reasoning and decision making. To whom is familiar with both my passions and the SOFTWARE exhibition catalogue (as you probably are, given that you are probably affiliated with Media Technology) my Fast Rewind will come as no surprise. I chose the work that honours the work that Frege's formal logic was based on: George Boole's set theory. The theory of grouping real-world information into sets and reasoning with those sets.
Carl Fernbach-Flarsheim, the creator of the work The Boolean Image/Conceptual Typewriter, shows a similar passion to mine. In the text accompanying the work, he describes the finite limits of life within the world we are given. The artist has an almost poetic grasp on the way this finite state translates to a series of facts and decisions. It is up to us, humans, to make conscious decisions about the decisions we are faced with. This has led to an artwork that Fernbach-Flarsheim describes as something that "can also be understood as a medium in its own right". It is not a photograph or aesthetic visual image. Rather, it is a visual representation of decisions in the matrix of life in a 2D space - a decipherable representation of "the message behind the medium". And yes, these decisions can be as simple as choosing an alphanumeric character. This choice is very limited, but all choices, in their own respect, are limited to a certain set of options.
The Boolean Image fits well within the ARTificial Intelligence timeline. The field of Computer Science and AI originated when Ada Lovelace described the "analytical machine" in the early 1800's. This machine was supposed to use strict rules to manipulate symbolic information - very similar to the work of Boole and Frege, but ahead of its time. The field of AI really took off in the 1960's, when Alan Turing presented his famous Turing test. When The Boolean Image was created in 1970, AI was still very much in its infancy. Yet, Fernbach-Flarsheim cleverly noted that by interpreting simple chosen symbols, the computer was already capable of identifying human decisions, thus, of identifying the core of what human life exists out of. Ada Lovelace's ideas had more than come true, but Turing had to wait. Still does, maybe. Currently, computers make what Fernbach-Flarsheim would describe as (simple) decisions for us all the time. Still, all of these decisions are based in code and usually based on statistical operations on large datasets. Is it, in this case, the computer who makes the decision, or have we simply decided to constantly repeat our previous decision behaviour?