Information is everywhere. The term ‘information’ is so powerful, yet we understand it so little. Information is information. It’s neither energy nor is it matter (as Norbert Wiener claims). But this doesn’t say a lot, and perhaps it isn’t even accurate, because matter is a form of energy. What, though, is information? Perhaps the question is put the wrong way. Couldn’t we ask instead: how can we use information?
Especially seeing that computers are not machines but general machines. And in asking the question ‘how?’, other, unexpected, questions pose themselves, such as: how do we use rationality? How analytics? How do we use geometry, arithmetic, algebra? How can we produce stabilities? How can we use symbols, indices, signals? How calculations, functions, codings? How generalisations and abstractions? How concepts, words, texts, constructs, drawings? How infrastructures, medialities, narratives? Fictions, phantasms, specifications, definitions? How form, structure, topoi? How behaviour, sensation, reason, cognition, logic? How does the new come about? What do Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Habermas, Heidegger, Sartre, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche,
Peirce, Boole, Poe, Hegel, Kant, Leibniz, Spinoza, Descartes, Aristotle, Plato and all the others have to say about it? – Curious yet?…