There has never been a real meeting between Alvin Lucier and Friedrich Kittler in Innsbruck. Its only reality is that of a TRANSITory fictitious event lasting over the years. That leaves enough fiction-creating space to reflect on the art of the two. The signal-to-noise ratio and its relationship to Jakobson's "poetic function" (which we now know can be counted as reality), or to Cage's autonomisation of both perception and a wide range of different (acoustic) materials, provides the refer-ence framework for the artistic projects reflected and realised simultaneously (not only) in electronic space at ZEITGLEICH in Innsbruck.

The merging of noise and signal, calculated and researched for a variety of purposes starting at the middle of this century at least, is something Friedrich Kittler finds executed already at the beginning and at the end of Richard Wagner's RING tetralogy and to that extent finds - if not executed, at least expressed - the end of European art. And that is something art works built of sound, from Marcel Duchamps inaudible box sound and John Cage's audible non-sound to Lucier's brainwave sound, seem to have observed. With the help of the maximum value 1 for the sign H - for information - in Claude E. Shannon's formula, Friedrich Kittler shows "that all the maximum of information represents is maximum improbability" and thus "is now almost impossible to distinguish from maximum disturbance". So it is still possible, even though (provisionally? apparently?) only just. Simultaneous (ZEITGLEICH) art derives its bursting force precisely by placing the old wooden wedge in the rock of sound in such a way that the role of the water, with its power to ultimately split the rock, no longer has to be assumed by the artist, who has been fading out since Wagner, but by the test setup generated by the work of art itself.

This volume contains Alvin Lucier's story of the recording of "Music on a Long Thin Wire". The self-rebuke, "Don't cheat", is the verbalised core of this aesthetic of test setups. The matter of communication and the difference compared with given expectations that the matter itself creates in the name of art is transformed into art. With the piece of wire he succeeds in separating the element and the operation or, as Friedrich Kittler postulates for the real inexorableness of digital sampling as well as for two of Thomas Pynchon's heroes, "in undermining one's own limits and separating elements of communication from their operations".

The pendant to maximum noise and hence information value, i.e. to a minimum noise-to-signal ratio, is anticipated in theory in Roman Jakobson's "poetic function" of language. If the message is to be found in the "attitude to the message as such", in the "composition of the linguistic sign", as Jakobson's colleague Mukarovsky put it, the coefficient for the signal-to-noise ratio shoots up to maximum. For art to be proof against the banality of ahistorical unconsciousness and also to avoid - in whatever medium it expresses itself - being taken in by the frequency trap of the gestural clichés of a perhaps related medium - in the case of a sounding art form, for instance, the old story of how to handle the pitiless fact of fading - it is essential to concentrate on the "poetic function" or, more precisely, on the precision that such concentration makes possible. The aesthetic category of the - to quote Jakobson again - "immediate experienceability of the sign" is the tool with which a music in which no sound and no pattern refers to anything but itself and its relationship to decodable noise turns itself into art. Following Richard Wagner's requiem for music's expressive similarity to language, a box, a nothing, a piece of wire, a radio wave therefore has the capacity to be art, as the divorced marriage of element and operation is reconsummated in the liaison entered into between noise and signal, which is perceptible on the basis of the power of distinction with which the aesthetic category of the "poetic function" of art helps itself to find what is useless for every-thing other than art, that is to say, to find itself.

Art based on wire and radio waves - as a cipher for "simltaneous" art (ZEITGLEICH) in (not only) electronic - space must therefore short-circuit nothing less than the maximum of noise as information and the maximum for the signal-to-noise ratio. If we fail to feed Shannon's formula with values so that the sign H takes on the values O and 1 simultaneously, art will ride off into the twilight of the next Götterdämmerung.

For the moment, however, it is possible - and this is not intended solely as an interceptively polemical transposition of TRANSIT's self-definition as "serving to promote and realise artistic projects in electronic space" - that this art has not yet moved beyond the Rheingold prelude. "The Sky is Basically Smiling", for example, in self-reflective sound-loops, which produce neither more nor less in the way of art than the digital potential of manipulating reality. Sooner or later someone falls into the hole left by the second that a radio signal takes to travel to the moon and back. And it is in the free space discovered by Friedrich Kittler - once "the yoke of subjectivity has been lifted from our shoulders" - in which "hermeneutics and polemics", and "reception theory and interception practice" are interchangeable, that Alvin Lucier finds himself when, sitting quietly, he lets his brainwaves play the drums. "The sounds that follow upon order do not of necessity mean the death of art nor the death of an art," wrote Daniel Charles in 1982. "Having exhausted their potential for meaning. ... nothing is finished, everything is indefinite; every day everything begins anew."