Across computer- and neurosciences, the arts, theories of design, and techno- or media-sciences, a research of the becoming or emergence of form is springing up. Its central question is: how are forms related to the complexity of streams of matter, energy and informations? A kind of common sense accompanies this question. It is summed up in the headline: information first. The fragile,
exciting encounters of informational programs “in form of” avatars, biocasting, e-card, RFID, ethnomorphing-programs, serious games, things that think, show us: there is no digital form but the status quo of informational poiesis and the ability of humans to share or produce the performance of informational coexistence between the multi-sensual body and the informational rest of the world. Today we deal with much more proto-forms, form-options, than with the spectacle of forms. Yet we lack a mutually informed cross-disciplinary inquiry into the infogenic fields of human cognition, expression, behavior, and creativity.

The traditional and heroic modern institutional orders were based on the definite priorities of forms. Starting with Plato or Pythagoras, the European history of the senses, cognition and invention was strictly framed by pre-cultural forms that no one could leave behind. It was a set of reachable orders; and complexities of human adaption and differences were defined as strictly reduced variations of these ideals. This was the source of what we know as a canon of forms, colors, knowledge and behavior.

Forms have been the trans-religious master narratives for more than two and a half thousand years. embedded in mathematics, the practices of calculation and digital effectiveness of explicit programming these priorities of forms, survived until today. Spencer-Brown’s Law of Form is an example for formalized generic principles, in which the differences between form, standards, conventions, selection and decision are neutralized for the sake of calculation or computing. But even mathematics are one of these languages, which humans invented and professionalized since more than three thousand years. And as a language this system of abstractions refers to the dynamics of ongoing co-evolutional changes of its rules and coded informational basis.

The basis of all co-evolutional changes are infogenic interrelations between information consumers, – are they biotic or abiotic systems. Therefore, I use the difference between information as signal and information as sign. A signal corresponds with immediate non-reflexive reaction that might start an observing gesture, – but must do not work that way. Signals are first impressions, accidental gifts “from the phenomenal world to the human brain-in-formation” (Barbara Maria Strafford). Over a long period signs have been performatives. But humans learned to differ between the accidental gifts and the self constructed option of line, circle, and sign. In the beginning of the invention of signs they were, regarding the hieroglyphs in Egypt religious culture, strictly coupled with the immediate meaning of signals. In Uruk, northern Iraq, Palestine and Greece, the idea became reality to free signs form one unmoveable meaning and to use signs, their combination and linear writing for different meanings or interpretation. From that time on, about 5.000 years ago, the sign was combined with the options of interpretation and, therefore, could be transformed into a re-combinative observing and expressive practice. Visible and readable signs opened the cognitive space for imaginative and fictional presence. Body, things, physiological encounters are transformed into an informational reality. With these artificial experiences new processes of inventions started.

Even though signs today are combined with the promise of almost instantaneous reactions, these complex patterns of interactivity carry the optional structure of content. Signs are the surface of information. They are invented, conventionalized, diffused and standardized. The transfer of signs between humans or in Human- ´What ever ´- Interfaces is always translation and transforming the connected fields of signs. This field-related existence of informational signs allows us to say that information is proto-culture and will be used as proto-culture. Information is not behind-the-scene, not behind the screen, it is the core of the non-formative monitoring of processes, proto-cultural coding.

In this sense, I will speak of infogenic fields and the infogenic human. I understand this as a criticism of the non-legitimated forms and the endless descriptions of the estimated qualities of pre-informational heritages. But it is not discoursive criticism alone. The critique comes from inside the forms, bodies, structures, it comes from the deep corporeal capacity for drawing one and numerous distinctions, using them as data and information. The inside is information. It is the discovery of relationships between the micrologics of differences, abstract structures and the real world of specific bodies, situations, events, cooperations, or collaborations. I will not derive some general claims out of this booming and buzzing universe of information. Thinking of CODED CULTURES, Coding Cultures, Coded Codes, I will take some steps into the direction of living complexities, like human-media-networks, locative media, works of art. They are internally heterogeneous, composed of a number of different clusters and properties, of different time-space-relations, or cybernetic localism and so on…

We need to formulate info-poetics of human adaption and self design, which integrates the three dimensions of matter-, energy-, and information-streams. With this hypothesis of complex synergies between the status of matter, energy, and information I accept NorbertWieners definition of the cybernetic focus: Information, neither matter, nor energy. But this difference cannot stand alone. For all biological, coding and aesthetic practices, information should be understood as a source of energy and artificial nurture, as “Lebensmittel”. Long time ago, the human biological system randomly invented the power of the artificial by using empathy and prospective ideas as additives to signals, non-verbal gestures, trans-situational wishes, that the moment will last for ever or a group could meet together under the same conditions that exist now. For example: The performance of passion and restraints was used as model for a coming situation. Within these processes of invention of time, space, different location, different time, same or different meanings, – speaking only about a few aspects -, the human biological system creates an internal monitor: cognition and, as a high end product, self-reflexivity, consciousness and self-evidence.

Codes became the key virtuals of human selforganisation.