The enormous building at 95 Obere Donaustrasse, on the banks of the Danube canal, is the I.B.M. Centre. A plaque at the main entrance informs us that on that site, in the Diana Baths which now no longer exist, on February 15th 1867 Johann Strauss for the first time performed his Blue Danube. The Diana Baths were certainly more attractive than this box-like structure, but the calculators and electronic brains now installed over what was once a temple of transience, in which a civilization asked flirtatiously for the avoidance of a tragedy, do not disturb the whirlings of that waltz which, as Kubrick was clever enough to realize in his 2001: A Space Odyssey, keeps in time with the rhythm and the breathing of the worlds. If the Japanese are announcing a computer that will soon be capable of attaining the complexity of the human mind, then maybe one day in the distant future it could compose the circular rhythm of this waltz, a joy that forever escapes one and always returns – more distant and tenuous, though.
The calculators and electronic brains, like the space-ship which they control, are part of that music of space in which the ship travels. In the ceaseless iteration of the waltz there is something of the eternal, and not only an echo of the past – of the epoch of Francis Joseph which, according to the old saying, ended with the death of Strauss – but the unending projection of that past into the future, like the images of remote events which journey through space and, for those destined to receive them some time, somewhere, are already the future.
That I.B.M. Centre is also a heart of the business world, but even Strauss, a genuine artist admired by Brahms, was a hive of industry turning out consumer goods for the mass market – goods which however, miraculously, approached the shores of poetry. The plaque on that building makes us feel a little like Hal, the computer in Space Odyssey who became so human as to make mistakes, to suffer from emotions and fears. Anyone who loves the waltz should try not to be upset at the idea that in 1982 a computer was nominated “Man of the Year”.