Anna Greenspan
2. Radio’s ties to the sea
are accentuated by the
critical role the new
technology played in
the infamous Titanic
disaster.
call in their book Faraday, Maxwell and the Electromagnetic Field, one of ‘the
greatest experimental discoveries in the history of science’ (2014: 16). Hertz’s
technological tinkerings were designed to prove that the mathematical theorizations of James Clerk Maxwell were correct. Their success determined
‘beyond doubt’ the existence of electromagnetic waves. Yet, despite the fact
that the world around him was being transformed by the electric machines of
the Victorian age, Hertz thought of his experiments as pure scientific discovery. Remarkably, he could conceive of no practical results from his work. ‘It’s
of no use whatsoever’, he is reported to have said, ‘this is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right – we just have these mysterious
electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are
there’.
A little over 100 years later, wireless technology – from radio’s capacity to
occupy the airwaves so as to broadcast signal across the sea2, to today’s mobile
phone, a device that has been adopted throughout the planet faster than has
any machine in history – has involved an evermore intimate engagement with
Hertzian waves. Today, the ‘mysterious waves’ that surround us but that ‘we
cannot see’ are required by an increasing number of ‘smart objects’ embedded
into all aspects of life. With the emergence of wearables and the ‘Internet of
Things’, with its promise of billions of interconnected devices within the next
two decades, the workings of the world are now, more than ever, powered by
the invisible waves of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The future orientation inherent in modernity coincides with the gradual
revelation of this unseen realm. In an essay entitled ‘Future perfect’, Iwan
Rhys Morus argues how the appearance of electronic technology sparked the
arrival of a mode of time that was explicitly directed towards the novelties
that tomorrow might bring. Victorians could not talk about electricity without
invoking its transformative future, writes Morus. ‘When the inventor Nikola
Tesla appeared onstage in London or New York, carrying glass tubes glowing
with electric light in his hands, he was giving his audiences a glimpse of that
future’ (2014). To quote Morus:
Before the beginning of the 19th century, the future was only rarely
portrayed as a very different place from the present. The social order,
like the natural order, was supposed to be static, with everything
in its proper place: as it had been, so it would be. When Sir Isaac
Newton thought about the future, he worried about the exact date
of Armageddon, not about how his science might change the world.
Even Enlightenment revolutionaries usually argued that what they were
doing was restoring the proper order of things, not creating a new world
order. It was only around the beginning of the 1800s, as new attitudes
towards progress, shaped by the relationship between technology and
society, started coming together, that people started thinking about the
future as a different place, or an undiscovered country – an idea that
seems so familiar to us now that we often forget how peculiar it actually
is. The new technology of electricity seemed to be made for futuristic
speculation.
(2014)
This forward-looking momentum continued to accelerate as the electric machines that had begun to infiltrate the modern world started to tap
into the wireless spectrum. Starting with ‘Marconi’s wireless telegraph, the
138 Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research
Wireless waves
fascination for telegraphy’s now mundane ‘lightening lines’ was replaced,
explains Jeffrey Sconce in his book Haunted Media, ‘with the more abstract
wonder of electronic communication through open air’ (2000: 62). The result
was an extraordinary epoch of invention that is still in the process of unfolding. The tinkerers, industrialists and inventors of the Victorian era brought
us light bulbs and telegraphs, yet, without the ability to make use of wireless
vibrations ‘that would be it. There would never have been radios or televisions
or cell phones; no satellites beaming down GPS signals; no WiFi or Bluetooth
or any other wireless technology’ (Bodanis 2005: 89).
The intrinsic trajectory of modern time, then, has been inextricably bound
to a process through which evermore ubiquitous and powerful receivers
become increasingly capable of unveiling the mysterious waves that ‘are there’
but that ‘we cannot see with the naked eye’. Our very sense of the future
is thus tied to our escalating, entangled and intimate involvement with an
imperceptible environment – simultaneously natural and machinic – within
which we are immersed.
Almost nothing was known about electricity until the modern period.
The first documented knowledge dates back to the sixth century BC when
Thales of Miletus wrote of his discovery that rubbed amber (‘elektron’ in
ancient Greek) could attract lightweight objects such as a feather. For the next
2000 years, writes Ira S. Brodsky in his book The History of Wireless (2008),
‘little was added to this meagre understanding of static electricity’. However,
beginning in earnest in the eighteenth century, a deep and ongoing technological absorption with the electromagnetic field began. Through a series of
discoveries, driven by a practice-based culture of technological experimentation, it became increasingly clear that the natural force apparent in lightening (and in some strange animals) could be harnessed and put to great use.
First as mere parlour tricks – an electrician initially simply meant a magician –
nineteenth-century society combined invention with industry to store electricity in batteries, harness it as a means for lighting their great metropolizes
and, with the invention of the telegraph, lay the first networks for global
instantaneous communication that laid the foundation for today’s information
age.
These technologies both relied upon and helped spark a revolution in
physics that fundamentally altered our conception of the natural world.
The theory of electromagnetics shifted our understanding of nature away
from external objects that were known through our senses towards abstract
forces that could not be easily perceived. ‘From a long view of the history of
mankind – seen from, say, ten thousand years from now’, writes physicist
Richard Feynman, ‘there can be little doubt that the most significant event
of the nineteenth century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws
of electrodynamics’ (quoted in Forbes and Mahon 2014: 241). Albert Einstein
concurred, ‘when James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) discovered the mathematical equations that modeled electromagnetics, one scientific epoch ended
and another began’ (quoted in Forbes and Mahon 2014: 241).
Maxwell’s proofs were based on the prior speculations of Michael Faraday,
a man untrained in the language of mathematics. Faraday, the son of a blacksmith, and therefore attuned to the abstract materialism of metal,3 did not
work through a familiar scientific process of abstract deduction. Instead, he
created machines that were designed to test his ideas about the electric world
that was intensifying all around him. Through this practice of empirical observation, Faraday began to uncover that ‘sources of electricity and magnetism
3. For more on ‘the
metallic line’ see
Deleuze and Guattari
(1988).
www.intellectbooks.com 139
Anna Greenspan
produce force fields that take on a life of their own’ (Brodsky 2008). By
establishing the basis for the concept of the electromagnetic field in physics,
Brodsky claims, Faraday ‘ultimately changed the way natural philosophers
viewed the world. His experiments with electric and magnetic fields opened
the door to an entirely new dimension of the universe’ (Brodsky 2008).
The mathematics of Maxwell offered proof of this imperceptible realm.
With this certainty came the dissolution of a mechanistic vision of the physical world that was based on a model of ‘colliding billiard balls that could
be touched and measured’. Our knowledge of electromagnetics, which was
postulated by Faraday, proved by Maxwell and, ultimately, made manifest
by Hertz, fundamentally challenged the foundational assumptions of the
Newtonian world-view. Unlike Newton’s model of a mechanical universe,
which assumed that forces (like gravity) were produced by the distant,
instantaneous action of one material body on another, electric and magnetic
forces ‘actually had a presence in space’. Maxwell’s theory of ‘displacement
currents’ that occurred even in empty space demonstrated that the world
was ‘not governed by objects acting at a distance – but, instead, by forces,
which acted together in accordance with laws that governed electrical and
magnetic phenomena’. After the work of Faraday and Maxwell, write Forbes
and Mahon, it became clear that ‘space itself acted as a repository of energy
and a transmitter of forces: it was home to something that pervades the physical world yet was inexplicable in Newtonian terms – the electromagnetic field’
(2014: 17, original emphasis).
‘The theory I propose’, Maxwell wrote, ‘may be called a theory of the
Electromagnetic Field because it has to do with the space in the neighbourhood of the electric or magnetic bodies and it may be called Dynamical Theory,
because it assumes that in the space there is matter in motion by which the
observed electromagnetic phenomena are produced’ (Maxwell quoted in
Forbes and Mahon 2014: 203). With this, Maxwell ‘was doing nothing less
than changing our concept of reality’ (Forbes and Mahon 2014: 210). He was
the first to recognize that the foundations of the physical world are imperceptible to our senses. ‘All we know about them – possibly all we can ever know –
are the mathematical relationships to things we can feel and touch’ (Forbes
and Mahon 2014: 210, original emphasis). Maxwell thus proved what
Faraday had already suspected – that the forces determining our world are
beyond the bandwidth of human perception and can be known only through
abstraction.
It was Faraday who initially came upon the idea that electromagnetics
occurred in waves. He was inspired by seeing the experiments of the German
physicist and musician Ernst Chladni, who first made sound vibrations visible. ‘Steeped in musings about acoustic vibrations and waves’, writes David
Bodanis in his book Electric Universe, ‘Faraday began to think that electricity and magnetism might be transmitted by waves resembling those of
sound, or of light’ (2005: 70). In contemplating the phenomena unleashed
by his machines, he began to suspect that ‘magnetic and electric forces must
be transmitted over time by vibrations or waves in the intervening medium,
rather like acoustic pressure in the air’ (Bodanis 2005: 81). In 1832 Faraday
wrote a letter to the Royal Society detailing these speculations. Anxious that
his wave theory may be too radical, Faraday sealed the letter in a move that,
as G. R. M. Garratt suggests, echoes Faraday’s suspicion that the transmission of magnetic forces takes time (a postulation that was foundational to his
theory of waves). The letter remained unopened for more than 100 years, until
1937 when it was finally read. In it Faraday had written,
140 Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research
Wireless waves
I am inclined to compare the diffusion of magnetic forces from a
magnetic pole to the vibrations upon the surface of disturbed water or
those of air in the phenomena of sound; i.e. I am inclined to think the
vibratory theory will apply to these phenomena, as it does to sound and,
most probably, to light.
(Faraday in Garratt 1994: 11)
Faraday’s early conjectures were later proved by Maxwell’s mathematics and
Hertz’s experimental science, which finally detected the shape of electromagnetic waves. These discoveries, with their re-conceptualizing of the physical world, came with a sense that the planet was submerged in an invisible
liquid-like medium. In Haunted Media, Jeffrey Sconce details the widespread
belief, pervasive throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,
that the planet was bathed in an all-encompassing ‘oceanic’ realm:
In refiguring the concept of transmission from the wired connection to
the more mysterious wandering signal, accounts of wireless and radio
returned consistently to the structuring metaphor of the ‘etheric ocean.’
Bound at first, perhaps, to the medium’s origins in maritime applications,
this most fluid of communication metaphors became a powerful conceptual tool for engaging not only the new electronic environment, but the
emerging social world as well. Oceanic metaphors proved versatile in
capturing the seeming omnipresence, unfathomable depths and invisible
mysteries of both radio’s ether and its audience – mammoth fluid bodies
that – like the sea were ultimately boundless and unknowable.
(2000: 63)
Today, though the idea of an etheric medium no longer holds sway, there is,
as our technology becomes increasingly wireless, a residing sense that the
network of cyberspace conforms, as Jennifer Gabrys has written, to more
‘liquid topologies’. Mesmerized with the streams and currents of information,
we are continually being soaked in a multitude of electromagnetic waves with
a whole variety of lengths and frequencies. It is this that theorist Mark Hansen
refers to when he speaks of the ‘vibratory nature of 21st-century media’ (2014)
and also why author David Bodanis simply names wireless technology ‘wave
machines’. In his book Earth Sound, Earth Signal, Douglas Kahn quotes Richard
Feynman as he elaborates on the wonder of this enveloping submergence:
In this space there is not only my vision of you, but information from
Moscow Radio that’s being broadcasted at the present moment and the
seeing of somebody from Peru. All the radio waves are just the same
kind of waves only longer waves. And then the radar from the airplane,
which is looking at the ground trying to figure out where it is, is coming
through this room at the same time. Plus the X-rays, and cosmic rays,
and all these other things, the same kind of waves, exactly the same
waves, but shorter, faster, or longer, slower, exactly the same thing. So
this big field, this area of irregular motions of an electric field of vibration
contains this tremendous information, and IT’S ALL REALLY THERE,
that’s what gets you! […] So all these things are going though the
room at the same time, which everybody knows, but you’ve got to stop
and think about it to really get the pleasure about the complexity, the
INCONCEIVABLE nature of nature.
(2013: 10, original emphasis)
www.intellectbooks.com 141
Anna Greenspan
4. For more see, for
example, Ernst (2012:
99) and Enns (2016).
The great media theorist Marshall McLuhan taught us long ago that it is
the fact of media, rather than its content, that matters most. What makes
media vital is less how it is used but, rather, ‘what it does to us and with us’
(McLuhan 1994: 239). For McLuhan, the machines of the information age –
radio, telephone, television and computers – are exemplified by electric light:
a ‘medium without a message’ (1994: 151). Illuminated by the empty purity
of light, it becomes clear that the true significance of new technologies is the
electric environment itself, which subsumes and transforms the world simultaneously. Environments, McLuhan insisted, ‘are not just containers, but are
processes that change the content totally’ (1994: 275).
In recent years, the environmental study of contemporary media has
gained ground. Theorists like Jussi Parrika (particularly in his work on
Wolfgang Ernst and ‘the German school’ of media studies)4 lay out a path
of research distinct from ‘the linguistic turn’ of Anglo-American cultural
studies with its focus on social and political content. Instead, this more
materialist theorization concentrates on a transcendental understanding of media, which conceptualizes the technological environment as ‘the
material substrate’ or underlying conditions through which meaning is
produced. In their essay on ‘Materiality of communication’, which serves as
an introduction to the book Communication Matters (2011), Jeremy Packer
and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley write of trying to escape the ‘post-structuralist impasse’ brought about by the overemphasis on the textual, semiotic
and ideological that has characterized so much postmodern thought. They
write of a new materialism ‘outside the traditional paradigm of representation’ that can engage with the technological background, which operates
as historical apriori, the transcendental conditions within which experience
takes place.
One manifestation of this materialist study of the media has been a growing intellectual attention to what researcher Lisa Parks calls the ‘complex
materialities of infrastructure’ (Parks and Starosielski 2015) with its physical
systems of distribution, wires, cables, standards and protocols. Wireless infrastructure is constituted by the physicality of telecommunication networks –
satellite towers designed for the transmission of signal, as well as mobile
devices that can receive and decode the circulating information. This communicative traffic in turn depends on technical protocols, which entail political
and commercial agreements. Bandwith allocation – or the divvying up of the
electromagnetic spectrum – involves both the regulatory power of states, as
well as the economic strength of corporations. Yet, behind or underneath
all this is an earthly, even cosmic, force – highly technological, but at the
same time wholly natural – that occurs in frequencies whose range is largely
beyond our perceptual reach. ‘The new media are not bridges between man
and nature’, wrote McLuhan, ‘they are nature’ (1994: 272). John Durham
Peters echoes this sentiment in the opening line of his most recent book The
Marvelous Clouds, ‘A philosophy of media’, he writes, ‘needs a philosophy of
nature’ (2015: 1).
Chongqing China, by some measures the world’s most populous city,
has recently implemented a cell phone-only walking lane. The paint on
the sidewalk guiding pedestrians distracted and consumed by their mobile
devices serves as a somewhat comic acknowledgement of the growing ‘ambient electromagnetic din of cities’. Jennifer Gabrys, recognizing
this transformation, argues that the proliferation of wireless technologies
requires that the space of the city be re-thought, and that the ‘hard and
142 Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research
Wireless waves
fixed image of the city fade into the background’ (2010: 48). In its place
emerges an intensive urbanism produced by the exchanges of wireless
devices that transmit across electromagnetic frequencies. The city, once
apprehended through its ‘arcades or thoroughfares’, is now ‘best understood through the drift and pull of [the] electromagnetic spectrum’. Urban
space becomes less constituted by its concrete structures than by the invisible rhythmic frequencies that connect our phones and sensors. As Gabrys
notes, Media theorist Villem Flusser wrote of this presciently in his 1988
essay ‘The city as wave: Trough in the image: Flood’. ‘When it comes to
cities’, he wrote,
5. Triggers: Introducing
the Technosphere |
Mark B. N. Hansen,
https://www.
youtube.com/
watch?v=JH6nr6GLm4s.
we should learn to think topographically rather than geographically
and see the city not as a geographical place, but rather as a flection
in a field. This is not a comfortable undertaking, as it involves one of
those notorious paradigm shifts. … When we are talking about a ‘new
urbanism,’ it is more useful to construct the image of the city as a field
of flections.
(Flusser 2005: 320)
Marshall McLuhan points to the same phenomenon when he quotes Cab
Calloway in Understanding Media: ‘When I walk down Eighth Avenue, man, I
see rhythms, I don’t see downtown’ (1994: 275).
As electromagnetic waves become increasingly foundational to urban
life, the city – the most artificial of environments – becomes evermore deeply
interconnected with the planet’s natural pulsating atmosphere. Behind
everything we can feel, touch, hear and see are the vibrations of the electromagnetic waves. ‘Electricity has become a mighty kingdom’, said Heinrich
Hertz over a century ago. ‘We perceive it in a thousand places where we had
no proof of its existence before. The domain of electricity extends over the
whole of nature’ (quoted in Bodanis 2005: 105). It is this saturating electric
environment that forms the ultimate material infrastructure of the media that
we carry with us, that we wear, and that we increasingly embed in the objects
around us.
When Thomas Watson, Alexander Graham Bell’s right-hand man, first
listened to the transmissions over telephone wires he was mesmerized by the
‘natural radio’ produced through signal from the ionosphere:
I used to spend hours at night listening to the many strange noises
of the telephone and speculating as to their cause. One of the most
common sounds was a snap, followed by a grating sound that lasted
2 or 3 seconds before it faded into the silence and another was like the
chirping of a bird. My theory at the time was that the currents causing
these sounds came from explosions on the sun or that they were signals
from another planet. They were mystic enough to suggest the latter
explanation but I never detected any regulatory in them that might indicate they were intelligent signals.5
Watson’s enchantment with ‘cosmological noise’, argues Mark Hansen,
points to the fascinating capacity of radio to ‘transmit without a sender’.
‘Radio was heard before it was invented’, writes Douglas Kahn, and
‘radio, before it was heard, was’ (2013: 2). Almost all the early inventors
(or explorers) of electromagnetics had a sense that in tapping into the
www.intellectbooks.com 143
Anna Greenspan
spectrum they were opening channels of communication with something
unknown. Their theories rested on the belief that the ‘oceanic’ ether
opened pathways of communication for entities other than ourselves.
Electronic communication tapped into waves of varying frequencies –
immersive but unseen – that carried messages from beyond. There was a
sense, writes Sconce in his history of electric occultism, that ‘as with the
oceans of the earth, unknown creatures might stalk this electronic sea’s
invisible depths’ (2000: 69). Edison thought he was talking to ghosts. Tesla
believed he could detect the transmission of deliberate, intelligent agents
and was convinced he was in touch with aliens. Oliver Lodge, a physicist
who, independently of Hertz, had detected electromagnetic radiation, said
of Hertz’s experiments that they ‘harnessed the ether for the transmission
of intelligence’. Marconi had originally been inspired in his own research
by the comments of Lodge and Hertz on the ‘fantastic’ presence of ‘ethereal vibrations in the atmosphere’.
Today, as we are increasingly surrounded by a myriad of wireless devices
that tap into and communicate through the imperceptible rhythms of the
electromagnetic spectrum, as our accessories, furniture and buildings wirelessly tune in to the airwaves, much of our environment communicates in
frequencies whose range is largely beyond our perceptual reach. Over the
past decades, then, there has been a massive expansion in the wireless interaction of machines with other machines. This trend shows no sign of slowing.
We are ever more submerged in the sub-perceptible traffic of the technology around us. Contemporary life, as Hansen says, is ‘permeated by wireless signals that are performing operations outside our awareness, forming
the infrastructure of everyday life’. Scholar Katherine Hayles, who has long
been attuned to the implications of this increasingly animate environment,
has spent the past few years writing about cognitive objects that can sense
and interpret the world and communicate on a machine–machine basis. She
writes:
As human agents, we naturally tend to foreground our own activities,
but in fact, human-human communication is becoming a smaller and
smaller bandwidth compared to total machine-machine communication. There are all the invisible information flows surging around us of
which were unconscious and unaware but that are nevertheless becoming increasingly important in the technical infrastructural and larger
picture of what is going on.
(Hayles quoted in Packer and Crofts Wiley 2011: 30)
The machinic engagement with the waves of the spectrum constitutes an
evolutionary trajectory, from the telegraph and light bulb to the smartphone and wearable device. By tapping into these ‘natural’ rhythms our
technological environment becomes more and more ubiquitous, connected,
autonomous and smart. This inevitable path towards ubiquity, interconnectedness and cognition – which coincides with the futurity of modernity –
proceeds by opening a realm outside the organic temporality of human
consciousness. The wireless devices that surround us operate in frequencies
that are beyond, underneath or outside the perceptual scale of human life.
As modernity unfolds, these technologies function to produce what Mark
Hansen has called a ‘cosmological revelation’, unveiling the existence of the
144 Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research
Wireless waves
nonhuman, invisible, vibratory environment within which all of our experience now takes place.
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Parks, Lisa and Starosielski, Nicole (2015), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of
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SUGGESTED CITATION
Greenspan, A. (2016), ‘Wireless waves’, Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative
Research, 14: 3, pp. 137–146, doi: 10.1386/tear.14.3.137_1
www.intellectbooks.com 145
Anna Greenspan
CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Anna Greenspan is Assistant Professor in Media Arts at NYU Shanghai. She
maintains a website at www.annagreenspan.com.
Contact: Room 938, 1555 Century Avenue, Pudong, Shanghai, China 200122.
E-mail: annagreenspan@gmail.com
Anna Greenspan has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.
146 Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research