Review of a book of a festival of a brain-tickling idea.
“The goal of science and the arts, and of education must be to decipher, not the genetic code, but the perceptual code,”
Marshall & Eric McLuhan, ‘Laws of media : The New Science’
as quoted in ‘Book Of Imaginary Media‘.
It’s a tricky question to answer – how do our current media and communication technologies alter the ways we perceive the world and each other? Coming at that from an unusual angle in 2004, was the Amsterdam festival : “An Archeology of Imaginary media”, which sought to explore ‘Imaginary media of past, present and future hoping to glean some insight into our relationship with media. A range of talks happened, and a play written by Peter Blegvad was performed, both later to appear in a book with DVD companion. Which as it turns out, is quite an engaging read (& watch ) despite the seeming abstractness of it’s theme.
“All communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact ( and perhaps even these ) are imagined.’ Communities are to be distinguished not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined,” points out the introduction, before further contexutalising ‘imaginary media’ : ‘like communities, all media are partly real and partly imagined. Without actual or imaginary characters, media cannot function’.
Imaginary Media, the book argues through a series of essays ( & DVD accompaniment), can encompass fictitious characters ( hello Sherlock Holmes), mythical beasts ( hello Pegasus ), the faded futurism of years gone by, and all manner of machines built to enhance or replace human interaction.
“Imaginary media may give rise to actual media, even when their final realization falls short of initial expectation. Media that were once imaginary may at some point become true. Imaginary media may also be sources of inspiration, in which case their effects might very well be felt and made manifest outside of the field of media itself.”
It’s a fun, provocative read, various authors exploring the book’s subtitle ‘Excavating the dream of the ultimate communication medium’ , with explorations of photographs of seances, a vinyl video player which plays back a video signal on a television set, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho distilled and blended down to one single frame, artificial intelligence as imagined early in the 20th century, Nikola Tesla‘s plans for developing wireless transmission across the globe, a project that got well underway but was never completed, Thomas Edison‘s early plans for a ‘psychic telephone’ that could communicate with the dead, Bruce Sterling‘s ‘Dead Media Project‘ where he collects dead media technologies… ( for more Bruce mythology, try his sci-fi novels, his viridian manifesto, or spimes ) and Roland Barthes comparing the eye contact he could still have with his mother via a photograph:
‘grasping the delayed light of a star, observing something in it’s course of it’s journey through time’.
DVDly Speaking
For those unfamiliar with the wondrous comicstrip and graphic novel, The Book Of Leviathan, remedy the situation via Amazon or however possible, muchos recommendos. Comic author of that greatness is Peter Blegvad, and he has a few comics on the DVD ( send your prayers faster and further with these patented flippers ), alongside comic authors such as Ben Katchor ( a large electronic eye with melancholy sensors, crying at an exhibition trade show ), Gary Panter and Aleksandar Zograf ( a new breed of plant was cultivated – sensitive to the mind of a dreamer. as a reaction to the close presence of a dreaming mind, the plant forms in one of its big leaves a temporary drawing like configuration that could be observed, photographed and analyzed as it sublimates the general mood of a dreaming consciousness… ).
Beyond these sequences of still pages though, is a 35 minute video by Peter Blegvad of a theatre piece made for the festival, titled ‘On Imaginary Media’, and dripping with his usual wit and esoteric wanderings. Speaking vegetables, a god-detector, Peter’s head as thatched house from which hatchlings emerge, virtual death goggles, mood enhancing military media and much narration, onstage action and occasional displayed quotes such as this future bumper sticker for VJs:
“It should be possible to project on a screen the image of any one object one conceives and make it visible,” Nikola Tesla
and:
“What is real is the life we lead when we lose ourselves, when we abandon or are driven from the rational fiction of our identity; when we fall in love, for example… “
– Michael Wood, the magicians doubts…
‘Book Of Imaginary Media’, Edited by Eric Kluitenberg, NAi Publishers.
Hey, I just saw the author speaking at Transmediale the other week. Really fascinating stuff. To think that such important and influential inventors like Tesla and Edison were kinda kooky and obsessed with communicating with the dead!