The research project Media Mediums (1) is focused on the
history of transmission at a distance and includes two objects of study :
Firstly, a long series of technical objects, machines and devices, both
implemented and speculative, which have as a foundational principle the
transportation of information, and secondly, much more mysterious and
less well-known phenomena such as telepathy, telekinesis or
teleportation.
On first glance, these two objects might seem to be in total
opposition with one another. One situated within the extreme rationalism
of technical or industrial contexts, anchored within the rigor of
scientific method and its theoretical and applied fields : physics,
chemistry, electro-magnetics, etc. The other gravitates towards the
inexplicable, “aberrant phenomena that when held up to our cultural
background of accepted truths... go against common sense and
institutionalized (scientific or religious) knowledge” (2), lining up on
the side of the occult, spiritualism, and the paranormal.
The prefix “tele-”, or “at a distance”, paradoxically tends to link
these two fields, to create lines of communication between them. But
this proximity is not only lexical. For example, at the end of the 19th
century the word “television” was synonym to clairvoyance in spiritist
circles. “Clairvoyants were capable of transcending space and time. They
could describe ancient edifices or objects with so much precision and
detail that it was as if they beheld the place or the object before
their very eyes” (3). Yet at the same moment, “television” was but one
of dozens of words used in technical fields populating the imagination
with a horizon of objects to come.
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