Kahn (Endnotes)
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Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Edmund Russell et al., “The Nature of Power: Synthesizing the History of Technology and Environmental History,” Technology and Culture 52 (April 2011): 246–59. 2. The occasion was a panel titled “Data Atmospheres,” convened by Frances Dyson at the annual conference of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, University of Texas, Austin, 2003. I discussed Whistlers and Sferics by Lucier and Electrical Storms and Aeriology by Hinterding. The way in which these works required a different approach is characteristic of a larger problem that composers and artists responsive to contemporary conditions can face: such composers and artists are often not well served by prevailing criticism or existing histories. Working from the integrity of single works or bodies of work has the advantage of engaging the theorization already embodied in artistic practice rather than importing it. Ideally, such an approach can counter normative cycles of history and criticism with a notion of artistic possibility from which such works arise in the first place. 3. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the “Large Glass” and Related Works (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 4. Michael Heumann recognized the implications of Watson’s sounds in his PhD dissertation, “Ghost in the Machine: Sound and Technology in Twentieth-Century Literature” (University of California at Riverside, Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved. of California Press. © 2013. University Copyright 1998), http://thelibrary.hauntedink.com/ghostinthemachine/ (accessed October 2005). Avital Ronell discusses Watson in a calls-and-affect manner fixed on Watson’s spiritism in The Telephone Book: Technology, Kahn, Douglas. Earth Sound Earth Signal : Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, University of California Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/yale-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1337907. Created from yale-ebooks on 2020-02-23 06:09:57. Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991). 5. Hillel Schwartz, Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond (New York: Zone Books, 2011). 6. From a 1983 interview in the documentary Richard Feynman—The Last Journey of a Genius, BBC TV production in association with WGBH Boston, 1989. 7. Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, vol. 2, Mainly Electromagnetism and Matter (Philadelphia: Basic Books, 2011), 20–09. Feynman continues: “But nevertheless, in some sense the fields are real, because after we are all finished fiddling around with mathematical equations—with or without making pictures and drawings or trying to visualize the thing—we can still make the instruments detect the signals from Mariner II and find out about galaxies a billion miles away, and so on” (20–10). 8. James Clerk Maxwell’s equations get subsumed under Albert Einstein’s electrodynamics, while the more quotidian fields of Hans Christian Ørsted and Michael Faraday and the empirical waves of Heinrich Hertz are ignored. Everyday media could serve as philosophical instruments, having rendered subatomic quantum activity audible in the noise floor of electronics and dispatches from the cosmos visible in the static of analog television. R. Buckminster Fuller was perhaps the most up front about how much of the cosmos is electromagnetic, how little is known about it, and how much the collective ignorance is ignored—although he went off the deep end imagining the eyes to be akin to dish-transceiving antennas from which thoughts could be “eye-beamed” into the cosmos and back and also suggesting that what is called intuition may be caused by remote cosmic transmission. And that was before he began entertaining the viability of body teleportation. See Bruce Clarke, “Steps to an Ecology of Systems: Whole Earth and Systemic Holism,” in Addressing Modernity: Social Systems Theory and U.S. Cultures, edited by Hannes Bergthaller and Carsten Schinko (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 259–88. 9. “Electricity and Its Relation to the Senses, Electrical World 1, no. 9 (May 5, 1883): 277. 10. As Laura Bruno notes, the “models of the dispersion and accumulation patterns of radioactive fallout isotopes provided the basis for Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved. of California Press. © 2013. University Copyright our understanding of pathways of persistent chemicals in the environment. The pathways of pesticides were compared to the dissemination model of strontium-90 in [Rachel Carson’s] Silent Spring, the first bestseller about Kahn, Douglas. Earth Sound Earth Signal : Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, University of California Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/yale-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1337907. Created from yale-ebooks on 2020-02-23 06:09:57. environmental destruction.” Laura A. Bruno, “The Bequest of the Nuclear Battlefield: Science, Nature, and the Atom During the First Decade of the Cold War,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 33, no. 2 (2003): 237–60. 11. Leslie Groves, “General Grove’s Report on ‘Trinity,’ July 18, 1945,” in The American Atom: A Documentary History of Nuclear Policies from the Discovery of Fission to the Present, edited by Philip L. Cantelon et al. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 55. “With the assistance of the Office of Censorship we were able to limit the news stories to the approved release supplemented in the local papers by brief stories from the many eyewitnesses not connected with our project. One of these was a blind woman who saw the light” (55). 12. One of Erik Satie’s cephalophones, a class of musical instruments designed to exist in the head alone, had a “range of thirty octaves” but was, he conceded, “completely unplayable.” An amateur tried, but “the instrument burst, snapped his spine & completely scalped him.” Erik Satie, A Mammal’s Notebook, edited by Ornella Volta, translated by Antony Melville (London: Atlas Press, 1996), 148. 13. Very Low Frequency waves dominate but do not completely cover this range. VLF is shorthand. When most people talk about “radio,” they are referring to the device within which higher frequencies must be stepped down or demodulated to become audible. For example: “In a Radio Nature receiver all demodulation operations, the separation of the carrier from the modulating signal, are unnecessary. The signal that will be received is already in base band. You just have to receive it with an antenna, and then transform the radio frequency wave into an electric signal, and amplify it enough to drive a loudspeaker or headphones.” Renato Romero, Radio Nature: The Reception and Study of Naturally Originating Radio Signals (Potters Bar: Radio Society of Great Britain, 2008), 17–18. Shorter waves carry more information in a given amount of time, so VLF is used for special purposes where not much information, relatively, is needed; however, as we shall see, VLF has played a big historical role in location and navigation. 14. Robert A. Helliwell, Whistlers and Related Ionospheric Phenomena (1965) (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006). 15. Ursula K. Heise, “Unnatural Ecologies: The Metaphor of the Copyright © 2013. University of California Press. All rights reserved. of California Press. © 2013. University Copyright Environment in Media Theory,” Configurations 10, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 149–68 (164). 16. See Nadia Bozak, The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Kahn, Douglas. Earth Sound Earth Signal : Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, University of California Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/yale-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1337907. Created from yale-ebooks on 2020-02-23 06:09:57. Natural Resources (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 17–52, for a treatment that includes poetics within a green media frame. 17. For a brief introduction to vibration, inscription, and transmission relating to technologies and tropes of sound, see my introduction to Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde, edited by Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). My book Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999) focused primarily on phonography, graphical sound, rhetorical lines of demarcation, cinema sound, cellular inscription, and other inscriptive concerns, rather than vibration or transmission. 18. Optical telegraphy was an intermediary system. Having light at its physical core, it too was technically electromagnetic, and compared with other contemporary systems it was considerably faster. Still, as Alexander Field has calculated, a thirty-five-signal message from Paris to Lille on the most sophisticated system in the world in the early nineteenth century would require relays between twenty-two stations, each staffed with its own telegrapher, and would require a total transmission time of approximately eighteen minutes. Alexander J. Field, “French Optical Telegraphy, 1793–1855: Hardware, Software, Administration,” Technology and Culture 35, no. 2 (April 1994): 315–47. Therefore, although the optical telegraphic system transmitted at the speed of light when enough light was available—with visual impediments like fog, rain, and snow permitting—electromagnetic speeds went in and out of circuit with the slower, metabolically based energies of the human body. Electrical telegraphy placed the metabolic switches (telegraphers)