About
Wireless Communications and the Marconi Galaxy
Culture, Technology and Myth-Making
On December 12, 1901, Guglielmo Marconi and his assistants received the first transatlantic wireless communication transmitted from Poldhu, Cornwall to Signal Hill, Newfoundland. This feat has played a pivotal role in communication practices and has influenced the mythic foundations of the field. In his famous book The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan invokes the name of Guglielmo Marconi to underline the passage from the mechanical age to the new electrical age of radio and television. The idea of a galaxy suggests the existence and the instantiation of a broad constellation of social and cultural changes. We have assembled an international group of Canadian and Italian scholars who are interested in the role that the wireless imaginary has played in shaping our everyday practices. It is these practices that constitute the substance of this constellation. Working within this metaphoric trajectory, we term this shift the ‘Marconi Galaxy’, an appellation coined by McLuhan. Our international research efforts will investigate these shifts into the electric age, which are still being realized.
In 1909 Guglielmo Marconi received the Nobel Prize in physics, the first Nobel Prize in that field awarded to an Italian. In 2009, Canada and Italy will be participating in a series of events to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Marconi’s contribution to the invention of one of the first systems of wireless communication, the radio. This important international moment offers the perfect occasion to reassess and revisit Marconi’s inventions at the dawn of a new wireless era of the internet and mobile computing devices. It offers an opportunity to investigate the role that these technologies have played in establishing innovative and groundbreaking cultural, sociological and political alignments. In the past hundred years, we have moved from the presence of analogue-based stationary transmitters and receivers to the use of digital mobile devices, from a broadcasting model predicated on the movement of information to new modes of communication that are many to many and highly interactive. These reverberations were set into motion with Marconi’s single ‘click’ created by an electromagnetic impulse. Today, these same impulses are capable of transmitting sound and moving images in real time from ‘terra firma’ to satellites circling the earth.
It is precisely these reverberations, impulses and interactions that our research team intends to investigate, interrogate and harness creatively for exhibitions and academic purposes. Technological breakthroughs are generally presented in the mythic language of “revolutions” without emphasizing the complex evolutionary processes that have made such developments possible. It is for these reasons that the collaboration between Canadian and Italian academic scholars, designers and curators will trigger a set of unique understandings of these societal phenomena and facilitate their popularisation.
The project “Wireless Communications and the Marconi Galaxy: Culture, Technology and Myth-Making” is supported by the Institute of Advanced Studies (www.isa.unibo.it) - University of Bologna as an ISA Topic 2009 and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, International Opportunities Fund, 2008.