Closing the Gap Between Apparatic Form and Imaginary Medium

After Hertz found out how to make and receive waves it would still take a long time for radio to find its 'form'. With form I mean the predominant type of social usage of radio waves combined with a specific technological appearance or, in German die apparative Form (apparatic form). Radio, as any mass medium, exists on two different layers, as an imaginary social signification and in its distinct appearance as a 'thing'. I use the term social imaginary significations as closely as possible in the way Cornelius Castoriadis proposes it. Conventionally there is a trivial meaning of imaginary which refers to 'existing in the imagination only'. Recently there has been a lot of hype around 'imaginary media' in this meaning of the word. For Castoriadis the social imaginary has a much deeper meaning as the source of social significations which become instituted in the world. Each individual contributes to and is affected by the collective imaginary. The imaginary consists of the whole of the mental life of people which comprises thought, desires and imagination in the classic sense. It is not congruent with the unconscious but taps also into it.1 In the early days of radio history those two things had not found together yet -- the science and technology of electromagnetic waves and radio as a social imaginary signification. Radio art needs to consider this fundamental categorical difference.

After Marconi, a race started to find other uses of radio rather than just telegraphy. Top of the list was wireless telephony -- appearantly at around 1905 nobody thought of radio as we know it now. The artist Paul DeMarinis (2006) created an installation for the Waves exhibition which uses a forgotten technology for speech transmission involving spark transmissions and a sort of microphone technology based on sulphuric acid. According to known history (unearthed by the artist himself) the technology was only used to make test transmissions between Rome and Tripoli which was then an Italian colony. Much more telling than the transmissions were themselves was the fact that the Tripoli side did not have a transmitter, only a receiver, thereby being exemplary for the relationship between Europe and North Africa at the time.2

As soon as radio waves had been put to work as carriers of transmissions the authorities sought to control this new power. The first international conference dealing with radio regulation in 1903 was initiated by the German Kaiser Wilhelm after an incident involving his brother, when his ship using equipment developed by Adolf Slaby could not communicate with the Marconi coastal station on the US shore. After that any excuse was being used to call for control of the airwaves, notably the sinking of the Titanic and the chaos that reigned in the airwaves during rescue attempts.3

With the tools of wireless experimentation becoming more available, in the United States of America a boom of do-it-yourself experimentation was allowed to happen. The comparison has been made before me that those radio amateurs were, in a way, the first 'hackers'. Similar to the way the hobbyists of the Homebrew Computer Club in California in the 1970ies triggered the development of the Personal Computer, radio amateurs pushed forward the exploration of the wirless medium.4 However, if we take on board this comparison between wireless amateurs and hackers, we will also have to deal with the baggage it comes with. On one hand the first decade of the 20th century in the US must have been a paradise of wireless hacking. Responding to an opinion piece in the New York Times which slammed amateurs for distracting the professionals, Hugo Gernsback wrote that there were "400,000 wireless experimenters and amateurs in the United States alone."5 In Gernsback's view the wireless amateurs "have done much to further the art in general, and many patents have been taken out during the last three years by such students interested in wireless." An interesting side-thread of this narration is that cable bound telegraphy amateurs had created their telegraphy community networks in suburbs. According to an article in the New York evening Post amateurs had created a cable bound community network in a village in New Jersey.6 Yet the class structure of American society meant that even among radio amateurs, sometimes presented as the 'real heroes' of the radio revolution, many came from wealthy backgrounds and were mostly white and male. The wireless hackers of the 1900s and society as a whole showed similar mechanisms of social exclusion which still affect hacking today (to the effect that there are fewer women in the informal hacker scene than in the world of official software development).http://earlyradiohistory.us/1920auto.htm)" href="#footnote7_8hlngc6">7 Therefore I would be careful with narrations of radio history which glorify the US amateur scene. However, what I would like to propose is to see the early radio amateurs as transmission artists. In that way they are indeed similar to the latter day computer hackers. Like hackers their main interest is not so much the content of communications but getting the technology to work. The interest in technology is intrinsical. Thus, for a wireless 'hacker' making their own signals is of an intrinsic interest for which no further motivation is necessary. They were primarily concerned with "getting an antenna up"http://earlyradiohistory.us/1917verm.htm), cf. WHITE 2007." href="#footnote8_3tehdi4">8 and finding someone else who would respond. The act of transmitting, of sending and receiving signals itself is a new artform. The pioneers of the age of wireless engage with the properties of waves, such as the calculation of the wavelength and the right size of the antenna. I would like to differentiate this proposition from the idea that early radio amateurs were the first radio artists. They were not, they were pursuing a hobby and did not reference their activity in any way within an artistic, cultural context. Both comparisons, between Home Radio Amateurs (HAMs) as hackers and as radio artists have their limits. What I think is really important is that HAMs were making their own signals, their own transmissions.9 At the beginning there was the transmission and reception of waves by free consenting individuals. This gains heightened importance especially when considering the catastropic development that radio took after that short window of wireless utopianism between 1887 and 1914.

• 1. cf Castoriadis 1975/1997VII.pp. 559 -611; also Castoriadis (1978) and (1997).
• 2. Paul De Marinis, 2006. Rome to Tripoli , Waves exhibition.
• 3. cf. Captain Linwood S. Howeth, USN (Retired), 1963, pages 153-165.
• 4. cf. the early book by Steven Levy (1984) described the influence of the Homebrew Club and other hacker clubs on shaping the computer industry.
• 5. cf. Gernsback 1912.
• 6. cf. Early Radio History, 2007.
• 7. Graynella Packer was the first female operator on a commercial ship. But later the law was changed so that other young women could not follow in that profession. Another young woman who had already gathered some experience as a wireless amateur was told that she "could probably pass a telegraph test" but would have also "to qualify as a radio operator, which meant that I should have to learn all about motor-generators, transformers, helices, detectors, three-slide tuners, etc." She left the place "rather discouraged" the young woman wrote, because as a girl it would not have been appropriate for her to "call on strange young men and ask to see their sets." (The Autobiography of a Girl Amateur http://earlyradiohistory.us/1920auto.htm)
• 8. An Irving Vermilya claims to have been the "first amateur to get an areal up" in a 1917 article (http://earlyradiohistory.us/1917verm.htm), cf. WHITE 2007.
• 9. For future studies I would like to propose a concept of 'transmissions' to replace the concept of information theory when it comes to analyzing communicatioin media from an arts and humanities point of view. The information theory concept is very limited as it excludes the layer of meaning and therefore has little to offer for the arts.