Ohne
Schnur: Kunst und Drahtlose Kommunikation
by Katja Kwastek, Editor
Revolver Archiv fuer Aktuelle Kunst,
Frankfurt/main and Cuxhaven Kunstverein,
Cuxhaven, 2004
228 pp., illus. col.
ISBN: 3-86588-025-8.
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Belgium
stefaan.vanryssen@hogent.be
In 2004, the City of Cuxhaven in Germany,
commemorated the founding in 1904 of the
first radiotelegraphy station to guide
the ships sailing the Elbe with an exhibition
and colloquium on the theme of wireless
communication and art. The project chose
the somewhat naïve expression ‘Ohne
Schnur, Kunst und Drahtlose Kommunikation’,
literally ‘Without Cord, Art and
Wireless Communication’, as it’s
title, referring to a 1997 TV commercial.
The idea was to better convey the fascination
that is linked to this form of communication,
which technically speaking would have
to be termed wireless and not cordless.
The book contains essays by the participants
at the colloquium and brief presentations
of the art projects that were presented
during April and May of 2004.
As soon as wireless — or cordless
if you like — communication became
a technical reality, it was appropriated
by both visionaries and artists for their
dreams and projects. In 1904, Hungarian
inventor Nikolas Tesla wrote: "A
cheap and simple device, which might be
carried in one’s pocket, may then
be set up somewhere on sea or land, and
it will record the world’s news or
such special messages as may be intended
for it. Thus the entire earth will be
converted into a huge brain, as it were,
capable of response in every one of its
parts" (p. 17). And in the same year,
futurist Filippo Marinetti coined the
term ‘immaginazione senza fili’
(imagination without cord) to express
the total freedom of artistic expression
in an analogy to ‘telegrafia senza
fili’ (cordless telegraphy). Wireless
surely captured the imagination of hundreds
of artists and each scientific or technological
innovation was practically immediately
used by someone or other to exploit its
potential of quasi-simultaneity. Artists
used telegram, fax, satellite, mobile
phones, wireless LAN etc. — admittedly
not all of them cordless — to transcending
the physical limits of person-to-person
communication and bridging the distance
between even the most remote places on
earth, and in space.
Kasimir Malewitsch, Suzanne Duchamp, Guillaume
Apollinaire, Viktor Tatlin, to name but
a few, where among the first to be inspired
by radiotelegrapy, as Dieter Daniels notes
in his insightful essay ‘The Miracle
of Simultaneity’. According to the
author, radiotelegraphy marked the beginning
of another phase in globalization at the
beginning of the 20th Century.
(That other icon of technical ingenuity,
the Eiffel Tower, was only saved from
demolition because it found a new function
as a radio transmission station.)
From the other essays, it is worth mentioning
that Stephen Wilson attempts to develop
a taxonomy of wireless artists in ‘Artists
as Researchers in Wireless Communication’
and Wolfgang Strauss, Monika Fleischmann
and Stephanie Zobel analyse the transformation
of physical, emotional an epistemological
spaces through the use of mobile means
of interaction.
