The Buddha once noted:
Let go of the past, let go of the future,
let go of the present, and cross over to the

further shore of all becoming and existence.

With mind wholly liberated and fully released,
you shall never come back to birth and death!

Dhammapada 348

The Persistent Past

Technologies persist. Concepts, methods and media of prior eras haunt our cutting edge world. At times they are as stains upon our vision or appear to be the result of some inexplicable inability to embrace the program set forth by our current understanding. People around the world use smartphones, but still use the terms “sunrise” and “sunset” many centuries after we have all agreed that the earth rotates on its axis every 24 hours. Or again, the inability of government and corporate planners to make changes that are really needed to forestall the consequences of climate change. In neither case would we say that the speaker or politician is a transcendent being who is living in the eternal present. Nor would we attribute the nonsensical disconnect between thought, word and action as indicative of a childlike naiveté. Perhaps these cases belie a certain blindness to the past, or a blindness to the future, without implying that we have reached a state of transcendence suggested by the Buddha. Someone is supposed to have said that we should study the past in order not to repeat it, but that is even more nonsensical. As in music, it is the repetition itself that creates the past. Old minds turn old memories over and over. Old cultures recirculate truisms and lies. But what is the past to the hapless material object, the technological medium that is its embodiment?

We experience the archaeology of our technological media on a daily basis. Old floppy disks, cables that no longer connect to anything, computers whose operating systems are no longer supported. These objects, cut free from both desire and utility, may present occasion for reminiscence “ my first…” Or they may present case histories in the ugliness of industrial design; or figures of failure along the wayside of progress. But these media are also strata in an archaeology of attention, how we listen, look and record. And of our connections – how we communicate, how we erase and put distance between our present selves and the dread of being what we were or will become. Like the mirror that always casts back at us an image of a younger self, an image that has already died, the objects of our media technologies offer up a whimsical, sometimes disturbing picture of ourselves.

Some technologies are incredibly durable: formats like audio cassette and 16mm movie film, both in material media and in player, are so remarkably robust on a physical level that they can endure decades of neglect and obsolescence and still offer up experiences that, while clouded with a patina of passed-time, we attend to in the same way that we would our current media. Other media require such a huge support network, social, economic, cultural and perceptual, that it truly remarkable that they could endure – the movie theater, for example. Even analog television broadcasting is gone forever. Its replacement by digital broadcast is only a social stopgap until home watching is completely internet driven – a sop of familiarity thrown to the aging members of our society.

But who can explain AM Radio? The Medium-Wave broadcast band, between 540 kHz and 1.6 MHz, has been around now for a hundred years without change in the United States and in other parts of the globe. It is rigorously licensed by governments through a series of jealously guarded frequency allocations and quasi-monopolies. It is as full of advertising and propaganda as the most shameless of web pages. There is no part of the country where it can’t be picked up. Despite its technological antiquity, radio receivers that can tune in Medium Wave are still being produced by the millions every year. But its quality is shoddy, perhaps the acoustic equivalent of Youtube. The very same radio receivers also pick up FM with its consistently superior tone. The same oligarchs own both AM and FM stations in every city. One might imagine this format could be pulled up overnight; made obsolete; the bandwidth could be auctioned off to telecom giants. What are the features that keep this curious technological anachronism alive? Speculation could include the vast inter-urban areas of the USA where FM fades, or the broad popularity of baseball-game coverage during the summer months, or the rural ubiquity of a seemingly unslakable thirst for hate-radio. And, working against its obsolescence is also the fact of its relatively narrow slice of the electromagnetic spectrum – only slightly more than one megahertz of bandwidth in all.

What makes the persistence of AM radio all the more remarkable is the negligible technology required to tune it in: a wire antenna, a coil, a diode and earphones. No decoding, no software, no algorithms. An easily constructed “crystal radio” can still pick up every major station in a given 100-mile radius. The materials to make such a radio are not only available for free, they are becoming more varied and abundant by the day: copper wire may be found by the mile as old appliances like discarded toasters, microwave ovens or land line telephones. Diodes proliferate by the billions in the form of cast off microchips. Earphones are seen strewn around the city in profusion. A capacitor can be made from tinfoil and paper. And no batteries are required - all the power needed to hear the talk, the music, the ads, is sent out by the transmitter tower and paid for in advance by the corporations, in exchange for our attention.

“Four Foxhole Radios” (2000) is a series of such wave-powered tuners, each created in the image of its imagined maker: arrays of found objects, scraps of discarded material such as empty vodka bottles, chewing gum wrappers, broken light bulbs and rusty nails are deployed in a whimsical manner to produce functional radio receivers. The title refers to a World War II era myth that emergency communications devices could be tinkered together in the field by soldiers who found themselves trapped or imprisoned without real communication equipment. . In a sense, they might also be termed "desert island radios" inasmuch as they imply the possibility of both technology and trade far removed from the organized channels of commerce. Like ET's coat hanger and Speak'n'Spell-assemblage communicator, the foxhole radios served to continue a connection to a point of origin that had been lost. And to offer a proof of technology in its absence. This ritualization of activities and materials for the purpose of achieving interaction with an invisible sphere has been called "cargo cultism" when applied to other cultures. Thus, the foxhole radio serves both as a ritual link to the spirit of the tribe and an assemblage-self-portrait of a stranger constructed with the materials in his environment.

[Images of “Four Foxhole Radios”]

What it means to have a Tail

If the foxhole radios inhabit a sort of technological ever-present and are passive receivers in the extreme sense, they will flicker out of existence at the moment when the plug is pulled on Medium Wave transmission. These devices make no waves themselves, so they leave no traces, no disturbances in space-time. Without the vast informational, cultural and electrical power resources pumped into the atmosphere by commercial broadcasters, our foxhole radios will once again become receivers for the mysterious and truly etheric music of the Earth’s ionosphere - whistlers and ‘sferics. By their passivity, they enjoy their happy existence in the moment, unlike the transmitters whose emitted waves expand ever outwards at near light speed.

Other technologies exist in a more awkward space relative to the Dhammapada’s advice. They have never had any existence, any time or place or participation in being, or vanishingly little of it. I tend to think of them as “orphaned technologies” – ones that are functional, but never found a place of their own. While they can send or receive, intercommunicate and reveal, obscurity is their most salient trait. They have neither whiskers nor tail, but if and when they are called into being, they radiate most peculiar fields.

A young disciple asked:
“What is wireless telegraphy?”
The Master replied:
“The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand.
“The ordinary telegraph is like a cat.
“You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles.
“The wireless is the same, only without the cat.”

Other works created during my period of fascination with wireless deal with transmission, the act of intruding into the magnetosphere, of spreading noise and commotion in the form of ether waves. “Firebirds” (2004) which examines radio-as-broadcast, engages an odd device – the flame loudspeaker– to play back the sounds of political speech. The flames of Firebirds are a material examination of the collision of voice, meaning, inscription and collective space as it existed briefly in a historical moment in the mid- 1930s at a time when for the first time voice of the political leader entered the private domain of the home and hearth via the medium of radio. For all its power and potential for terror, the course taken by the political leaders' voice was no less technological. In the end, only a wave in the air, a scratch in the groove, the trembling of a loudspeaker. Sound with all its attendant artifacts of recording, transmission, reception, makes this evident. The voices of Firebirds are drawn from original speeches by Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler, all from the years 1935-36. The source of the sound is actually a flame, modulated by high voltage audio fields. These thermophonic devices radiate the speech not only as sound, but as waves of varying-intensity light that can be picked up by photo-detectors, and as radio waves that can be received by AM radios. The system is almost perfectly efficient, radiating all the energy applied into a signal detectable by some means.

That sound can emerge directly from gaseous space, without a solid vibrating elements of the loudspeaker has been a phenomenon noted since the earliest days of electronic technology. A number of attempts to introduce this phenomenon into general usage ensued. All failed. In 1924 Lorenz AG of Berlin marketed a Kathodophone, an early form of plasma tweeter. This was basically a triode opened to the air coupled to a small horn. In the early 1950s S. Klein elaborated on this principle and described an electrothermal horn loudspeaker using a rich mixture of platinum and iridium to project ultrasonic waves. In 1967 military researchers at United Technologies Corporation in Sunnyvale published a paper in Nature describing the form of electrothermal transducer used in Firebirds. An electrically modulated oxyacetylene flame, seeded with potassium ions, is made to vibrate the air. As the air around the flame is instantaneously heated and cooled, expanding waves of sound vibration are produced in the air, creating an omnidirectional sound source. The speaking flames of “Firebirds” follow in this succession of orphaned technologies – devices that actually work but failed to enter the dominant discourse as a simulacrum.

[Images of Firebirds]

In a similar way, “From Rome to Tripoli” (2006) re-creates a technology that was obsolete practically even before it was born and centers around a radio transmitter based on the hydraulic microphone/transmitter apparatus of Quirino Majorana and Giovanni Vanni in 1908 that successfully broadcast voice messages from Rome to Tripoli in Libya, a distance of nearly 1000km, inaugurating the age of radio-telephony and of broadcast media.

A stream of sulfuric acid, mechanically vibrated by the voice, reproduces the interruptions of the vocal frequencies as a series of electrically conductive droplets. This stream is passed between two electrodes biased at a DC voltage. Each drop directs a short burst of electricity to a high-voltage transformer configured as a spark-gap radio transmitter, thus reproducing in a crude way the vibrations of the human voice. The signals cover the entire radio spectrum (what would now be considered an interfering radio-frequency noise) and can be picked up by any Medium Wave receiver in the vicinity.

The piece poses questions about the nature of one-way communications, radio-phonic, cultural or military, in particular those between Europe and North Africa. At a time when radio receivers were a rare piece of laboratory apparatus, who was in Tripoli to receive and verify the transmission? The sound distortions introduced by this crude system call to mind the harsh sounds of western European culture falling on foreign ears. Using a stream of vitriol to create a torrent of noise may serve as a mechanical metaphor for the many manifestations of unwelcome cultural address. An interesting follow up to the transmission is the military invasion of Libya by imperial Italian forces in 1911.

For the audio tracks I used a mix of voice and music. Each transmission begins with an announcing sequence of alarm sounds taken from a cheap and universal auto theft alarm. There follow recitations of Italian Futurist poetry, Bavarian waltzes, and of course the triumphal march from Aida, Verdi’s prescient foray into North Africa, which was by then over thirty years old.

[Images of From Rome to Tripoli ]

Stepping on the Coda

This approach to re-instancing vanished media technologies, or technologies that never achieved a position of meaning at all, has been called media-archaeology in some quarters, been denigrated as a curious form of nostalgia in others, and has attained an unmerited cult status in other contexts. It shares a certain warp of hybridity with the emerging and as-yet-unformed technologies of the near future, but casts an uncanny reflection into the past. Perhaps it could be thought of as a cultivated atavism, a new-man-ape with a vestigial tail for a nose. But by a play of reflections in distant mirrors we may see our present technical condition laid bare and ponder whether or not it is an inevitability.

As an afternote, my more recent work (2010 – 2015) abandons this model to embrace sound-in-the-present-instant where the click or noise-instance serves as a marker of and within flow, as a drowning man shouting from the raging river. The discovery of the noise equivalent of “en-light-enment” may not be far off, but no matter - eternal wisdom preempts even this desire:

The past should not be followed longing after,

the future neither desired nor urged for!

What is past, not real anymore, is dead and gone.
The future, not real now, has yet to come!