Photophones: A Promise from 1890

In 1890 the journal Review of Reviews, in its opening issue, promised its readers cross-continental ‘photophones’, which Roger Luckhurst in The Invention of Telepathy describes as “trains travelling at 300 miles per hour and telegraphing without wires – even telegraphic facsimile handwriting, tastes, and smells.” A little over a century later, photophones are part of our media landscape (although they are not trains) and can transmit handwriting (if you have a touchphone and stylus; or if you just photograph your handwriting and use MMS).

But maybe the past can guide us a little more into the future? For the noticeable omission in our slightly-differently-realised telegraphic/phonic media is the transmission of tastes and smells. Would seem a good project for Apple, no?

The Typewriter, The Gun and The Movie Camera (1996)

As paradigms of modernist technology, guns and typewriters share a cultural terrain. This landscape is shaped not least by the arms manufacturer Remington & Co. switching to typewriter production after the end of the American Civil War, but also by phenomenological issues in the machines’ use and construction; with typewriters we fire off words as firing off bullets from a gun.

The title of the above documentary on movie maker Samuel Fuller draws through these technologies and places them aside image making technologies. Sam Fuller was a writer and filmmaker, with a specialty in war films. That these tools of his trade should form a title for this documentary by Tim Robbins  (pt 1; pt 2; pt 3; pt 4; pt 5; pt 6) is almost commonsensical. However the title resonates in ways that lie under or rather away from the documentary; for all these technologies fire themselves in their relationality into the cultural landscape in the late nineteenth century.

Whilst the movie camera would seem to be exceptional, it is in fact fundamental, a phenomenological sibling to the gun and the typewriter; think of Etienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotography and his photographic gun (Fusil Photographique). We still shoot a photo, the rapid opening of the lens referred to as a firing, as fast and as hard as the ejection of a bullet, or the strike of type on platen.

Current Visual Obsession

These last few weeks have seen the graduate shows of art and design schools across the UK. At the RCA, Hector de Gregorio, a printmaker, produced a series called Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination. De Gregorio states his aim is to seduce the viewer and with his densely rich images, specifically the one above called Lee Adams, Performer, he has completely seduced me. It is my current obsession and I am finding it difficult to look at anything else.

Bind me; or ways in which we dress our books

A collection of unusual bindings over at Abebooks. With prices.