Dieter Daniels - Welcome to the Wireless World - Simultaneity and Ubiquity in Art and Media from the 19th to the 21st Century

Média Médiums

With the rise of radio technology in the 19th and 20th century, the global simultaneity of wireless becomes the paradigm of a new temporality. The time signal represents the first global “transmission” to everyone – long before the development of the radio. Here begins the ubiquity of “wireless” media pervading the public as well as the private sphere. The Eiffel Tour plays a central role in this development - it is from here that the first time signal as well as the first European-wide radio program was broadcast. At the same time, artists and writers (Delaunay, Apollinaire, Marinetti, Cendrars) celebrated the commencement of the wireless era in their images and poems relating to the Eiffel Tour. Today, we adopt the coordinates of space and time through mobile communications, GPS navigation and radio-controlled clock directly from global wireless networks. Ubiquity and simultaneity have thus become everyday experiences. With mobile communication technology the wireless has become almost a part of our bodies to a point that the inevitability of its ubiquity has become a quotidian plague – “vacation in the dead zone” is expressed as a tangible desire. This is a topic contemporary artists have engaged with in an innovative, critical, sensual or diverting manner. Dieter Daniels, born 1957 in Bonn (D); 1984 co-founder of the Videonale Bonn; numerous projects, exhibitions and symposia in the field of media art; 1991–1993 head of the Mediatheque at the ZKM, Karlsruhe; since 1993 professor for Art History and Media Theory at the Academy of Visual Arts (HGB) in Leipzig; 2001 – 2005 concept and co-editor of "Media Art Net" (www.mediaartnet.org); 2005 - 2009 director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media. Art. Research in Linz. Many publications on art of the twentieth-century, on Marcel Duchamp, Fluxus, Mediart; book publications include - Kunst als Sendung (2002) Vom Ready-Made zum Cyberspace (2003); Netpioneers 1.0. Contextualizing early net-based Art (2009) Audiovisuology, An Interdisciplinary Survey of Audiovisual Culture, Vol. 1 Compendium (2010) Vol. 2 Essays (2011) Sounds like Silence - John Cage – 4’ 33’’ – Silence today (2012)