Dieter Daniels: Sending and Receiving

(Courtesy of Wood's Lot)

Sending and Receiving
by Dieter Daniels (translated by Grentz, Henning)
Tout Dait: Marcel Duchamps Online Studies Journal

Everything that we call electronic mass media today begins with the sending and receiving of signals without any material connection, with the miracle of "wireless" that started shortly before 1900. From 1920 on, this transmission technique of then primarily strategic military use develops into radio broadcasting. As a result, material things disappear from mass distribution and the media turn into something "immaterial". The uniformity of all products for all people caused by industrialization - as is expressed by the lexical term "ready made" - is only a preliminary stage towards a globally synchronized perception of a "radio-made" experience world. With the Greenwich time signal, which has been broadcast by radio transmission from the tip of the Eiffel Tower since 1910, this immaterial synchronization reaches all of Europe. And only a year after that a time signal is transmitted around the world through a chain of wireless stations.

Radio is not a word but a prefix. It denotes something that emits radially: from one point to many, carried by electromagnetic waves. According to the intentions of its inventors, radio transmission ought to deliver a signal from a transmitter to one single receiver. But despite all efforts they cannot mold the Hertz waves to fit into the concept of cable connections: the signal would always reach more receivers than it was supposed to. Thus, the military becomes concerned with the secrecy of their radio messages. At the same time, this circumstance delights the radio amateurs who devotedly listen to everything their homemade apparati allow them to receive way before actual radio programs emerge. These craftsmen and amateurs form the basis of the unexpectedly developing radio boom starting in 1920, which creates a medium nobody had planned. The same happens again in the 1980s when hackers, being the first private users of the global computer and telecommunications network, represent the forerunners of the Internet boom of the 1990s.

Indeed, radio - and therefore the beginning of all electronic mass media - is invented by receivers, not by broadcasters. One might modify Duchamp's famous quote that the onlookers make the pictures: "Ce sont les récepteurs, qui font les médias." And even though today it seems as if the broadcasters alone possessed all power over the mass media, there is an almost anarchical criterion, on which all is based and in which the power of the receivers has been preserved: In TV ratings are everything.

How could the power of the receivers be great enough to turn the entire media machine upside down and change it from a strategic into a distributive system? What fascination initiated all that constitutes our present-day electronicized worldview? For one thing, there is the "bricolage" or fiddling with ominous elements such as wire, lacquer, magnets, crystals and so on. Under one's own hands an apparatus comes into being that brings forth strange signals from the nothingness of the air. The enigma lies in how something develops out of nothing and how this something is interconnected with the rest of the world. For there are signals telling of news from far away, of temperatures, stock market rates, other radio amateurs and sometimes even of sensations like the SOS signal of a distressed ship. The power of the receivers lies in the invention of listening - first there were the listeners, next broadcasting stations emerged addressing this unknown and scattered community, then a radio boom arose, which was very much comparable to today's internet boom. During the first years of radio, listeners would experience and describe receiving as global raptures of listening to boundless spaces. "

"…to feel at home in the surge, in the motion, in the fleeting and infinite. Not to be at home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be in its center and to be concealed from it." These words may serve to describe the listening experience that would fascinate so many from the time of the amateurs to the beginning of radio. Yet they come from Charles Baudelaire and relate a flaneur's experience in the anonymous mass of a modern metropolis, "from this universal communion he gains a unique sort of inebriation."(1)

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