The Telectroscope

The most recent blog posts and today's class discussion both exhibit a sense of nostalgia for bygone media: the telegraph, the teletype, and (if I may introduce another) the telectroscope. The telectroscope was conceived of as a means to transmit an image, optically, to a distant receiver through a series of mirrors and lenses. It functioned on the same basic premise as a periscope. Throughout the late 19th century, several inventors held patents in the field of telectroscopy and the achievements of one of these inventors, Jan Szczepanik, was featured in a short story by Mark Twain. However, the telectroscope never actually existed, at least not until earlier this year.

In spring 2008, the citizens of New York and London woke to find large iron, drill bores punching through the pavement of their respective cities which, several days later had been replaced by large, fanciful "telectroscope" lenses which linked the two cities visually. Standing in front of the telectroscope in New York, one was visible to someone standing before the telectroscope in London, and vice versa.

If this sounds all too wonderful, it's because it is. The telectroscopes were part of an art installation by interactive video artist Paul St. George. That's right, video, not light and optics. What is unusual about this installation piece, however, is that it comes with an elaborately fabricated back story involving the artist's fictional ancestor, Alexander Stanhope St. George. In fact, I find the false back story of the telectroscope to be more interesting than the installation itself. Take, for instance, this photo of the world famous industrialist Isambard Kingdom Brunel standing before the launch chains of the Great Eastern (mentioned in Starr, one of the only ships large enough to lay a trans-Atlantic telegraph cable) which has been doctored to include the fictional St. George as a child. This insistence on an historical link which never existed is almost more troubling to me than the fact that the installation "cheats" by using video instead of mirrors and lenses. Don't get me wrong, the piece is a beautifully executed parable of human achievement and globalization that succeeds in being interactive, aesthetically arresting, and "feel-good" all at the same time. What it fails to do is actually pay off the nostalgia it stirs up. We want Brunel to be a character in the narrative which includes Twain and Alexander Graham Bell (to whom the telectroscope was falsely attributed in the late 1870s) like the plot of an E. L. Doctrow novel. The truth is, without Photoshop and digital video, the telectroscope is impractical, nigh impossible.

Briefly, here is my take on what this actually means. In the twenty-first century, the development of media technology proceeds at such a dizzying speed that very few people actually understand the mechanics and processes which go into a text message or a YouTube video. I have little to no impact on how this technology is developed, how it is disseminated, and how it infiltrates my life. Standing in front of the telectroscope, I am a person visually interacting with another person. Even if this never progresses past waving or making faces, I have a distinct sense that I am participating actively in my interface with not just the person, but with the technology. The fictional back story makes the telectroscope simple, not just in the sense that it purports to function using something as elementary as a mirror, but that it aesthetically references another time, a simpler time. It is at once novel and antiquarian.

However, it is not antiquarian at all. In reality I can do the same thing from my room with iChat, with the added benefit of audio. Thus, the insistent appeal to history for a sense of legitimacy, without which the installation is nothing special. Still, it's hard not to feel cheated when you realize that's not real polished brass and walnut grain. Either way, I invite you to judge for yourself. The telectroscope is no longer on display, but the official website has some pretty neat pictures, including some of the Queen's visit, which is great it you want to talk about nostalgic reverence for something obsolete and impractical.