Echoes and Frequencies: Tele-Visions and Wireless Technologies

Abstract

This issue investigates the layered temporalities, shifting modalities, and evolving infrastructures of tele-visions – a plural, hyphenated term designating the spectrum of remote viewing technologies that have shaped, and continually reshape, how images travel and appear across distances. From early optical telegraphs and nineteenth-century electromagnetic signal relays to today’s ubiquitous digital environments, these systems condition how we think about, imagine, and experience the televisual. One element emerges as a particularly fruitful entry point into the archeology of tele-visions: the wireless. In many ways, the integration of Hertzian waves into telecommunications at the close of the nineteenth century marked an epistemic shift – a profound reordering of the technical, perceptual, and conceptual frameworks through which reality is organised and understood. The present issue explores the historical, technical, and artistic dimensions of that transformation, which, beyond the mere absence of cables, ushered in a new media paradigm whose political, philosophical, and environmental ramifications continue to be redefined with each successive wave of wireless innovation.