Marconi Galaxy: Technology, Cultural Models, Myth-Making

The event is supported by the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada (IOF Development Grant) and by the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of Bologna as ISA Topic 2009. The goal is to popularise through performances and open talks the result of s research project dedicated to the impact that the wireless is having on our daily life, as well as on our imagination. On December 12, 1901, Guglielmo Marconi and his assistants received the first transatlantic wireless communication transmitted from Poldhu, Cornwall to Signal Hill, Newfoundland. This feat has played a pivotal role in communication practices and has influenced the mythic foundations of the field. In his famous book The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan invokes the name of Guglielmo Marconi to underline the passage from the mechanical age to the new electrical age of radio and television. The idea of a galaxy suggests the existence and the instantiation of a broad constellation of social and cultural changes. For this event, we have assembled an international group of Canadian and Italian scholars who are interested in the role that the wireless imaginary has played in shaping our everyday practices. It is these practices that constitute the substance of this constellation. Working within this metaphoric trajectory, we term this shift the 'Marconi Galaxy', an appellation coined by McLuhan. Our international research efforts will investigate these shifts into the electric age, which are still being realized. In 1909 Guglielmo Marconi received the Nobel Prize in physics, the first Nobel Prize in that field awarded to an Italian. In 2009, Canada and Italy will be participating in a series of events to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Marconi's contribution to the invention of one of the first systems of wireless communication, the radio. This important international moment offers the perfect occasion to reassess and revisit Marconi’s inventions at the dawn of a new wireless era of the internet and mobile computing devices. It offers an opportunity to investigate the role that these technologies have played in establishing innovative and groundbreaking cultural, sociological and political alignments. In the past hundred years, we have moved from the presence of analogue-based stationary transmitters and receivers to the use of digital mobile devices, from a broadcasting model predicated on the movement of information to new modes of communication that are many to many and highly interactive. These reverberations were set into motion with Marconi's single 'click' created by an electromagnetic impulse. Today, these same impulses are capable of transmitting sound and moving images in real time from 'terra firma' to satellites circling the earth. It is precisely these reverberations, impulses and interactions that will be explored throug this event, emphasizing the complex evolutionary processes that have made such developments possible. It is for these reasons that the collaboration between Canadian and Italian academic scholars, designers and curators is here encouraged to trigger a set of unique understandings of these societal phenomena and facilitate their popularisation.