{"id":249907,"date":"2025-05-21T03:59:51","date_gmt":"2025-05-21T03:59:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/entertainment\/art\/infrastructures-of-telecommunication-we-make-money-not-art\/"},"modified":"2025-05-21T03:59:51","modified_gmt":"2025-05-21T03:59:51","slug":"infrastructures-of-telecommunication-we-make-money-not-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=249907","title":{"rendered":"Infrastructures of Telecommunication \u2013 We Make Money Not Art"},"content":{"rendered":"


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The Architecture of the Wire: Infrastructures of Telecommunication<\/a>, by art and architectural historian Carlotta Dar\u00f2<\/a>. She is Associate Professor at the Ecole Nationale Sup\u00e9rieure d\u2019Architecture Paris-Malaquais and currently a guest senior researcher at ETH Zurich. Translation by Christian Hubert.<\/p>\n

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The Architecture of the Wire<\/a> is grounded in the thick materiality of telecommunication systems. In the cables, wires, poles, transmission towers, antennas, switches, conduits, phone booths and other objects that found their way into homes and landscapes. Carlotta Dar\u00f2 posits that electrical technologies for sound transmission didn\u2019t develop autonomously from architectural and urban design. They were interwoven into modern planning, physically integrated into urban, rural and domestic architecture.<\/p>\n

Not only did their physical presence and organisation influence the constitution and organisation of modern cities, but energy and telecommunications infrastructures also had an impact on the structure of societies.<\/p>\n

The book tells the history of telecommunications networks. At its core are not famous inventors and engineers, but a series of urban and rural transformations, seeped in enthusiasm for scientific progress but also in accidents, anxieties, utopian scenarios and resistance to new objects, grids, systems and the new complexification of society.<\/p>\n

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Hugo Gernsback with his isolator<\/a> (external noise eliminator). Published in Science and Invention 13, no. 3 (July 1925)<\/em><\/p>\n

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On 5 November 1898, Eug\u00e8ne Ducretet succeeded in establishing a radio link in Morse code from the top of the Eiffel Tower to the Pantheon four kilometers away<\/em><\/p>\n

The Architecture of the Wire: Infrastructures of Telecommunication<\/a> balances the gritty realities of ugly utility poles and systems breaking under the weight of snow with the fantasies of an invisible, hidden, immaterial infrastructure. It goes from nerdy details about the distribution of wires in conduits to Frank Lloyd Wright\u2019s vision of a techno-enabled decentralised city that would bring society together; from the th\u00e9\u00e2trophone<\/a> (the first applications of the telephone in 1876) to how the radio saved the Eiffel Tower from its planned demolition; from the USA vision of \u201clinear imperialism\u201d to L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Moholy-Nagy\u2019s Telephone Pictures<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Photograph by Walker Evans, Reedsville, West Virginia, 1936. Library of Congress LC-DIG- fsa-8c52037. \u00a9 Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/em><\/p>\n

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Wireless Telegraph Motor Car used by Marconi (at rear right) in 1901. Society of Wireless Pioneers<\/a> \/ California Historical Radio Society, Alameda, California<\/em><\/p>\n

The focus of the book is mostly the USA, with a few incursions in Europe (mostly France) but the geographical restriction doesn\u2019t prevent it from being immensely enjoyable. It is packed with anecdotes, archive photos and artistic interpretations of the new infrastructures. It will make you stop and look at poles and antennas and will remind you how much digital technologies owe to the technological elements of the 19th century. I was particularly fascinated by Dar\u00f2\u2019s analysis of how modern telecommunications has developed in relation to the law. What happens when systems of telecommunication infringe on private or public space? How did you navigate between the necessity of the infrastructure and the frictions caused by its use and physical presence? Although their service was considered a public good, these infrastructures were owned by private companies, and they occupied fragments of land, underground space and underwater corridors administered by both private and public legislation. From there, everything was a potential source of conflict: cutting down trees to make room for poles and wires, the ugly and cumbersome \u201coccupation\u201d of the roads by utility poles, the running of wires over a portion of private land, the wires blocking access to buildings in case of fire, the high electrical currents that were a danger to passersby, etc.<\/p>\n

My favourite anecdote<\/a> in the book details how the public phone booth came to acquire the legal status of private space when occupied by a user. In 1967, the FBI discovered that a man named Charles Katz was placing illegal bets from a payphone in Los Angeles. The booth\u2019s telephone was tapped and the recordings were used as evidence. In his trial, Katz argued that the wiretap constituted an invasion of privacy. The Supreme Court, referring to the Fourth Amendment, which \u201cprotects people, not places\u201d\u2014and thus the person making the phone should enjoy a \u201creasonable expectation of privacy.\u201d From that point on, no pay phone could be tapped without a search warrant, making it a popular venue for criminal activity and prompting some U.S. municipalities to establish restrictions on their use. <\/p>\n