Transmission Mysteries: Art and Technophilia

The global Covid pandemic with its covert, rapidly spreading pathogenicity of mutating variants, along with the hegemonic epidemic of computer hacking and the crisis of worldwide refugee diasporas, provoke urgent questions about a range of transmission enigmas. Long before history and technology, art initiated the transmission circuit. Prehistoric caves housed vividly painted images of wild animals that continue to enthrall and mystify thirty-five centuries later. In radical contrast, technophilia, the compulsively seductive allure of our hyperactive media, continues to become increasingly endemic. Powerful synaptic algorithms incessantly propagate synergetic labyrinths of instant information transferences whose inter-connectivity and obsessive fission sustain the world while threatening its survival.

Ancient cave paintings, like those at Chauvet and Altmira, which feature colorful eidetic renderings of bison, aurochs, and reindeer made with pigments composed of dirt, red ochre, animal blood, and applied with twigs and bird bones, undoubtedly served the magical purpose of subduing and controlling nature's treacherous chthonic forces. Visual and oneiric, those paintings bridged dreams, imagination, and futurity—anticipating time and history. The enigma of how they were produced—in deep, hidden, pitch-black recesses or on high inaccessible cavern ceilings—remains a mystery. Those proto-artists' prehensile dexterity catalyzed the frontal lobes of the brain crucial for the development of language.

The ingenious coordination of hand and eye undoubtedly took centuries to evolve, in fitful upsurges, and in preparation for the greatest transmission system—the miracle of language, which required centuries, if not eons, of tentative vocal experimentation before an oral tradition developed, long before the alphabet and writing. Art and history revolve around the symbolic and symbiotic enigmas of image, sound, and glyph, forerunners of the alphabet; subsequently, synergizing transferences between time and history propagated mythologies about the origins of an inchoate, unknown past. Transmissibility also entrains a totemic mystery—the diversification of clans, cultures, and societies that comprise the great chain of being, all haunted by mortality.

The word transmission has numerous connotations—as a trope for the carrier of currents, images, energy, electricity, art forms, traits, symbols, cultures, traditions, information, turbo-powered engines, and now viruses. History too is an engine fueled by time and disappearance. Transmission, however, was originally physiological. The fitful synchronization of eye and ear led to the audio-acoustic streaming of surround sound, physiologically entrained by visual, electrical, and somatic impulses—signals that travel though nerve networks to coordinate sense perception, locomotion, and cognition—and now instantly ripple through the worldwide web. A surge of viscerally corporeal messages are continually relayed to the brain, supported by the autonomic system of heartbeat and circulation insuring that oxygen and nutrients course through the bloodstream to nourish cells and extract excretions.

Electronic circulation and digital transmission facilitate the f(r)ission of word and image, percept and precept, hand and brain, signal and sign, body and movement, signifier and signified, symbol and icon, stimulus and response—a long, ongoing and parasympathetic chain reaction. The dialectic of word and image, eye and ear, picture and symbol has been instrumental for engineering human intelligence by catalyzing and compressing data that interconnects past and future, life and death. Machine technology and the transmission systems relaying energy and intelligence have become modernism's performative avatars. Art telegraphs experience that speaks first in images, like dreams in shorthand.

The transmission mystery of the electromagnetic pulse, originated by the telegraphic Morse code, like the digital zero-one binary, mirrors the steady-state cardiac rhythms of systole and diastole. The circulation of blood and corporeal messaging interconnects topology and geography and can be likened to the river of consciousness, whose capillaries and arterial tributaries mirror the interconnectivity of global networks. Similarly, the Covid pandemic confirms that lethal viruses and pandemics spread between bodies and nations as quickly as pulses and data do through digital systems. The complex and rapid spread of coronaviruses' toxic variants presents another transmission mystery, pointing to possible Dark Science origins—the production of its spike protein may have been intentionally engineered—biowarfare run amok. Tampering with the source codes of psyche, software, genome, and viruses has led to humanity's criminally endangered enterprise.

Now, in stark contradistinction, tremendous...