Media Mediums
Jeff Guess et Gwenola Wagon
2014
Telegraphy, ghosts, computer networks, materializations, mesmerism, spirit telegraphy, clairvoyance, television, ectoplasms, electronic voice phenomena, telephony, suggestion, extraterrestrials, aether and fluids, radio, mind reading, cybernetics, telepathy, cryptography… The research project Média médiums is an exploration into a wide range of experiences, practices and dispositifs related to the archeology and prospective futures of various communication technologies and their historical relationship to what are considered to be more occult phenomena.
https://www.mediamediums.net/
An exhibition was organized at the Ygrec gallery (Paris, april-juin 2014) which presented a selection of works in dialogue with archives, histories, protocols and devices linked to the possibility of transporting thought and intelligence at a distance. Public events consisting of lectures, performances, discussions and concerts accompanied the exhibition. A public seminar, lectures and discussions on the history of telecommunications and spirit phenomena, brought together students from the classes “Communication Protocols : Technology and the Spirit World” (Jeff Guess, Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Arts Paris-Cergy) and "Histoires de Fantômes et de Machines” (Gwenola Wagon, Université de Paris 8). Both the seminar and the events are available as podcasts.
The research project Media Mediums is focused on the history of transmission at a distance and includes two objects of study: Firstly, a long series of technical objects, machines and devices, both implemented and speculative, which have as a foundational principle the transportation of information, and secondly, much more mysterious and less well-known phenomena such as telepathy, telekinesis or teleportation.
On first glance, these two objects might seem to be in total opposition with one another. One situated within the extreme rationalism of technical or industrial contexts, anchored within the rigor of scientific method and its theoretical and applied fields: physics, chemistry, electromagnetics, etc. The other gravitates towards the inexplicable, “aberrant phenomena that when held up to our cultural background of accepted truths... go against common sense and institutionalized (scientific or religious) knowledge”, lining up on the side of the occult, spiritualism, and the paranormal.
The prefix “tele-”, or “at a distance”, paradoxically tends to link these two fields, to create lines of communication between them. But this proximity is not only lexical. For example, at the end of the 19th century the word “television” was synonymous with clairvoyance in spiritist circles. “Clairvoyants were capable of transcending space and time. They could describe ancient edifices or objects with so much precision and detail that it was as if they beheld the place or the object before their very eyes”. Yet at the same moment, “television” was but one of dozens of words used in technical fields populating the imagination with a horizon of objects to come.
Collection of books
A collection of 20 books, made in collaboration with Jérôme Saint-Loubert Bié was published - Philippe Baudouin, Jean-Louis Boissier, Stéphane Degoutin, Leif Elggren, Renaud Evrard, Raphaël Faon, Nicolas Gourault, Jeff Guess, Noël Lafargue, Lauren Moffatt, Ayuko Nishida, RYBN, Jeffrey Sconce, Noah Teichner, Gwenola Wagon, and Anne Zeitz.
