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Description

In this talk I explore how imaginary networks (never-, partly-, or even fully-realized but short-lived communication technologies) provide us with meaningful models for alternative future networks outside of or beyond the internet. In short, imaginary networks are envisionings of how networking could be otherwise. While media archaeology has explored some examples of imaginary media, the vast array of imaginary networks that have been proposed, depicted, and described since the 19th century has barely been accounted for. No doubt, these networks have been largely overlooked because it’s all too easy to reduce networks such as Jacques-Toussaint Benoît’s pasilalanic-sympathetic compass to mere curiosities or cruel thought experiments and thus relegate them to irrelevancy. Given that imaginary networks have been so thoroughly overlooked, it’s also not surprising that no one has yet noted the possible significance of the fact that other (cruelty-free) unrealized imaginary networks such as Paul Otlet’s Mundaneum and Hugo Gernsback’s radio-controlled television plane from the early twentieth century are depicted as wireless. Further, we have yet to explore how short-lived imaginary networks such as the Voice of Free Algeria or Radio Alice–radio networks that played a profoundly important role in numerous liberation movements throughout the world between the 1950s and the 1980s–(still) exemplify the possibility of new beginnings in the future.