ART AND ELECTROMAGNETISM –

Charles Halary
halary.charles@uqam.ca

The term electromagnetism was coined in the late 18th century to describe the radically new vision of life
born of the convergence of electricity and magnetism. In electromagnetism, as in certain Eastern
philosophies,1 energy flows are the primary vital forces of the body and the Universe. The great writer
Stefan Zweig stressed the importance of the late 18th and early 19th century in the chapter he devoted to
Mesmer in his book Mental Healers: Franz Anton Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud.2 Zweig
describes Mesmer as the precursor of Charcot, Janet and Freud. The existence of magnetism had already
been recognized for some time when Hans Christian Oersted, inspired by the philosopher and poet
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling's belief in the unity of the forces of Nature, scientifically
established the connection between magnetism and electricity in 1820.3 So it was that the artistic
movement of Romanticism brought about the unification of the two apparently separate natural forces of
ELECTRA and MAGNETES.4

1
The ancient practice of Chinese acupuncture, which developed out of an effort to understand the Indian system of the Chakras,
(focal points of electromagnetic energy along the spinal column) demonstrated an extricate knowledge of energy flows
throughout the human body. Acupuncture, which has existed for as least 4700 years, proposed a form of hygiene of the body that
went far beyond the superficial treatments developed in 19th century Europe (social hygienics). Training in acupuncture is
recognized today in the West, but its use remains marginal in the industrialized countries. Shen Nung, the "founder" of medicine
in Chine, considered acupuncture to be an essential part of medicine seen as an "art of living", a Taoist view based on the
complementary principles of Ying and Yang. One reason why these practices have remained marginal is that they are rarely
covered by health insurance. Western medical studies have show that certain points on the skin are more conductive than others.
Kirlian experiments on the same points arrived at the same results. This Oriental knowledge is widely recognized in the North
American artistic community and part of the scientific community, especially in California. The fact that acupuncture has become
a legitimate medical practice is witnessed by Acupuncture in Medicine, which has been published as the scientific review of the
British Medical Association's Acupuncture Society Journal of the since 1982. Also see Lewith, George T, Acupuncture - Its
Place in Western Medical Science, Merlin Press, London, 1999. Acupuncture tends to see itself as a medical art in a science-
dominated Western world. In recent years, the discovery of organic ferromagnetic substances in the hippocampus has opened the
door to a materialist explanation of the "sixth" sense observed in messenger pigeons and sleepwalkers, whose sense of direction
appears to be based on their sensitivity to the Earth's magnetic field.
2
Zweig, Stefan, Mental Healers: Franz Anton Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud, NY: Garden City. 1932. Zweig
describes Mesmer's close ties with the whole artistic community in Vienna, and particularly with the young Wolfgang Mozart.
3
Oersted observed that the magnetized needle of a compass was deflected by the magnetic field generated by a wire conducting
electrical current at the terminals of a Voltaic battery. This meant that magnetism could be studied scientifically, since it could be
measured with a known amount of electrical current. André Marie Ampère used the phenomenon as the basis of his theoretic
work on electricity. Oersted found in the German romantic philosopher and poet Schelling the proponent of a philosophy of
Nature based on a unified life force. Robert Stauffer, "Speculation and Experiment in the Background of Oersted's Discovery of
Electromagnetism," Isis, 48 (March, 1957), p. 35. Oersted made this particular discovery by chance while he was doing a
demonstration in one of his courses. Schelling's ideas can be summarized as follows: The ultimate reference, human mind, is
located in the brain, where it perceives all of the nature's forces, including magnetism and electricity, as having a single cause.
Nothing is inanimate, everything is in perpetual movement, polarized between two extreme points of oscillation. Schelling's
philosophy reinterpreted Kant in the light of the scientific ideas of Volta and Galvani.
4
ELECTRA comes from the Greek words elektron (an alloy of gold and silver that resembles amber, a hard translucent fossil
resin varying in color from yellow to light brown) and êlecktôr (brilliant). The Latin word electrum refers to amber; the earliest
manifestation of electricity was that produced when amber was robbed, and these electrostatic properties led the English doctor
William Gilbert of Colchester to coin the Latin term electricus in his book De Magnete in 1600. In Greek mythology, there are
two Electras. The lesser known of the two is the daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, mother of Iris and the two Harpies, which she
conceived with Thaumas, son of Pontos and Gaea. The better known Electra is the daughter of Atlas and Pleione, who conceived
Dardanus and Iasion with Zeus. MAGNETES (Old English for magnet) comes from the ancient Greek city of Magnesia in Asia
Minor where magnetic stone was mined. Cognates of electra and magnetes are also found in India and China, where they refer to
similar phenomena in very different cultural environments.
Modeling electromagnetic waves

In the West, the concept of electromagnetic fluidity remained marginal in the circles of power, whose
imagery and organizational constructs clung firmly to the mechanical model. But evidence in favour of
these late 18th century ideas was provided by the experiments of Volta and Galvani 5 that first established a
connection between electricity and life. A few years earlier, the mechanical automata of the Jacquet-Droz
brothers in Neufchâtel had reached such a level of perfection that they had ceased to progress.6 The
discovery of the role of electricity as a life force relegated them to the museum. The rising vitalistic
romanticism in the arts and philosophy produced the modern conception of life we share today.7 Two
centuries later, it has been embraced in all spheres of society.

While electromagnetism was initially seen as a source of inspiration for the arts of the time, it became an
extremely powerful theoretical – and practical – tool in the hands of European scientists. In the mid-19th
century, James Clerk Maxwell developed a unified theory of electricity, magnetism and light that is still
considered valid today.8 The intermingling of the sciences and the arts was later enriched by the
intertwined perspectives of Einstein and Picasso, who both drew inspiration from the work of Ernst Mach
and Henri Poincaré. Einstein's relativistic view of the observer encompasses Maxwell's linear view by
proposing an induction that is independent of the conditions of observation. Picasso's Les demoiselles
d’Avignon is an example of a similar type of observation, with its group of unclad women whose postures
do not depend on the position of the observer, but who, on the other hand, are observing the observer as a
potential client. In his Nude descending a staircase, Marcel Duchamp prolongs the kinetic sequence by
developing a series of perceptions on a same image decoded in linear time. What is so surprising to the
eye is that he treats a classic subject as if it was being filmed with a camera.9 While Duchamp emphasizes
the limits of our perception of light, Picasso questions the very perception of linearity. These artistic
experiments in destabilizing the frame of reference are the very opposite of some recent exhibitions of
"single-meaning" images.10

5 Electricity became one of the explanatory factors of life thanks to the work Galvani, who corroborated Volta's experiments in
Florence in the late 18th century. Galvani held that a universal fluid was present everywhere in the animate world. Volta, who
explained electricity as a product of the internal activity of animate bodies, won the day. He called his invention an "artificial
electrical organ" in reference to the natural organs of the electric fish Louis Bec used in his research in zoomorphology. Never
has there been a friendlier debate in the entire history of the sciences that the one between Volta and Galvani. Dibner, Ben,
Galvani-Volta: a controversy that led to the discovery of useful electricity, Norwalk : Burndy Library , 1952
6
Chapuis, Alfred ; Droz, Edmond, Les automates, Éditions du Griffon, Neufchâtel, 1949, pp 301-305. The automata (the writer,
the draftsman and the harpsichord player) are exhibited as works of art at the Museum of Art and History in Neufchâtel's, the
heart of the world's greatest clockmaking region.
7
Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society 1780 - 1950, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1971.
8
It was thanks to Maxwell and Michelson that Einstein was able to develop his Special Theory of Relativity by considering light
to be central to the explanation of the universe. In recent years, speeds greater than the speed of light have been measured within
light waves (Alain Haché, "Dépasser la vitesse de la lumière, La Recherche, January 2003, p 55). The question of light in
theoretical physics and its treatment in painting have been admirably analyzed by Arthur I. Miller in Einstein, Picasso: Space,
Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc, Basic Books, New York, 2001. Similar interferences will no doubt result from
interactions between quantum physics and the production of images by media artists. Maxwell had explained the visible range of
the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, leaving the invisible to the fertile imaginations of his successors, many of whom were
artists.
9
In 1912, Duchamp produced another painting featuring a Queen and King with a "nu vite" (flasher) surrounded by an the
invisible world of electrons, Marc Partouche, Duchamp, Images en manoeuvre Éditions, 1992, and Anne d’Harnoncourt and
Kynaston McShine, Duchamp, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Prestel, 1989, pp 259-260.
10
The propaganda image was invented by the Roman Catholic Church when its authority was being challenged in the late 19th
century. The mass circulation press turned it into a sales technique, churning out images designed to trigger immediate agreement
and leave no room whatsoever for thought or contemplation. The purpose of the advertising image is to appeal to an impulse and
associate it seamlessly with a given stereotypical behaviour. In this sense, pornographic images are the prototype of thoughtless
appeal. The "porno-chic" that is invading contemporary art museums is indicative of a trend. I see the work of Sam Taylor Wood
as part of a search for photographic exactitude that places her in the world of advertising with nothing to sell. The photographer
Terry Richardson has built his trademark in the brutally magnetic market of porno-chic; he makes his model looks like gray
For a culture of electromagnetism

Today, we tend to identify this approach to art as scholarly or theoretical, and confined to the hand-
painted canvas. It has become "historical". The act in which an object is created by a hand guided by a
thinking brain has been replaced by a physical operation guided by a computer program. The growing
scarcity of the hand-made polysemous work is accompanied by a monopolization of the production of
electromagnetic power by huge corporations which have severed all of the intellectual connections
between the commodity and its intrinsic nature. Electromagnetism has become a product to be sold or a
means to sell other products. Rarely has the separation been more obvious than in the case of ENRON. At
the very opposite end of the energy sector, Electricité de France (EDF) has subsidized serious intellectual
projects initiated by the artists themselves at the Espace Electra. ENRON's originality was that it
produced software to manage energy flows for maximum profit, and then indulged in creating virtual
profits that ultimately led to the most costly bankruptcy in history of capitalism, until it was swiftly
followed by that of the global electromagnetic communications giant WORLDCOM.11 This territorial and
cultural "emancipation" of electromagnetism driven by the imperative of every-expanding industrial
production was on a collision course with companies based on a mechanical model.

World War I triggered a first example of regression into an earlier universe of convergence between
industry, science and the arts. Urban modernity was propelled forward by the force of electricity. Art
nouveau inspired industry to adopt flexible, organic forms. Civilization was seen to be the fount of
happiness, and Paul Lafargue proclaimed that the right to do nothing was synonymous with the right to
enjoy life. Things had been looking good in "La Belle Époque".

In 2003, oil has recaptured the centre stage in the arena of social concerns, and the information society
based on electromagnetic flows of energy and culture is battered, bruised and seriously confused about its
future prospects. Powerful business interests like the film majors and show business conglomerates are
lobbying receptive governments for limits on free access to the Web and centralized control of the
software installed on home computers. The artistic hopes of the end the 19th century were dashed by the
First World War. The hopes of the early 21st century are running up against problems of a similar order.

The World Wide Web that emerged at the end of the Cold War between Moscow and Washington12 has
produced a new art form (Web art) which tremendously expands the possibilities of exchange and
communication. It also brings with it new forms of social control, cyberwar and organized crime. Today,
the age-old combat of artists to defend freedom of expression is coupled with a desire for integrity, which
implies the ability to develop and practice new forms and means of free expression. And today, data and
energy networks have entered the ultimate stage of convergence with the human body thanks to
computerized apparel and implants.

The universes of globally-networked electromagnetic signals and the flows of biological energy in the
individual bodies of human beings are becoming interconnected. Hence the decision to divide this

rabbits blinded by the lights of a car on a country road that you can't resist shooting with the old rifle in the trunk just because
they happen to be there and at least that way you don't come home with nothing to show for the experience!
11
During the heady days then the only direction for the NASDAQ seemed to be up, Pierre Lévy, World Philosophy, Odile Jacob,
2000, claimed that we were witnessing the fusion of information, electromagnetic networks and the monetized economy, or in
other words, mind was merging with money. He equates the rise in stock prices to a channeling of intelligence into the
communication networks that would create a noosphere representing a new Darwinian stage of human evolution. Lévy's book has
not been updated since the collapse of the stock market in 2001-2002.
12
The Internet as we know it today was the brainchild of physicists at the Centre européen de recherche nucléaire (CERN)
located on the border between Switzerland and France.
symposium into two parts: Part One approaches the human body in terms of its internal flows of
electromagnetic energy, and Part Two seeks to grasp the body's relationships with the electromagnetic
world that extends from our immediate environment to cosmic infinity.

Tesla and Faraday: inspirations for artists

The marginalization of the arts in industrial society is the result of the wars of the 20th century, in which
electromagnetism nevertheless played a crucial role. This conflictual relationship has a little-known yet
mythical source in the relations between Nikola Tesla and his banker John Pierpont Morgan 13. The study
of classical literature has accustomed us to associate tragedy with Antiquity, and especially with
exceptional circumstances like war. We are therefore ill-prepared to understand what is happening in
front of our very eyes, or to explain the world we live in, the world of the animate inhabited by a powerful
intellectual force - Science. At that level, electromagnetism is tremendously important politically and
economically, but it is not "vitally" linked to human nature. Tesla was not just the inventor of the modern
industrial electromagnetic system, not just an engineer; he was also an aspiring social scientist with a
vision of a world unified by free energy and by communications unlimited in time and space. Tesla was
so extraordinarily sensitive to electromagnetic fields that he experienced electromagnetic phenomena as
self-evident. He failed to understand that no everyone shared his hypersensitivity, and he failed to
convince people with his explanations.

Faraday had shown the way by asserting that electromagnetism was a universal principle of life on Earth.
Faraday definitively established the unity of magnetism and electricity by proving that a moving magnet
near a copper wire induced an electrical current in that wire, the inverse of Oersted's discovery. By
inventing the Faraday Cage, a chamber that isolates electromagnetic waves, he introduced a concept that
can be used for private protection. Faraday may also be the person who will have shown us how to protect
ourselves from outside electronic incursions (Catherine Richards) thanks to computerized clothing.14

North American engineers later built their continent with electricity as the defining new principle, in the
spirit of Thomas Edison. Most of them saw only the practical applications of electrical energy – its
philosophical, ethical and theoretical aspects escaped them completely. Yet it was this headlong rush to
embrace electricity that defined America's technological originality in the world. And it is the basis of the
present American dominance in computers, yet another product of engineers rather than mathematicians.

Russia, on the other hand, had produced the best theoreticians and artists in electromagnetism, serving as
a relay between the contemplative East and activist Western science. Even today, electromagnetism
occupies a prominent place in the concerns of Russian scientists and artists

13
Our contemporary social sciences and humanities tend to present the world as a mechanical interplay of opposing forces. They
never capture the drama of the actual confrontation between historical actors. Capitalism, the working class, nationalism, the
oppressed, imperialism – these are empty abstractions we find in pamphlets or speeches at political conventions. The brief
conversation between Tesla and Morgan boils the dilemma of modern urban life down to its essence: free electricity versus
privately-owned oil. But for the real drama, see Krsto Papic's remarkably balanced 1979 film The Secret Life of Nikola Tesla,
with none other than Orson Welles, by then aging and ill, in the role of John Pierpont Morgan.
14
Steve Mann, Cyborg, Doubleday, Toronto, 2001, took the symbiosis between digital machines and a human being to its limits.
The only engineer to engage in self-experimentation, Mann has shown how dangerous external computerized control of the
human body can be. Having provided an ad absurdum demonstration that grafting computerized components onto the human
body is a dead end, he quite rightly advocates the wearable computer (wearcomp) approach.
Theremin and Paik: finding the instruments of independence

Leon Theremin is the artist, scientist and sound engineer who truly embodied the dilemma of the
technological work of art as a means of individual emancipation or subjugation. Early on, he engaged in a
series of subversive acts to protect the role of the artist in an unfavourable environment. In Tsarist and
early-Soviet Russia, he invented the first electromagnetic musical instruments (Simon Pierre Gourd).
Then he emigrated to the United States so that he could practice his new art freely. In was in New York in
1938 that Stalin had Theremin kidnapped because of his inventive genius and technical skills in sound
engineering. Theremin was forgotten or given up for dead.15 A handful of artists kept his memory alive
until he re-emerged after the death of Stalin.

In the 1950s, Robert Moog 16 had the idea of paying his way through engineering school by making and
selling musical "kits" based on the theremin. Surprised by his success, he began working on the
synthesizer that is standard equipment for modern music groups all over the world.

During the same period, a Korean artist and friend of John Cage by the name of Nam June Paik went to
Germany and had the ridiculous idea of placing magnets on television screens, producing an
unconventional image that took the scientists and engineers by surprise. Paik had invented video art. It is
to the intersection of the two journeys of the engineer attracted by artists and the artist who subverted the
work of engineers that we owe the audiovisual tools that gave birth to the media arts.

Thanks to that intersection, artists recovered their cherished independence from the engineers and the
mass media. The whole media arts movement was born out of the moment when Nam June Paik
connected with Marcel Duchamp. The ready made as an act of intellectual resistance to the mechanical
objects of an industrialized world paved the way for the subversion of the fluid objects of the
communication society.17 In the wake of Nam June Paik, artists engaged in a joyous deconstruction of this
universe, with all of the excesses that the operation implies at its destructive extremes. Paik's magnets
threw a wrench into the works of "Big is Beautiful". Suddenly, the race was on for the small and portable:
battery-power transistor radios, carriable video cameras, portable computers and cell phones. After Paik's
original subversion, artists gradually occupied a space that hade been monopolized by engineers. The
politicians (election campaigns) and corporations (advertising) were not far behind.

These were positive developments. In the 1960s and 70s, artists recreated a space for freedom by
appropriating communication technologies in the name of democracy and individual expression. The
personal computer popularized by Apple18 became and has remained an essential tool for media artists.
The convergence of "Small is beautiful" with social movements of young people angered by bureaucratic
excess and financial misconduct created a consumer technology market that prepared the terrain for the
media arts.

But what works for one generation ends up being an obstacle for the next, and even Apple has become for
all intents and purposes indistinguishable from its competitors. Today, the new centres of democratic

15
Glinsky, Albert, Theremin. Ether, Music and Espionage, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2000.
16
Trevor Pinch, Frank Trocco, Analog Days, The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer, Harvard University Press, 2002
17
Raymond Gervais suggests a reading of electronic music as a by-product of remote communications invented in the 19th
century. The idea can be conveyed by a phenomenon familiar to many: the crackle on phone lines during electric storms. For
Gervais, electronic music is natural, and not the technological phenomenon many consider it to be. An object found in nature!
Raymond Gervais, "Electric Readymade", Parachute, 107, Montreal, 2002, pp 32-41.
18
Freiberger, Paul and Swayne, Michael, Fire in the Valley, The Making of the Personal Computer, Osborne/McGraw-Hill,
Berkeley, 1984,
creativity are thriving on the Web, a truly global field of convergences and confrontations of all sorts. The
desire to control the Internet expressed by law enforcement agencies and the major music companies is
offset by the ability, in the democracies at least, to create overnight a whole nebula of new sites that
transcend the now obsolete borders of our nation states.19

The myth of the computer20

There was no room for free spirit in electronics turned into machines by engineers. In 1948, Orwell
imagined a totalitarian 1984 by projecting and generalizing the dynamics of the mechanistic universe of
Stalinism. Thanks to Wiener, the term electronic brain gained a certain questionable popularity; he saw
the computer as the tool that would legitimize cybernetics as the science of power. McCarthy did not
correct Life Magazine when it hailed him as the inventor of artificial intelligence in 1956.

In fact, it was Simon and Newell who borrowed the screen from the television and transformed computers
by connecting a computer-controlled anti-aircraft firing mechanism to a cathode ray display.

In that post-WWII American perspective, electromagnetic flows curiously justified the devaluation of
humans in a world in which science had just invented a way to use the atom to exterminate the human
species, and quantum theory that rendered its existence absurd. The natural electromagnetic activity of the
human body is threatened on all fronts – few outside of cardiology ascribe much importance to the force
that regulates the most vital muscle of the human body, which is also the main generator of its
electromagnetic field.

Creative thought is intimately engaged by these mysterious problems of the organism. The desire to
defend the integrity of the human being through the integrity of the human body is an essential question
that enables the intuitions of artists and the analyses of scientists to come together. Whereas in yesterday's
world, home and hearth were the source of private tranquility, the body has become, in its most intimate
modalities, the locus of new relationships between social forces. New applications of electromagnetism,
which are increasingly familiar to artists, are entering a sector – that of private and public health care -
where debates about the future of our urban societies are raging. Debates which raise legal and technical
issues that are also of relevance in this symposium on the relationships between art and electromagnetics.

Information arts according to Stephen Wilson

How can we use electromagnetism to make art in an ultra-mediatized world and still avoid the Luddite
gesture of negation and destruction on the one hand, and the uncritical act of mimicking science, on the
other? This is certainly a question we will be asking ourselves at this symposium. Allow me to borrow
from Stephen Wilson a few observations that will help us answer the question.21 His book divides the
media arts into six fields. For reasons which become more obvious as his demonstration proceeds, Wilson
presents biology and physiology as the first sources of inspiration, reviewing experiments on the
electromagnetic relationships of the five senses, biosensors, bio-surveillance and neurosciences as part of
the development of bionics as a technology and bioelectricity as an approach to the human body whose

19
The Web can monitored and controlled like any other means of communication. A priori control is practiced by severely
restricting access, as do the dictatorships in China, Cuba, Iraq and most countries in Asia and Africa. In the democracies,
especially in the U.S., France, the U.K. and Israel, powerful analytical tools are used to exercise a posteriori control.
20
The French word ordinateur originally designated the person who led processions in the Church. In 1956, IBM France was
looking for an appropriate translation for the English word computer. A French teacher suggested that the antiquated term
ordinateur be used to refer to an electronic calculator that, in addition to calculating, imposed a certain order in a procession of
data.
21
Wilson, Stephen, Information Arts, MIT Press, 2002.
scope extends to parapsychology (pp 59-70). These electromagnetic relationships are also present in
artistic experiments with external impulses that stimulate and modify the body (pp 157-170). The classic
example is Stelarc's Ping Body, a performance in which "what is being considered is a body moving not
to the promptings of another body in another place, but rather to Internet activity itself - the body's
proprioception and musculature stimulated not by its internal nervous system but by the external ebb and
flow of data" (dixit Stelarc). Stelarc is but one of many artists who see electronics as an extension of the
body and have experimented with brain processes and heartbeats, the conductance of skin and the
physiological and acoustical properties of voices (pp 180-188). One "striking" example of the relationship
with electromagnetics is Walter de Maria's Lightning Field, a sculpture of stainless steel poles arranged to
attract lightning strikes that can be viewed during overnight visits in the New Mexico desert (p 245).
There is of course solar art (pp 246-250) in which installations or sculptures reflect or reflect on, capture
or transform sunlight.

But the most important field of electromagnetism is related to the high-power electronically-controlled
systems - telephone, radio, television, computers and the Internet – to which Wilson devotes an extremely
comprehensive treatment. The creation of sensory interfaces22 that relay the body's electromagnetic
vibrations to external electronic systems has given rise to "affective computing", a specific discipline in
which the body dissolves into an array of sensing devices.

The ultimate challenge to the relationship between the body and its definitional space is posed by the
technologies of systematized illusion or "virtual reality" (pioneered by Jaron Lanier). Alan Türing and
John Von Neumann had already modeled the challenge that the media, information and/or simulation arts
would represent for human perception.23 Distinguishing a human being from a computer in an industrial
world is a problem that says more about the psycho-physiological state of human beings than it does
about the technical capabilities of machines. At a time when conversations between human beings are
becoming increasingly anomic, the use of computer characters to communicate puts the very vitality of
the human electromagnetic field into question. Like Sir William Crookes did himself, 24 artistic research
focuses electromagnetic rays to create a spirit we can interact with.

Are we talking about a machine like Ève Andrée Laramée's "Apparatus to Distill Vague Intuitions", or
about new proof that modern science is predicated upon the rejection of nature and the electromagnetic
vibrations that materialize nature in the human body? Are the media and information arts the channels
whereby that science is introduced into the last bastions of the art of resistance and subversion, or is that
very nature, repressed by the men of science, that is reasserting itself through the women who are bringing
to the arts and the sciences a sensibility that the industrial revolution had crushed after the brief flowering
of Romanticism?

The electromagnetic field

As a force that imparts movement to a field, electromagnetism hardly lends itself to classical academic
distinctions between science, technology and art. As Peter Weibel suggested at Ars Electronica in Linz in
1993, the origin and reproduction of life has reasserted itself as the crucial problem in a universe

22
Poissant, Louise, (ed.), Interfaces et sensorialités, Presses de l'Université du Québec, Montréal, 2003. A collection of texts on
networking of human bodies and external electronic systems.
23
McCorduck, Patricia, Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence,
Freeman, San Francisco, 1979.
24
In addition to the Crookes' Tube (the precursor of the x-ray machine, electron microscope, cathode-ray oscilloscope and the
image tube of television receivers), Crookes invented the radiometer, essentially a partially evacuated glass or quartz tube within
which is mounted a shaft with four light vanes. Depending upon the strength of the radiant energy, this effect produces a steady
rotation of the vanes. Of limited practical use, it is perhaps the simplest and most delightful objet d’art produced by science.
structured by computers. Computers run on electrons, which means that they share in the same dance of
electrons as all that is animate. Yet they operate using a binary logic that takes pragmatic advantage of the
physical-chemical properties of electrons in silicon semi-conductors, as opposed to organic, carbon-based
molecules. This unforeseen extension of Ohm's Law using the logic of open (1) or closed (0) gates led to
the development of electronics as a means of direct action on electrons, with a derivative effect (the
magnetic field thus created). Today, we are still trying to fully understand electronics, just as electronics
had been understood in its particular relationship with the classical mechanisms based on the steam
engine. By reconsidering this relationship, we can find new globalizing interpretations that will greatly
extend our palette of means of expression upon which the next wave of protections of individual
freedoms will be based. How can one "expose" others to electromagnetism (in the sense of exhibit)
without being a scientist, while "exposing" oneself to electromagnetism as a source of artistic inspiration?
This is a question for which there is no shortage of answers (Sabine Himmelsbach).

Research labs are busy building computers in which electrons bound to their atomic nuclei are replaced
by high-energy particles that obey the laws of quantum mechanics. Quantum machines will take us to the
frontiers of electromagnetism in a strange rational universe whose relations with the organic (the living)
we can only as yet imagine. Even now, in the arts as in technology, we are just approaching the gates of
the quantum age. Technology is preceded in its advance by poets and metaphysicians. The relationships
between the physical science of technology and human experience are mysterious. By analogy, that
experience will enable us to invent connections with the arts whose contours have barely begun to come
into view,25 in a process that will nevertheless be fundamentally motivated by the search for an aesthetic
effect.

Contemporary scientists would like to construct an "elegant universe". Artists certainly have a role to play
in achieving this objective. Whereas electromagnetism is a powerful universe of continuous action over
distance, quantum fields are based on discontinuities (discrete lumps, or quanta). Art and science can
meet in a common search for unity. Of everything known to us in physics today, electromagnetic
interactions are the closest to life - a fact certainly not lost on artists – that are manifested by two
particles, one of matter (the electron spinning in solids, liquids or gases), the other of energy (the photon,
practically without mass, also has wave properties that enable it to travel through all forms of space).
Artists and generals are fascinated for diametrically opposed reasons by a fourth state of matter - plasma –
a more or less coherent cloud of ions and electrons that can be observed in balls of lighting or in the
Crookes' Tube, the ancestor of today's TV sets. The plasmic phenomenon begins with sparks and
ionization. On the edges of life, Kirlian photography makes the ionization induced by high-voltage pulses
visible to the eye as an electromagnetic field generated when light-producing electrons are excited.

Light and the wave mechanics of art

Artificial light has become an electromagnetic product that exploits the ability of electrons to change their
energy potential by emitting a photon. We know that this can occur organically by observing the
naturally-occurring biochemical light of fireflies. Fire - another form of light that occurs both naturally
and artificially - is seen by some religions (Zoroastrianism) and some anthropologists (Leroy-Gourhan) as
the source of human spirituality. Natural cosmic light is the product of the thermonuclear fusion of
hydrogen (protons that turn into neutrons by shedding photons) from stars. The arcs of electrons that
occur in thunderstorms and the aurora borealis are intermediaries between the stellar winds and the
Earth's electromagnetic field, without which no life would be possible. Electromagnetism is a
phenomenon whose study takes us beyond the commercial changeablilities of electronic devices. For
artists, it is an infinitely more enduring partner than the ephemeral computer. This is the reason why we
propose to replace the limiting idea of "art and the computer" by "the undulatory relations between

25
Brian Grene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, a Quest for Ultimate Theory, Vintage Books, 2000.
electromagnetism and art". These relations, as stable as the human species, open the door to a synesthesia
whose the instrument of choice is the body.

The computer hardware we are surrounded by ends up on a garbage heap (or at best in a recycle bin)
within five years of its introduction. We throw our cell phones after two or three years of use. Electronic
devices have the shortest life expectancy of any product of technology. Why bother to repair them when
they become so rapidly outmoded that they cannot be put to another use? Most of our electronic devices
are manufactured in Asia, especially China, for the mass consumption markets of the world. To the extent
that there remains anything in that process that might lend itself to an artistic intervention, it is assembly.
The "ready made", a re-assembly of known objects Marcel Duchamp happened upon as a justification for
contemporary art, is in the process of dissolving into what we might call the "just-for-you", the
construction of a point of view from an ephemeral "personalized" assembly. Duchamp attached a great
deal of importance to the act of seeing that gives birth to art, and suggested that the undulatory changes of
our ways of seeing resonate with and create art.

Changes of points of view take place in discrete places - church chapels, the amateur scientist's laboratory
and today, the artist's workshop. Artists are seen as possessing the extraordinary power to invent worlds.
Where all else has failed in the interpretation of the world, people are turning to artists, most of whom
have themselves failed to understand with what baggage their vessel has been loaded before they embark
upon their adventure.

Among other things, artists are called upon to justify the purchase of expensive equipment that will only
be used for as long as a particular project lasts. Is there a way to play artistically with the notion of
resistance? Perhaps by returning to the electromagnetic principle, by attaching electro-magnets to the
perimeter of the nondescript building of some numbered company. The media arts have constructed an
artistic field in which our electronically-networked instruments are entirely dependent on a central source
of power, and will collapse in a heap on the ground if the power is cut off.

Commitment, responsibility and the return to nature

Artists are invited to express their points of view on political causes, and now they are even called upon to
tell science what to do. While entrepreneurs are waiting for them to produce new ideas so that they can
make money, politicians are getting them out to protest against war. Not a bad state of affars if one is
seeking visibility and an important role in society. But does it really make a difference if the individual
means of expression remain the same as they were before?

The banks will lend on the basis of tangible assets, i.e., real estate, investments or moveable property, but
never on the strength of an artistic idea, which they see as being by definition fraught with risk. The more
or less legitimate specialists of so-called "venture capital" may enter the scene when the art in question
can be seen as having mass appeal on the market of mainstream entertainment. The entire lot is saved
from final judgment by a handful of exceptional individuals among the powerful - the collectors.26

The field of electromagnetic art is indivisible. What kind of sale value can be expected of works which,
by their very nature, are not only not unique, but infinitely reproducible? The fact remains, however, that
regardless of how non-commercial it may be, electromagnetic art is still capable of bringing out the most
aesthetic and individualistic qualities of the most industrial of designs.

26
Once an aristocratic duty, support for the arts has become is a bourgeois hobby, not infrequently delegated to agencies of the
welfare state. Artists have become a category of voters among others. Its members, impassioned by their art, fail to note that
society is asking them to get by on the low end of welfare. Living from one's art is nothing short of a feat. As Einstein used to say
from his vantage point at the zenith of science, one can find a quieter and more predictible future in plumbing.
At a time when the mass media have taken leave of their senses and are chasing after modern mad
scientists (the Raëlian cloners) in a genetic adventure to manipulate life, the much more crucial question
of the distinction between the inanimate and the living is being pushed into the background and
downgraded to a simple matter of faith.

Science is divided between those who attribute a memory to matter and those who think that the complex
memory inserted into every organic molecule generates life. Science is adrift, waiting for contemporary
artists to come up with a more satisfactory explanation. Having overcome their initial reticence, some
artists are euphorically embracing the confusion between tools and machines. Tools impress upon matter
the will of their possessor. Machines make their operators believe what they want to see or can imagine
within the limits of the imaginations of the engineers who built them.

In pictorial art, Photoshop reigns supreme thanks to the brilliance of Adobe's engineers. Photographic
artists who make own their plates of silver-forming crystal with collodion to re-experience the emotions
of the age of Niepce and Daguerre are ignored by the curators of large-scale exhibitions in today's
museums and galleries. Yet the future of media arts lies in optical research on the properties of materials,
in digital and video holographics, in the study of the electromagnetic polarization of materials (liquid
crystal displays, polarizing glasses for IMAX 3D movies, Polaroid-type sensitive surfaces …). As
incredibly slick and powerful as Photoshop, Maya and Flash are as commercial products, they must not
be allowed to overwhelm the horizon of artistic creation to the exclusion of everything that lies beyond.
Otherwise, electromagnetic art will dance to the tune of the software companies.

The path of the discovery often leads back through nature. Back, so as to experience the flame of a candle
double-refracted through an Iceland crystal. Back, to reconnect with the hand of the artist, an
electromagnetic field ephemerally structured into bone and flesh. Back, to question our way of seeing, to
what happens along the wave chains from our eyes to our neurons. Back, to raise our eyes to the aurora
borealis and re-immerse ourselves in the Nordic myths through science (Nina Czegledy and Peter Ride).
We need to constantly reinvent new combinatorics by returning to the path of those who proposed the
Renaissance to the Christian world of Europe 500 years ago. Our contemporary media arts are born of
such intersecting ways of seeing. Art and electromagnetism are interacting fields. In the classical
worldview, such fields attract or repel entities; in quantum physics, they produce new entities simply by
meeting. Never has the task of painting an accurate picture of the relationship between the arts and the
hard sciences been more complex, because subjectivity cannot be eliminated, and the simple fact of
looking changes the emotional state of the viewer.

A clash in the icon

In French, the word "icon" is both masculine and feminine, androgynous, hermaphroditic, attraction and
repulsion in an improbable unipolar social magnetism. The icon reproduces itself, like a living cell
multiplying from a matrix.

On the other hand, the French word for image is "feminine" and originates in the visualizations of a
pleasant dream. The meaning of an image can never be reduced to a series of machine-identifiable
features, a fact that has led the spies of the computer age to encode their messages in images which can
only be deciphered by their intended recipient; the explanation is hidden in the brain, not in the machine
or the medium of the image. Images are pure products of the brain. Thi is why the blind can construct
images out of their emotions, and blind people who recover their sight later in life can only interpret what
they see with their eyes with the help of a mentor.
Images are expressions of the mind that some would conceal and others adore. They are relationships,
symbols of an autonomous entity that is the product of two other entities (Joanne Lalonde). Generalizing,
we might suggest that an idea results from this interaction, the interference between the two entities.
When it takes a regular (symmetrical) rational form, the resulting subjective belief suggests relationships
(religare) which, as they stabilize, form a religion whose strength lies in the ritualized story that dispenses
with the question of its origin.

All of the great religions are the product of small sects inspired by an individual who possessed powerful
personal magnetism. The image of this person, reproduced in all sorts of ways, is the conventional way of
keeping the magnetism alive. Modern dictators imitate them as best they can. And public relations firms
try to construct images out of the product they are supposed to sell, "reflected" images (as opposed to
Lucretius' "deep" images) that are nevertheless capable of triggering a deep resonance in each individual.

Today's democratic election campaigns are laboratories where images of devotion are constructed and
assert themselves, free of any need for programmatic analysis, in what is clearly a return to tribal customs
in an electronic environment. Multiplication and mobility have propelled the "art of the icon" to its
apogee by producing an "icon of art" that vibrates to the frequencies, amplitudes and phases of
electromagnetism. The media machine uses opinion polls - the rational means of collective introspection -
to bring consenting yet undecided wills into line with the decided wills of power.

A fertile convergence of science, art and religion occurred at the Iconoclash exhibition at the ZKM in the
summer of 2002 under the auspices of Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. The pretext was the study of the
moving image, which according to Latour polarizes attraction and repulsion.27 Images produced by
electromagnetic waves are complex because they are alive. Light, reaching our brain through the retina, is
itself affected by an electromagnetic activity specific to neurons. Light is an electromagnetic wave that
induces a very particular tropism in all living organisms of the carbon cycle; it is the starting point of the
evolution that led from vegetable to animal via photosynthesis (generation of oxygen). Paul Valéry who
borrowed term "tropism" from biology to spiritualize materiality in the psychic world. Magnets are made
up of ferromagnetic particles oriented by an initial magnetizing pulse. Images likewise have an
orientation which, according to Roland Barthes (The Luminous Room), can sometimes exert a magnetic
pull when it polarized on a punctum that strikes the imagination.

The celluloid dream

There is a definite connection between the primary orientation of life's smallest organized particle and
electromagnetism, which gives direction and meaning to fields, bodies or images. David Cronenberg's
1997 Crash explored tropes by trapping human bodies in cars (protective structures like the Faraday
Cage), which have come to mediate the most intense drives and devouring passions of our urban hives
abuzz with the incessant industry of termites. Many works of art have been created for the television
screen, the hypnotic object par excellence in a society of confinement. The snow-after-the-image theme
structured Neil Stephenson's emblematic novel Snow Crash (1992), in which organically-living
individuals are also actively metamorphosed into the Metaverse, a universe of pure images on a futuristic
Internet. The same Cronenberg used this idea in another film, Existenz (2000) in which people could be
transported into a dream reality by plugging themselves into a network via a connector implanted in their
backs. All of these works share a classic theme: before actual death, the vital fluid can leave the body,
inducing cataleptic failure. As Calderon the playwright would have it, it is in our dreams that the action
takes place. The clash is a form of awakening. Dreaming is intensely erotic and therefore pleasurable

27
Latour, Bruno, "What is iconoclash or is there a world beyond the image wars?, in Iconoclash, Beyond the image, wars in
science, religion and art, ZKM, MIT Press, 2002, p 15.
under natural circumstances, but even in the socially-uncontrollable realm of the dream, the road to Eros
and pleasure can be blocked when the dreamer is subject to social, physical or emotional constraints.

Edouard Lock's choreography Amelia (2002) "embodies" the mechanical boredom that is affecting our
erotic impulses – Lock's languid sensuality rises into the furious intensity of wild abandon before lapsing
into a mechanical ballet in which the source of the audience's fantasies is a sort of programmed ritual of
pollinization. The magnetic attraction between males and females has produced one very curious
American 20th century archetype that makes a couple of Marylin Monroe and Albert Einstein. Are the
images indivisible or composite? Anyone who has a copy of Adobe Photoshop can make big images out
of small images. And each original image can be broken down into infinitely smaller images thanks to
programs that depend on the minimal definitions of a machine. We can see this is in fractal geometry,
which has presented electromagnetism with a challenge that can only be resolved in the infinitely small,
where reason yields to rigour. That is where the real clash in the icon occurs. Writing, the seismographic
form of the internal hum, makes the phases of this life-given subjectivity visible. It is the way human
beings come to understand the private cinema that starts when a spermatozoa enters an ovule, and ends in
death and decay. The rejection of this least acceptable sequence of images is expressed by an image, in
the form of an icon.

The density of the icon

The icon is a channel for a sensation that is very distant in space and time. The other more immediate
senses are less involved in any desire to exert power. After sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell are often
ranked in descending order of aesthetic importance.

The image of a cooked dish melts delectably against the palate, where touch soon bows out to smell and
taste and the mysterious shapes of its power disappear. As universal as cooking and eating may be, they
not generally seen as an art in a Western world dominated by Anglo-Saxon Puritanism, which knew its
first riches with spices of the Orient, yet still fails to recognize the culinary arts as the primary means of
recreating social interactions. The sculptures produced by cooking are the only ones that excite all of the
senses and trigger a totally integrated body response in an act that recharges the batteries of human
electromagnetism and immediately and irresistibly fulfils the image's destiny to be devoured by those that
behold it. The human species excluded itself from the range of living (i.e., electromagnetic) substances it
can ingest by making cannibalism taboo. But what is the growing taste for live vegetables and animals
(e.g., oysters in Europe, and the much wider palate of the Japanese) if not the expression of a quest for
meaningful vibrations?

The purpose of consuming these "fruits of the earth" is to stimulate the actions that produce the
electromagnetic body. The first image whose meaning seems have been continuously transmitted is that
of the orgiastic Cretan feasts where Dionysus-Bacchus used the divine libation wine to bring forth the
human out of the animal. Bacchus was torn from the breast of his mother by the first "life-bearing" father,
Jupiter, who gave birth to the world from his thigh. Jupiter, the God of Thunder (the electromagnetic
phenomenon which gives rise to life) offered Bacchus to artists to inspire them and to transform life into a
valley of pleasures. The bull icons strewn around the Mediterranean soften the image of the man-
devouring Minotaur wondering somewhere between a Fellini film and our own life story. Dionysus joins
Picasso across the ages to contemplate the Demoiselles d’Avignon, who dance a dance of veils in which
the tension rises as the veils fall (Marc Boucher).

Destruction as rebirth

Iconoclash offers an interpretation of the destruction of images (iconoclasm) as an act urged upon the
viewer placed in the role of predator. In the era of mass consumption of images, embellishments are
passé. Where is one to find a forger who takes malicious pleasure in replacing an original painting with a
perfect copy? Instead, the mass media celebrate the destruction of images as a means of liberating
repressed energies. Accidents, wars and catastrophes are truly signs of the times for Paul Virilio's
exhibition (Ce qui arrive) at the Fondation Cartier, which prefigures a "Museum of Accidents". In our
increasingly mediatized universe, change is the rule, slowness and stability are banished, and the clash of
ideas is replaced by the clash of images catastrophically flashing by, generating a continuous wave as
fascinating as it is sinister. This new morbid fascination transforms large-scale serial death into a game
that relegates orgasm to the realm of the weaker sensations. Sade would be a fumbling amateur in this
North-Americanized universe. The very denigrators of images have become their main predators –
privately, a whole generation of boys are addictively destroy images in violent home video games, the
only mass segment of the video game market.

The media arts are awakening to this propensity to turn breaks into continuous waves. Once upon a time,
the cinematograph reconstituted movement by advancing a strip of photographic images at sewing-
machine speed, leaving it to retinal persistence and the brain to complete the job of de-and-re-composing.
Advertising bombards us with incessant promises of revolution, yet the Vandals and other Visigoths are
at the suburb gates. The desecration of statues and other images of the Stalinist regimes were just the
beginning of a new cycle that is sweeping the world.

Marcel Duchamp's ready mades lifted objects out of the ordinary world and elevated them to art. The
seminal iconoclash was the urinal Duchamp transformed into a fountain for the purposes of an exhibition;
it became invested with the dignity of a fountain by virtue of the artist's seeing it and presenting it as such.
Dario Gamboni28 points to a possible connection with the multiple meanings of La Fontaine's fable The
Sculptor and the Statue of Jupiter, in which the sculptor hesitates between turning his block of marble
into a divine sculpture, a table or a fountain. He chooses the god, and once the work is finished, he falls
trembling in awe and admiration before it. Seeking to provoke an artistic academic institution that was
less and less sure of itself, Marcel Duchamp created a new "democratic" way to make art. In a spirit akin
to Warhol's comment that anyone can become a celebrity for at least few minutes thanks to the media
(Andy Warhol), Duchamp succeeded in making a piss pot as famous as a living god.

The media arts raise the prospect of destructible art (the eye on the metronome in Man Ray's Objet à
détruire) in a world dominated by the Fine Arts, whose raison d’être is to be preserved. Nathalie Heinich
tells the story of a curator of the "Fine Arts" school who, lacking explicit instructions, exhibited a work in
its wooden shipping case, thinking that this might have been the intention of the artist. Are not museums
the institutional enemies of iconoclasts? True, they "conserve" (as do carrier waves), but the fact is that
contemporary art museums often protect works which, if they were left in the street, would likely be
vandalized by the "collective artistic action " that usually occurs during mass revolutionary movements of
the people.

A carrier wave

"We see many things projecting broad waves not only from within themselves but also from their
surface." (Lucretius, On the Nature of Things)

28
Gamboni, Dario, "Image to destroy, indestructible image", in Iconoclash, Beyond the image, wars in science, religion and art,
ZKM, MIT Press, 2002, p 112-114.
Lucretius' observation is developed by the philosopher Michel Henry in his study on Kandinsky,29 for
whom painting was the profound expression of life, and life vibrated invisibly from deep within the body.
Kandinsky, who remained within the orthodox iconic tradition, sought to make the deep waves "visible"
through his paintings, but not by having them seen through the eye. Instead, he wanted his paintings to
generate a magnetic vibration similar the one that guided Puységur's sleepwalker. The idea was very
popular in Europe at the end of 19th century, as the sociological theses of Guyau on art and the whole
symbolist movement show.

The ancient concept of wave projection was that they emanated from a point within beings and things.
The idea that appearance determines impression is more recent. In the modern world of consumerism and
advertising, the determining role of appearance eliminates all cause.

Two human beings have permanent subliminal relations produced by electromagnetic murmurs from their
bodies. Even when they are separated, they remain in intimate contact. Under the apparent
communication, other hums define the situation as a whole. Life is a carrier wave that fluctuates along the
arrow of time and reaches its agonizing culmination in a flat electroencephalogram. The anguish is
stabilized by the acceptance of its finality, made easier by the adoption of a belief that transforms the
internal hum into a tropism of eternity. The transformation takes two main forms of great intricacy: the
spoken work and the written word. The vibration of the voice and the calligraphic movement of the hand
are the two phenomena that create dialogue and calm the body.

Total dialogue of bodies occurs in carnal relations that light up the mind for a brief moment. All art forms
attempt to capture that carrier wave, in an object or a performance. The positive vibration sought by the
artist serves to bring his or her spiritual upheaval into tune with the collective maelstrom. It makes
perceivable that which is invisible. In the period when scientists and artists were working to "bring to
light" the invisible - the Lumière brothers (with their cinématographe and its 24-frame-per-second
movement too rapid to be perceived by the eye), Wilhem Roentgen (X-rays), Henri Becquerel
(radioactivity), Georges Seurat (photons and pointillism) - the philosopher Henri Bergson suggested that
intuition was the best way to grasp reality. Bergson was one of the last to defend the primacy of intuition
before the world conjuncture tipped the scales away from creativity to the horrific destruction of the
ensuing wars between nations and within nations, fought in both uniform and civilian clothes.

The loss of sensitivity

The degree to which the body is seen to be sensitive in general determines how sensitive the body is seen
to be to waves of energy in particular. The question is common to both sociology and psychology.30 There
seems to be little doubt that the concentration of vast numbers of people in cities has lowered our bodies'
perception levels as a result of saturation (the body lowers its thresholds because the average wave energy
is too high). The phenomenon physiologists call "stress" and sociologists call "anomy" refers to a serious
disturbance of psychic and social balance. The stated objective of all healthcare systems is naturally to
restore balance in the body, yet the literature is full of examples of the perverse effects of systems that
cure one problem and trigger a host of others in the process.

29
Henry, Michel, Voir l'invisible, Bourrin-Juillard, Paris, 1988 and Kandinsky, Wassily, Du spirituel dans l'art et dans la
peinture en particulier, Folio, Essai, Gallimard, Paris, 1992, echo the ideas expounded in 1887 by Jean-Michel Guyau, L'Art au
point de vue sociologique. Alcan, Paris, 1923
30
In the period art historians refer to as symbolist, efforts to make the invisible visible focused on the vital fluids. Jean-Martin
Charcot, a professor of Freud and doctor at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, first conducted experiments to reveal the spirit using
a combination of hypnotism and electricity. Charcot later inspired the psychologist Pierre Janet, whose work laid the groundwork
for Chertok, Goetz, C.G., Bonduelle, M., Gelfand, T. Charcot: Constructing Neurology, Oxford University Press, New York,
1995,
Such disturbances of electromagnetic balance are probably aggravations of one of the objective
characteristics of human physical existence that distinguishes living beings from their environment and
enables them to evolve, adapt and transform. But these disruptions of phase, frequency and amplitude
must remain within certain limits to produce such a result. The problem is that our society, won over to
the industrial ideal, has generated social disturbances of such magnitude that the simple religion-based
equilibriums of old no longer suffice to ward off the anguish.

The building of a global society in the mid-19th century required a planetary electromagnetic network
whose construction began, according to McLuhan (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964)
with Morse's invention of a device to send and receive electromagnetic impulses over wires. Louise
Provencher31 has aptly characterized this period when the arts engaged in a hesitation waltz with all sorts
of inventors of electromagnetic machines to send, receive and record. Nikola Tesla, the oddest and most
"charged" of them all, asserted that electromagnetic waves were naturally-occurring, preceded us in the
order of creation and held one of the keys to the understanding of our species; he also said that the only
way to use them was to obey their laws, which he held to be the same as the laws of human thought. The
more business-savvy Marconi tried to steal one of Tesla's inventions, a continuous wave modulator for
broadcasting (Marconi's case was subsequently dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1944). In 1900,
using a Tesla device, Reginald Fessfinen, a Quebecer from Lac Brome, sent a human voice via
electromagnetic waves for the first time in history; this event occurred just months after the first magnetic
voice recording on steel wire (Poulsen), which later evolved into the plastic ribbon coated with iron oxide
that would replace Edison's electromechanical wax recordings. Sound precedes the image in the recording
of a universal vibration, an iconographic sound. Recordings do not say where the images or the sounds
come from. Nor need we bother to ask the question if the clash is a moment in a movement of
spontaneous creativity.

Spontaneous generation

While Pasteur dismissed Pouchet's idea of the spontaneous generation of life, contemporary physicists
admit that matter and energy spontaneously shoot out of black holes of all sizes … and disappear into
them just as sprightly. Such appearinga and disappearing acts were familiar to shamans, who were the
mediums of their tribes just as electronic networks are the media of our modern metropolises. Teilhard de
Chardin and McLuhan both viewed the discovery of electromagnetism as a "extraordinary biological
event", but we can ask ourselves whether or not the discovery enabled those without a great deal of
natural magnetism, like the sweepers of the shaman's hut, to rise to the top of the pyramid of power. It
took the genius of Charlie Chaplin to do justice to such an absurd usurpation in The Great Dictator.
Absurdity enforced by a political police kills, as Eastern Europe has so tragically shown. But in
contemporary show business, how many "stars" exist solely because of the talents of sound technicians
and lighting engineers? The hollow images Communist regimes churned out for decades in Eastern
Europe explain why the media play a comparatively insignificant role in that terribly battered part of the
continent.

Through a process of objectification, thought is migrating out of the human body and into electronic
machines, where it spontaneously generates thought. With Türing, the computer emerges as an
exonervous centralizing machine that spontaneously produces logic, the skeletal form of human thought.

The domain of this electronic logic had already become planetary with invention of the telegraph and the
discovery of Hertzian waves. Electrons, the best known elementary particles even today, are indivisible,

31
Louise Provencher and Richard-Max Tremblay, Montréal-Télégraphe, CD-ROM and exhibition, May 2000, Occurrence-Ohm-
Avatar, Montréal
unlike protons or neutrons (which are made up of quarks32). Unlike oil, a fluid that flows out of refineries,
electricity is a wave that vibrates.

The natural ability of human beings to generate magnetism kay bave been affected by as yet unknown
viruses. There is something missing in the discourse on the breakdown of social ties if, as we contend,
social ties are biomagnetic and ultimately owe little to discourse at all.

While the human body produces rather weak electromagnetic fields (the brain), the strongest being that of
the beating heart, the chest can produce a voice capable of filling great spaces with sound. The direction
action that sound vibrations exert on matter can generate audible forms and, surprisingly enough, visible
forms. We also know that very high frequencies can shatter glass.

Vibrations can spontaneously generate shapes. In 1787, Ernst Chladni published a treatise on the figures
created by the vibrations of a violin on a flat metal surface dusted with fine-grained sand. These patterns,
which seemed to be woven in a vacuum, were variously studied thereafter. The best known shapes were
published by the French mathematician Jules-Antoine Lissajous in 1857-58. In 1967, the artist and
physician Hans Jenny originated cymatics (the science of the structure and dynamics of waves and
vibrations) which is slowly but surely drawing attention among people in the arts and the sciences. Jenny
developed the tonoscope, a device that makes the shapes generated by various frequencies of the human
voice visible; increasing the frequency, amplitude and phase of the sound increases the complexity, speed
and rhythm of the forms. Goethe once described architecture as "frozen music"; and indeed, cymatics
shows that objects are stationary waves. Hans Jenny 33 used classical physics, violin strings as sources of
vibrations and the currently dominant theory in physics – superstrings (www.superstringtheory.com) - to
explain matter or energy as vibrational effects. He created sound sculptures that looked like human forms
moving in crowds. Jenny's last work was on the shapes generated by the human voice, especially the
sounds of the most ancient languages. What is surprising in these experiments is the conclusion that
vibrations can generate solid forms. Vibrations can organize matter. The ultra low frequency waves
(10Hz) emitted by the Earth ("Song of the Earth") could be seen as the evidence and the source of life in
the form of such waves. All entities would in this view have their own specific vibrations, their unique
voice.

Hearing voices

Communication machines are being used to compensate for the decline in social magnetism. In the early
20th century, Jean Jaurès, the founder of the French Socialist Party, would give speeches to thousands of
workers without any form of amplification. Hitler, on the other hand, always hid behind a microphone,
and all contemporary political leaders use television, as well as the services of handlers, spin doctors and
image makers, to make themselves seen and heard. Staging and lack of direct communication diminish
social vitality, and the lack of living magnetism has to be made up for through the systematic use of
communication machines, our new modern prostheses. The electronic media serve up compensatory
sensations for bodies that have lost their sensitivity through the fear of war and the constraints of work.
Max Weber saw in the charismatic individual a way of holding a groups together and directing organized
masses which he felt would otherwise be amorphous and devoid of rational collective intent. As the
number of charismatic leaders too independent of mind to be put in positions of power has decreased,
voice communication machines have had to be built in order to control the masses.

32
Quarks are a theoretical construct of the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who posited that they were the building blocks
of neutrons and protons in the nucleus of atoms. The word quark was borrowed from James Joyce, who used the word to mean
"strange thing" in Finnegan’s Wake. Joyce once ran a movie theatre in Dublin called Volta.
33
Hans Jenny, Cymatics: A Study of Wave Phenomena and Vibration, Macromedia, 2001.
Whereas these voice machines were initially inspired by Romanticism in the case of Helmholtz (he based
his resonator on the pronunciation of vowels he believed to be the essential vibrations of the human
voice) and social pragmatism (Graham Bell's telephone was originally designed to help the deaf), they
quickly became, with the advent of radio and television, machines of power and persuasion. Modern
electoral campaigns are ultimately advertising campaigns designed to sell a smile projected on a hollow,
empty television screen that spontaneously generates power. Over the radio, one can only hear voices; on
the TV, everyone can see who the voices belong to. Television has contributed to stripping the human
voice of its essential role in the transmission of signals between people. This can be seen in the
Mediterranean countries where television has not yet completely taken over social space, and the directly
spoken word remains central to human communication.

The voice may still be important among those peoples who continue to love good stories and good
speeches, but it is being overwhelmed by a barrage of images that are more subliminal than sublime.
Advertising, which originated in the regulated uncovering of the pubis, is the science of the chain of
meanings at the end we find the couch potato, staring at the TV screen and mightily fatigued by it all. The
disappearance of amulets and other charms in the flood of industrial commodities has deprived social
magnetism of its last forms of stability. Society has turned to the media screens flickering with shadows
that only come alive thanks to the extraordinary power of self-suggestion of the brain human.

The body vibrates to the rhythm of the heart. The beating heart generates the largest electromagnetic field
in the bodies of humans and all other mammals. Our brainwaves are much finer, and the rest of the body
hums in between the two extremes. The body's voice expresses the heart. The "voice" itself is a matter of
breath (which can be reproduced by a little-used register of the pipe organ or the modern synthesizer); it is
a murmur we hear from within ourselves. The voice of others is carried through the air and requires a
listening ear. Nature sends an electromagnetic muscular pulse that modulates the sound vibration which
the ear captures and retranslates into electromagnetic pulses for neuronal decoding. But the brain does
more than that – it also produces voices of its own. In dreams, in ecstasy, in misunderstanding ...

The unity of human body and mind

We must disagree with Bruno Latour when he says that by images are constructed differently in science,
religion and art. We humans imagine all of our sensations and intellections the same way. Granted,
although the boundaries are fuzzy, images can be produced in a variety of ways in science, religion and
art; there is, however, only one system of reception and interpretation - the human body. These three
words, whose meaning changes from period to period and place to place, share a common tropism that
deciphers the world, and designate the phases of the full deployment of the psyche.

Today, thanks to Kurzweil, computers are capable of voice recognition. Machines that reproduce human
speech by imitative recording are capable of transcribing it into written form. The computer being in a
broad sense a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is better at turning signs into sounds, like the
music boxes of old. Voice synthesis is more advanced than voice recognition. A text unifies, but words
remain multiple manifestations of unruly life. We can escape the censure of the speech therapist, but not
the censure of spelling. The voice is synonymous with freedom. Comedians practice it as a stylistic
exercise. The impersonation of famous people is sure to trigger the type of laughter Bergson calls
mechanical. It is, after all, easier to caricature someone's voice than to pull of a feat like the actor Fregoli,
who would play all of the characters and change costumes up to 60 times in his comic pieces.
The sequined costume goes electronic

Fregoli took the art of the on-stage costume change to the extreme. Nobody seems interested in trying to
match his performances today. Meanwhile, compugraphics still cannot make such changes credibly with
artificial characters. Fregoli's art may be lost, but his name lives on in medical terminology as the term
psychologists use for mental condition in which the patient thinks someone they know has changed in
appearance and asks them why they are disguising themselves.

Changes in appearance are often due to a change of clothing, which in turn changes the perception of the
individual's identity. Watching up to a million pilgrims circle the Kaaba in Mecca persuasively supports
the concept of magnetic tropism. This is unquestionably a social current in full public display, and the
dress code is clearly male-identified; it is not unlike a political demonstration in the streets of Paris, New
York or Montreal, or the flow of city traffic seen from a helicopter.

Every person who has his or her cell phone on is being tracked by a grid of relay stations. Today, the
companies that receive this information have a view of urban movement similar to the zoologist's view of
the movements of tagged migratory birds. Tomorrow, computerized clothes will physically identify
individuals as they move about their cities. This paradise for the proponents of quantitative sociology is
also the paradise of the agents of crowd control. Everyone will be transparent under the lights of the
investigators.

Meanwhile, the fetichized objects of modern everyday fashion have lost all semblance of enduring style;
they have less of a half-life than a firefly. Clothing is one of the most obvious social distinctions between
human beings and other mammals. This is quite a problem for the major religions of the Middle East and
Asia. Dress is to human beings what natural fur is to other animals, but it is much more than. Human
dress is regulated, and the distinction of wearing clothes rather than fur is even more important to us than
our common belonging to the animal kingdom. If hair removal salons have become so extraordinarily
popular, it is because humankind now has the technology, and some humans have the disposable income,
to complete a job left unfinished by genetic evolution.

The skin must be purified of all animal reference. Scientists have already engineered artificial skin for
serious burn victims that is making its way into cosmetic surgery. The idea of producing a second
artificial skin is not that far from the idea that clothing, however rudimentary, is a second skin for us. The
artist Eduardo Kac has created a transgenic rabbit with fluorescent skin to demonstrate the artistic
potential of genetics, an idea we would be more kindly disposed toward if Kac had Orlan's courage and
was willing to experiment on himself.

Because our skin conducts electricity, what is going on electromagnetically just under the dermis can be
measured. The biofeedback equipment used in medicine is based on this principle first discovered by
Oersted. Human biomagnetic activity will be increasingly used to regulate the movements of the urban
masses. Judging by the levels registered by biofeedback devices, it is not hard to imagine that the stress
people face can trigger in biochemical changes in the organism. The future of the acknowledged need to
battle stress lies in the symbiosis of clothes and the body.

Genetic baggage and electromagnetism

Human beings are nomads whose only real baggage is their genes. Eduardo Kac has capitalized on the
transgenics craze and come up with a high-sounding rationale of the chromosomal manipulations he
thinks should be allowed in the name of artistic freedom, but his fanciful justifications are no substitute
for a systematic artistic and medical study of the transformational effects of electromagnetic waves on
genes.34

Few people express much concern about the electromagnetic effects of radio and television transmitters
(that bristle atop skyscrapers, the Eiffel Tower, and our own Mount Royal ...), cell phone relay stations or
high-voltage transmission lines, but the evidence of increasingly detailed studies suggests that they are
not as harmless as we are told.35 As our cities of the 21st century begin to realize that they are enveloping
themselves in an electromagnetic fog, people are rightly wondering what the affects on human beings will
be. The first concerns are about health. Radioactivity, lest we forget, was highly fashionable in the 1920s
and 30s, and European spas (especially in Hungary and in France's Massif Central) touted the radioactive
and otherwise therapeutic properties of their mineral waters … Within a mere twenty years, the
radioactivity of atom bombs had become the main threat to the existence of the world's great cities.
Today, there are electromagnetic bombs (e-bombs) in the arsenals of the world's most powerful militaries,
but even the experts do not agree on what the effects of using them would be. Science is threatening the
continuity of life the arts have long championed. And the battlefield is the metropolis.

Scraping the sky to extract lightning

Towers, obelisks, skyscrapers.... the phallic skylines of our cities invite us to congregate in a dazzling
deluge of lights, only to bitterly regret having succumbed to the attraction (Chaplin's City Lights).
Magnetism connects people in a communion with objects, some lasting, many ephemeral.

It is because of the cyclic variations of intensity underlying the rhythms of human society that the search
for the origin is so disappointing. No sooner has the search yielded something than we must be saved by
new myth that more pleasingly covers up the truth. The myth of the body is triumphant in the images
beamed at us from all sides by TV and movie screens. Technology has seized upon the body and is hard
at work on the nec plus ultra of aesthetics, an electronic envelope, computerized clothing for digitalized
skin. Marketing magicians treat us to glimpses of the magic electromagnetic clothes and optical jewellery
promise to infuse technofashion. The clothing of the electromagnetic city will act as a protective shield
and inform the wearer of unwanted infraconscious incursions so that they can blocked. Textile design will
play a pivotal role in social relations.

Dress in the 21st century will be electromagnetic in a world that will rely heavily on the media arts.
Electro-tech will be as omnipresent in fashion, everyday life and the globalized urban bodyscape as
cowboys' jeans in the old Wild West. The process began when young people by the millions adopted the
Walkman as a badge of distinction. Today, no urban kit is complete without advanced-optics glasses,
high-tech watches and a basic assortment of electronic accessories. The sight of people talking on
handsfree cell phones and using interactive interfaces has legitimized the idea of conversing with
electronic partners. Animism is back.

How can the media arts express this new way of seeing the human body as indissociable from life
produced by women (they are still the necessary intermediaries) so as to define a binary humanity that
permeates in all artistic representations and invites us to revisit and survey the body, should its dissolution
be imminent?

34
Robert O. Becker and Selden Gary, The Body Electric, William Morrow, New York, 1985. Becker uses examples like the
jellyfish and the salamander to show that regeneration is a process of electromagnetic reconstitution of life.
35
Computers outrank cell phones as the main constant emitters of electromagnetic waves in our urban societies, along with
systems like Bluetooth (from the Swedish manufacturer Ericsson) and 802.11b, a or g (which weren't lucky enough to have
imaginative engineers steeped in Scandinavian folklore to give them more literary names).
Both males and females know that their reproductive period is limited in time. But most women are
defined by whether or not they have children, and this induces a sense of duality of being (myself and my
child) that inspires the protectiveness of the young which is intuitively at the root of human relations.
Protectiveness is on a very slippery slope, because some day, somehow, science will trip it up. In the
beginning, there will be cloning and artificial wombs. The ex nihilo creation of life is a little farther down
the road. But once we have embarked on the derivative production of anonymous cells of human beings
in search of recognition, the issues relating to electromagnetic identification will take on a significance
that far exceeds anything we have seen so far.

The energy and chemistry of emotions

Chemistry has defined the material contours of the electronic relations between the atoms of organic
molecules, but it yet to understand the physical mechanism whereby matter passes from the inanimate
world to the world of the living. Physics has given us the still mysterious technical ability to resuscitate
life by applying electrical shocks to a body from which all vital signs have disappeared. For two whole
centuries, electricity has applied been pragmatically in medicine without any structured scientific
framework, much as the steam engine was created and put to use decades before the study of the
conservation of energy provided a rational scientific explanation of how it worked.

In fact, Carnot's breakthrough in the mathematical understanding of the laws of entropy36 directly inspired
Claude Shannon's ground-breaking theories of information, of which the computer was the first practical
application. The first wave of computers were based on a mechanical model taken to extraordinary
heights by digital technology. The computers in today's research labs are based on concepts of spin
moments and quantum theory that are much closer to magnetic vitalism. The acceptance of non-Judeo-
Christian religions (such as those of India and China) is opening scientific minds to principles of
transformation that braid universal strings with time, space and energy. Hospitals have opted for
chemistry to treat the ills of the mind, but the therapeutic use of electricity invented by Charcot, and
subsequently discredited because of the abuse of electro-shocks, is returning to psychiatric practice in the
alternative form of biofeedback.

The Puritan science of Newton and the Royal Society37 sought to sanitize the world of the body and its
humours by subscribing to an ironclad mechanical model of the machine as the destiny of humanity. The
arts of the Baroque and Romantic periods preferred to enriched human life by celebrating sensations as a
source of happiness. And the more bodily the sensations the better: smell, touch, taste, all of the intimate
vibrations that find in music a most agreeable way of defining the distant waves of light that excite a
sense so important to scientists - sight. Once sight had been pared down to more reasonable proportions
with due consideration for the optical illusions (Hering, Zöllner, Poggendorf or Müller) that informed the
work of Escher or trompe l'œil school in European painting, the dream analysis Freud so persuasively
imposed at the end of the Symbolist period brought this extraverted faculty back into a body newly self-
assured and ripe for the charms of the likes of Dali.

The assured and reassured body of our Modern Times has traded its monologue with a life-giving Nature
indifferent to its comings and goings for a user-friendly dialogue with always-on, always-observant
machines that are beginning to be privy to our most intimate thoughts. In their urban paranoia, the
financial conglomerates have ordered systems that read the electromagnetic states of the body and deduce
styles or behaviours. Artists have imagined ways to connect these detectors of dreams (songes) or lies
(mensonges) to less utilitarian devices that produce sounds and images using amplified body waves. The

36
Sadi Carnot, Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu et sur les machines propres à développer cette puissance (1824).
37
Merton, Robert King, Sociology of Science, University of Chicago Press. 1985.
belief in the existence of body waves is as old as magic, according to Marcel Mauss,38 who was a keen
observer radio and television as they emerged in apparent contradiction of the Cartesian notion that
remote action was impossible.

At the dawn of the 21st century, the body and its the skin are central to the changing relationships between
art and electromagnetism. The clothes we are wearing today are dominated by the fashion of nostalgia
and an archaic needle-and-thread industry; they will be completely transformed by the demands of an
entertainment society and massive military investments in computerized combat gear.

Conclusion

Following the lead of Nikola Tesla,39 whose body was hypersensitive to electromagnetic waves, we can
now see that our Hertzian oscillators have been means of communicating over distances that our own
bodies could perform on their own with the right training. Puritan science imbued human knowledge with
a mistrust that precluded the study of such phenomena as a matter of principle, and ultimately preferred
the kind of knowledge that exterminates bodies. E.P. Thompson40 was right to think that the ultimate
purpose of science-enabled industrial capitalism is to replace all bodies with machines, which John U.
Nef41 sees as the primary source of the progress of modern techno-science.

In The Social Creation of Nature, Neil Evernden 42 shows that the project of replacing people with
machines, so central to the Italian Renaissance, distinguishes human subjects, for the purposes of social
control, from the basely objective rest of the world. This devaluation of the object, which imposes
masculine authority on life, resulted in a dualist imagery in which geometry is the point of contact
between the purity of concepts and the universe of deceptive sensations. The early 21st century desire to
mathematically recreate an animated computer image of the human body, a sort of empty shell that only
responds to remote viewing, flows logically from a universe that has decided to bestow on machines the
role of recreators of the world, a world inspired, according to Bernhild Boie43 by empty ideas borrowed
from the arsenal of substitutes of the real thing.

As the attention paid to the question of the origin of life today diminishes, more and more intellectual
resources are being poured into maintaining the barrier between humans and the rest of the living world.
From this point of view, the relations between sciences and the arts have remained unchanged since the
end of the 18th century, when Galvani and Volta made their first discoveries about electromagnetism in
the human body.44 Every time electromagnetism finds a way to unify the flows of vital energy, a way to
keep them apart has to be sought and found. Yet we live in the era of the electroencephalogram. And what
indeed are we to make of the resemblances between humans and cats?

The waves of electromagnetism won the hearts of the Romantics thanks to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
(1818), a remarkably imaginative portrayal of the life-giving powers of electric shocks on inanimate
matter. All progress in medicine can be ascribed to electromagnetism up until the discoveries of Pasteur,
who made biology an independent science of the living cell.

38
Mauss, M. and Hubert, H.. "Esquisse d'une théorie générale de la magie" (1902) in Sociologie et anthropologie. Paris, P.U.F.,
1950.
39
Tesla, Nikola, My inventions (1919), Skolska Knjiga, Zagreb, 1977.
40
Thompson, E.P. (1982a). Notes on exterminism, the last stage of civilization, Zero Option, London, Merlin, 1982.
41
Nef, John, U, Western civilization since the Renaissance; peace, war, industry, and the arts, New York, Harper & Row,1963.
42
Evernden, Neil, The Social Creation of Nature, John Hopkins University, 1992.
43
Boie, Bernhild, L'homme et ses simulacres, José Corti, Paris, 1979.
44
Segré, Emilio. From Falling Bodies to Radio Waves: Classical Physicists and their Discoveries. New York: W. H. Freeman,
1984. and Meyer, Herbert W. A History of Electricity and Magnetism, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1971.
It took until the end of the 19th century for electromagnetism to shake up societies the world over with the
generalization of lighting and the telegraph, and the emergence of radio. The central theme of the world
expositions of the period, especially the Chicago Exposition, was the nexus of the arts, progress and
electromagnetism. After the momentum was broken by World War I, the theme reasserted itself, though
less forcefully, at the 1937 Paris Exposition (Dufy's La Fée Électricité). William Crookes' spiritism
opened the door to strange artistic experiments with the X-rays and bottles of plasma that would later
become the omnipresent neon lights of urban advertising "immortalized" by the photographer William
Klein.

Russia has been particularly fertile in electromagnetic inventions. As a great Eurasian society, Russia was
in the best position to absorb ideas from China and India and present them to the Christian world in a
language in which Orthodox mysticism gradually gave way to scientific thought. Russia is the birthplace
of the great universalist conceptions of electromagnetism in the Western world. At the same time, Russian
culture rejected Asian methods based on unchanging lineages and incorporated ideas from its founding
Nordic tribes (the Rus from Scandinavia). The idea that electromagnetism is a cosmic force that
permeates all living organisms has been continuously present from Tsarist Russia to the USSR and the
Russian Republic of today.

Leon Theremin, who invented the first electromagnetic musical instruments in Saint Petersburg, had close
contacts with Russia's great theoretical physicists. The Russians' work on the high frequency waves led to
the invention of the Tokamak, an electromagnetic chamber capable of confining a thermonuclear reaction.
Music and acousmatic lasers are another example of convergence. Russian research on electromagnetism
has frequently combined engineers and scientists, and many artists, including Theremin, were involved in
the Soviet war effort. Few were allowed to devote themselves exclusively to the arts.

As a result, the USSR was able to draw the United States into a new electromagnetic arms race. Unlike
atomic weapons, which by their nature preclude any "victory" other than mutually assured destruction
(MAD), electromagnetic weapons are only supposed to target living organisms and electronic systems.
Russia's strength in electromagnetism is suggestive of a style of human development quite different from
the petroleum-based model. Magnetohydrodynamics, the science of plasmas in magnetic fields, was very
much in the spotlight in the 1960s and 70s, when work was done on a range of fluids from water to
molten metals. The magnetic properties of fluids are essential to life and to certain forms of artistic
expression. For a time, magnetohydrodynamics was seen as an alternative to nuclear energy, but it is so
infinitely more complex from the standpoint of physical engineering that research can only continue
under the aegis of a global consortium around the Tokamak ITER project proposed by the USSR 20 years
ago; the European site in Cadarache (Provence) is one of the more likely candidates, along with
Clarington in Ontario. A whole culture of high-energy electromagnetics (fields of several tens of teslas)
will emerge over the next ten years, with unpredictable consequences. A record field of 58 teslas was
produced in 2002 for 20 one-thousands of a second at the Intense Magnetic Fields Laboratory of Nobel
Prize-winner Louis Néel in Grenoble. This research is being applied in transportation (German MAGLEV
levitation train links are being built between Hamburg and Berlin and in China) and in the magnetic
resonance imaging systems that hospitals used to produce kinetic images of internal organs by causing
water molecules to vibrate.

Electromagnetic art will benefit from these power gains, just as sound reproduction gained from the use
of neodymium magnets in premium-quality loudspeakers. One benefit will come from a key property of
high-energy electromagnetism: the neutralization of gravity. As far back as 1959, the artist Takis created
a Telesculpture consisting of three cones suspended in a magnetic field. More recently, Thomas Shannon
has been one of the most active "magnetic" artists. Magnetic levitation is an integral part of works such as
Past, Present, Future (1986). Also in 1986, the Brazilian artist Mario Ramiro created Zero Gravity. In
addition to magnetism, electrostatic and acoustic energy can also be used to produce levitational effects.

Electromagnetic art will also benefit from advances in high-energy electromagnetism and the creation of
permanent magnets. Our changing physiological, hence intellectual, relationship with electromagnetic
fields will give rise to a new definition of thought in terms quite different from those we are currently
borrowing from computers. In counter-distinction to a dominant historical trend that sees a digital society
producing digital art, we can already see that digital sampling techniques are exhausting their potential
and that the technological landscape is being reshaped by new discoveries. Today's digital techniques
serve first and foremost to transmit information more efficiently thanks to data compression, and they
play a major role in the refinement of social control. In the future, when greater bandwidth has lessened
the importance of compression, it will become apparent see that binary digital techniques were
transitional45 and that the analog mode of electromagnetic and sensory apprehension of the world is the
only stable scientific and artistic structure for human beings.

The undulatory relations between art and electromagnetism – takes as its starting point a discovery
Oerstedt made in 1820 thanks to an inspiration from Schelling. Tim Clark summarizes Schelling's point
of view on the subject of education as follows: "It is at the very beginning of their university career that
young students first comes into contact with the world of science. The more taste and inclination they
have for science, the more likely it is said that this world will strike them as confused mass ... as a vast
ocean upon which they are launched without star and compass ... most student when they concentrate on
mastering a special science, are left without guidance ... rather than expend their power struggling for
insight into the living whole of knowledge, they confine themselves narrowly to some one specialty".46
Clark's purpose in invoking Schelling's critique is to show that the concept of discipline has been emptied
of its substance because the general study of the world has given way to contiguous departments of
knowledge unrelated to each other by any order of ascending significance or learning progression. The
evanescence of general culture, which is now a common fog as opposed to a shared clarity, has become
an impediment to the very advancement of knowledge.

Through this symposium, whose starting point is a discovery of Oersted thanks to the ideas of Schelling
the generalist, within the framework of his teaching and in dialogue with the international community of
his time, we hope to have engaged in a concrete exercise of interdisciplinarity in which artists and social
scientists join forces with "hard" scientists and engineers in the search for common ways to freely express
the possibility of a conscious society capable of progressing from within.

45
The return to simple physics concepts like vibrations and waves shows how outrageously the media industry has played up one
technical aspect, the digital sampling of electromagnetic waves. One has only to read a basic explanation of periodic movements
(sinusoidal movements in Cartesian terms) such as Paul French's Vibrations and Waves, MIT Press, 1970 to realize the extent to
which we disagree with the current interpretation of computer-related cultural changes. Natural vibration is at the heart of
physics, which invented the concept of the wave to measure it. French starts his book with an analogy between the vibration of
the heart and the vibration of the universe.
46
Tim Clark, "Libri IX Disciplinarium, Disciplina, and Disciplinary Research: a Brief History of the Antinomy of (human)
History, the Critique of Limitation, and Interdisciplinary Studies", in Lynn Hughes and Marie Josée Lafortune, Penser
l'indiscipline, Optica, Montreal, 2001, p 72-85.