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Title
Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society
Description
The Optical Telegraph
Smoke signals, drum telegraphs, and the marathon runner are all all examples of man’s effort to conquer the tyranny of distance. However, the first truly successful solution to the problem of rapidly transmitting language across space was the Frenchman Claude Chappe’s optical telegraph. His chain of stone towers, topped by 10-ft. poles and 14-ft. pivoting cross members and spaced as far apart as the eye could see, was first demonstrated to the public in March of 1791 on the Champs Elysees. Chappe created a language of 9,999 words, each represented by a different position of the arms. When operated by well-trained optical telegraphers, the system was extraordinarily quick. Messages could be transmitted 150 miles in two minutes. Eventually the French military saw the value of Chappe’s invention, and lines of his towers were built out from Paris to Dunkirk and Strasbourg. Within a decade, a network of optical telegraph lines crisscrossed the nation. When Napoleon seized power in 1799, he used the optical telegraph to dispatch the message, “Paris is quiet and the good citizens are content.”
Seeing with Sound
The vOICe is an invention to aid the blind that we feel confident Father Kircher would have appreciated. It consists of a video camera embedded in a pair of sunglasses, a pair of headphones, and a backpack laptop that translates the visual information before the user’s eyes into auditory information played through his ears, inducing what we can only imagine must be an extraordinary form of artificial synesthesia. Objects on the left are sent to the left ear, objects on the right to the right ear. Brightness translates into volume and pitch provides information about what’s up and down. With practice, seeing becomes hearing. Landscapes become soundscapes.
Dreams and Nightmares of the African Astronauts
Italian artist Marco Boggio Sella travelled to Burkina Faso in search of people who had never heard about the moon landing. He carried with him photographs of the event and textbooks on astronomy. After explaining this most wondrous of milestones to the benighted natives, he commissioned local artisans to create works inspired by their new-found knowledge of space travel. Their sculptures and fabric pieces, carried out in traditional materials but depicting their fantasies about space exploration, are on display at John Connelly Presents in New York City, through June 17.
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