Strange Transmissions: Channeling the Spirits in the Spectrum
by Kathleen Quillian
Broadcast: 1. to transmit by radio or television 2. to make known over
a wide area; 3. to sow (seed) over a wide area, especially by hand.
On the night of October 30, 1938, the United States experienced an alien
invasion. A radio broadcaster, cutting short a musical performance, described
what appeared to be a meteor which had just fallen from the sky and crashed
into the Earth causing a huge crater in the ground near Grover Mill, New
Jersey. From this crater emerged a tentacled creature that, over a period
of time, killed scores of people with a deadly heatray. This performance,
an adaptation of H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds," executed by
Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air, caused a fair amount of
panic to a nation who was already shaken by one world war and anxious about
the prospect of entering into another one, just looming on the horizon.
Fast forward a decade to the end of WWII and the introduction of the television
set as a standard household commodity. By 1950, over 8 million households
in America owned a television set and 107 stations were broadcasting around
the country. The American entertainment industry, recognizing the significance
of this new,
popular medium, rapidly shifted allegiance from Hollywood film
to television broadcast, as box office attendance decreased and the amount
of television set sales increased. These early years of postwar prosperity
mixed with the paranoia of Communist invasion, heightened by the introduction
of television into American life, made for a culturally-fertile time in
history which we can now see in hindsight fluctuating somewhere between
gravely imminent and nearly absurd. Along with regular variety and sit-com
shows, Americans, during the early years of television broadcast, were also
privy to the bone-chilling images of the first nuclear bomb testings—a
series of events which served mostly to increase the anxiety of already-communist-fearing
Americans. During this time also, Americans were treated to several years
of televised courtroom spectacles, better known as the hearings of the House
Committee on Un-American Activities and the Senator McCarthy-led Senate
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. It was a common belief of this
jittery government that communists, in their attempt to overtake the U.S.
would do so subversively by infiltrating the entertainment industry and
broadcasting secret, or not-so-secret messages over the airwaves, straight
into the homes of unsuspecting citizens. It was in the country's best interest,
they believed, to nip this problem in the bud and attempt to purge the entertainment
industry of such menacing figures as Lucille Ball, Artie Shaw, Ayn Rand,
Humphrey Bogart, Elia Kazan and a list of other artists and entertainers
who had, or were believed to have had a brush with communism in their past.
This angst-ridden and checkered past has supplied popular culture with
a steady stream of otherworldly spirits which continue to traverse the universe
from far-away places to prey upon model citizens. Along with a myriad of
patriotic and wholesome American
films and television shows to emerge from
the 1950s are a slew of now-classic sci-fi films in which the US is visited
by alien life-forms of all kinds—films such as "The Day the Earth
Stood Still" (1951), "Invaders From Mars" (1953), "It
Came From Outer Space" (1953) and "Them!" (1954) among many,
many others. For a country susceptible to invasion, paranoia-induced visions
produced threats ranging from biologically to politically to dogmatically
alien—or all of the above, such as in the movie "Red Planet Mars"
(1952) which hashed out a narrative pitting Communism against Democracy
through a Christian lens, flavored with a sci-fi twist. In this film, a
husband and wife scientist team in southern California believes they have
made contact with the planet Mars by broadcasting the numeral translation
for pi, only to find out later that these broadcasts had been intercepted
by a Communist-financed, former Nazi criminal from somewhere in the nether-regions
of Russia. Over a period of time the messages received from Mars wreak havoc
on the world when it is revealed that Martian life spans are 3 times that
of Earthlings and that their civilization has advanced well beyond the need
for natural fuel sources. In the tense final moments when "good"
confronts "evil" in the laboratory, God does manage to broadcast
an unexpected message through the electromagnetic spectrum only to be cut
short by the greedy Communist Earthling who announces that he would rather
rule the underworld than remain a servant in Heaven. The original episode
of the sci-fi television series "The Outer Limits" (1963) portrayed
a television broadcast engineer in Los Feliz, CA, as he picks up a three
dimensional signal of an electromagnetic creature from "the edge of
the constellation Pegasus." This creature gets sucked through the broadcast
signal and wreaks havoc on the town by emitting radiation which became way
too overbearing for the terrestrial environment and then
eventually vanishes
back into the ether from whence it came—but not before giving the townsfolk
a short speech about the perils of hate, fear and war. Most people are familiar
with recent examples of otherworldly life forms traversing broadcast dimensions,
like the spirits that beckon to little Carol Anne in "Poltergeist"
(1982), the broadcast experiments that warp cable TV producer Max Renn's
mind in "Videodrome" (1983) and the ghost of the young girl who
relentlessly reminds the world of her murder in "Ringu" (1998)—as
well as the American remake, "The Ring" (2002). Sometimes the
alien forms are conjured by big corporations, like in the movie "Halloween
III" (1982), which portrayed a corrupt corporation whose interest was
for some reason to make children's heads explode when their mask product
was activated by a magical Halloween night broadcast. The "Max Headroom"
television series in the mid-1980s was kicked off by an episode in which
a cutting edge, subversive advertising scheme ("blipverts") developed
by a child prodigy for television broadcast station Network 23 was so intense
that it overstimulated the latent energy stored up in the bodies of "perpetual
viewers" and made them....also explode. These examples, only a few
of their kind, demonstrate the grisly fascination people tend to have with
technology and alien invasion, but they also serve to remind us of the real
powers behind broadcast media.
At the end of the second millennium, two Bay Area media archeologists,
writer Erik Davis and filmmaker Craig Baldwin, contributed two seminal works
to the sci-fi repository of the cultural canon. In their respective contributions,
Davis and Baldwin demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between energy,
spirit and communication and how humans shape these, according to their
needs, through technology. Davis' ongoing interests in alternative spirituality
and technology led him to write the monumental
Techgnosis (1998)—an extremely
vibrant and penetrating anthology on the cultural history of technology
and communication, from early myth to contemporary data transmissions. Examining
the inventory of tools and techniques over the ages, from moon bones to
alchemy to Artificial Intelligence, Davis reveals a continual fascination
of societies to channel energy into the service of giving shape to the unknown.
Putting the Internet in context of this long and colorful history, we find
that it is not so new or unique, but rather a new forum through which to
conjure and shape messages and meanings—much in the way that early "mediums,"
from ancient alchemists to 19th century Spiritualists, were able to do through
their various methods. In 1999, Craig Baldwin followed this up with the
release of his sci-fi montage film "Spectres of the Spectrum"
which shapes some of these same ideas into a more poignant commentary on
the abuse of power attributed to broadcast communications through the ages.
Baldwin reminds us, through appropriated and simulated footage, that progress
does not always weigh even on all sides of the cultural equation.
In the interest of cultivating progressive communication, artists, over
the years, have devised myriad methods to subvert cultural paradigms and
stunt the growth of mega-merger palimpsests. Two of the more time-honored
methods are through montage and intervention. In the spirit of ancient wizardry,
these methods take on a heightened effect when posited through technological
channels. The method of using montage, as Baldwin does in "Spectres
of the Spectrum," involves borrowing certain elements of culture from
their original source, rearranging them and re-animating them to magnify
and critique cultural tropes. Another method for artists engaging in critical
discourse is to insert oneself and/or one's work directly into the media
landscape in order to dislocate and subvert accepted
habits or beliefs.
On Thanksgiving Day 1994 Bay Area performance artists Guillermo Gomez-Peña
and Roberto Sifuentes staged "Naftaztec: Pirate Cyber TV for A.D. 2000"—
a retro-futuristic, cross-cultural video performance-intervention broadcast
nationally on satellite television. Posing as cyber banditos, this video
performance was inserted into the media landscape as a pirate intervention,
in which the artists confronted viewers with radical views on Mexican, American
and cross-cultural identities using a cache of cultural references and resources.
Speaking in a mixture of languages and dressed in hybrid Aztec/Mariachi/Chicano
costume, Gomez-Peña and Sifuentes took phone calls from viewers, demonstrated
a "Chicano Virtual Reality machine", and took live reports via
picturephone throughout the fast-paced, MTV-style 90 minute program. The
alien invasion this time was in the form of a so-called "illegal alien"
invasion which replaced the regularly-scheduled broadcast material with
an alternative mythical reality using cultural identity as the language
and technology as the critical lens. In a more subtle way, video artist
Stan Douglas purchased time in 1992 on late night television in Vancouver,
Canada to air his "Monodramas"—a set of short, self-contained
dramas in which nothing in particular happens. Directly inspired by the
work of the ultimate existential writer Samuel Beckett, these highly calculated,
choreographed segments of drama mixed with a certain amount of dry humor
were designed to throw out of whack, if only for a moment, what television
scholars call the "flow" of standard corporate-model television
broadcasting. Each segment, when surreptitiously placed in the same space
as commercial advertisements, gave one pause to think—about the kinds of
things viewers subject themselves to—or maybe rather what they are missing—on
a daily basis, simply by turning on the television set.
It is interesting to note and somewhat of a compelling exercise to frame
the concept of broadcasting in terms of its original agricultural context.
Philo T. Farnsworth, better known through the annals of history as the inventor
of the cathode ray tube and electronic television, came up with the idea
in 1921 on a farm in Idaho as he plowed the field back and forth and back
again. This continuous action of drawing lines in the dirt across the field
inspired the idea in Farnsworth's imagination of what is now known as the
"raster scan" in which the electronic beam moves back and forth
across the monitor, ultimately creating the images that we see on our television
screen. Through an unfortunate twist of fate, it seems we have become estranged
from the initial concept of broadcasting as a life-giving form as we succumb
to the life-sucking force of commercial television, through which it has
mutated over the years. While television viewers become activated over "reality
TV" shows—anxiously awaiting to find out who is going to eat how many
bugs or who is going to get dumped from the dating pool—commercial advertisers,
politicians and the military continue to find new ways of using the tools
of broadcast media for their own gainful purposes. Their biggest motive:
money. Their most effective tool: fear. What they already know and continue
to operate by is the fact that power relies not just on force and intimidation,
but perhaps moreso on fear of the unknown. The public, when all they know
is what they are told, comes to rely on the steadfast conviction of their
leaders—a win-win situation for those in charge.
When the Federal Communications Commission was established as an extension
of the United States government in 1934, large parts of the country were
still underserved by limited access to information, leaving broadcast technology
an essential resource to keep the public informed of news and events. Because
of the limited
resources of the electromagnetic spectrum through which information
at the time was solely transmitted, the FCC became the gatekeepers of the
spectrum, regulating who gets to control how much and making sure that the
content of the information was suitable for all listeners. In March 1952
the Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters was enacted by the Television
Board of the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters to
give a certain amount of respectability to the wild and unruly world of
early television broadcasting. Modeled after the Hollywood Production Code
of 1930, the Television Code was essentially a badge of honor adopted by
broadcasters to placate moral guardians, to ward off the threat of federal
censorship, and to ensure a happy relationship with sponsors, who are ultimately
responsible for financing the industry. With licenses granted by the government
to use a public resource and money from corporate sponsors to shape it into
some kind of sought after form, television studios are left with a limited
palette of material to work with—generally that which is without controversy,
in "good taste", for entertainment, or educational purposes—to
keep viewers happy and coming back for more, but so as not to offend any
party who happens to have a stake in the return profit. With the FCC on
the one hand, and multi-billion dollar commercial sponsors on the other,
the arena for commercial broadcasting leaves little room for either progressive
information or experimental use of the medium. Yet somehow, this commercial
model has sustained the system in the US for over half a century. Over the
years, however, we have seen a tremendous amount of change in broadcasting
technology, from the electromagnetic spectrum, to co-axial cable to fiber
optic cable, to satellite TV, wireless communications, "interactive"
TV and the Internet— changing the game at every new watershed along the
way. Where
once there were only limited resources for the transmission of
information, it is now the case that there are too many resources and too
much information going through them. It has gotten to the point where the
FCC is no longer needed to do the job they were originally created to do
and the commercial sector is scrambling to maintain the profitability of
their respective plots of turf as more and more competition rears its ugly
head.
It seems that the time has come when the commercial broadcasting industry
should begin to show signs of crumbling around its fortified foundations.
Now that the Internet has emerged as one of the most popular forms of media,
producers of broadcast media need to decide whether they will embrace the
new medium and all of its turbulent energy, as NBC has done already with
Microsoft, or change their approach to the system altogether. Not surprisingly,
bad habits are hard to break. For while multimedia communication mergers
have left the airwaves a homogenous mass of entertainment, the Internet
appears aimed at becoming one endless virtual strip mall—leaving our scope
of view on the world— both real and cyber—extremely limited and reducing
our interactions to commercial exchange. But in the end, it seems that for
all the rampant merging and consumerist tendencies, the match is not so
well fit between the monsters of commerce and the multidirectional freewill
of the Internet. Thanks to the diehard energy of innovative thinkers and
activists, the Internet still manages to retain much of its mystical charm
and revolutionary spirit. Along with net and computer artists, activists
and independent journalists are finding the Internet an amazingly useful
tool for the advancement of communications. The Internet provides not only
the power of broadcast to transmit information fast and far, but more importantly
the ability to advance democracy through dialogue and participation. For
over a decade
Amy Goodman, host of the media broadcast program, Democracy
Now! has been on the frontlines of the effort, reminding us that a democracy
can only work if every voice is heard and accounted for, or at least has
the potential to be; and that public airwaves are a public resource, not
a commodity to be divvied up for the exclusive use of a select few. Goodman
has spent the last several months touring the US and Europe with her "Unembed
the Media" tour, tirelessly speaking out about the unfortunate and
dangerous trend of US media journalists partaking in daily operations with
the military. This trend, she explains, in effect creates a closed-circuit
communication loop, making the media—whose job it is to ask the difficult
questions and to hold those in power accountable for their actions—the
megaphone for the government. The unofficial fourth branch—the watchdog—collapses
into the three other branches of government so as to become nearly indistinguishable
from the camouflage of military fatigues—building a totally imbalanced
perspective of the world and the people who run it. Joining the ranks in
the battle against the US government and their media minions, the independent
media network Indymedia and political action group MoveOn.org, since the
late 1990s have been daily negotiating the territory between traditional
broadcast media and the Internet by forcing their way through the cracks
left in the media landscape by FCC regulation in order to re-capture the
attention of the public. Relying largely on community support, these independent
journalists and activists round up the information where they can, filter
out the bias, lay down the facts and mobilize the masses into action—in
short, making for a stronger democracy through open access, dialogue and
self-determination.
While it would be easy to say that the Internet is the answer to the double-threat
of government privatization and media
consolidation, this is not necessarily
the case. The economic divide still very much exists in the real world and
is magnified when framed in the context of new media. The Internet may be
theoretically open to anyone, but not everyone has the equipment, the training
or the voice to participate in this so-called Democratic medium. And now
that corporate media has sunk its claws into the virtual frontier, the roads
are beginning to be locked into a familiar pattern—overshadowed by banner
ads, celebrity gossip, and links to online stores or other sponsors within
the commercial network. Public broadcast media is the only other viable
option for voices unheard in mainstream media. But this resource is constantly
under threat as Republicans stand poised to seize ultimate control of the
public mind through covertly-placed fundamentalists in positions of power
in the public broadcast industry. As funding sources slow to a trickle,
public broadcast media will be left to die a slow death while corporate-funded
media grows fat and happy, fed on the banquet of global riches. The boogeyman
is still hovering in the spectrum, though now it looks suspiciously like
an American right-wing radical.
Silence is the most threatening sound—because when there is nothing to
gauge your position by, it is difficult to know where anything begins or
ends. Noise, and lots of it, is the only thing that will make the ghosts,
aliens, and other menacing creatures run howling from the media spectrum
and into the spotlight where we can get a good look at their faces —giving
at least a fleeting moment of knowing who the real enemies are.
Sources:
Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture, Thomas Doherty. Columbia Univ. Press, New York, NY, 2003.
The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers,
and the Media That Love Them, Amy Goodman. Hyperion Books, New York, NY, 2004.
Democracy Now!, http://www.democracynow.org
Federal Communications Commission, http://www.fcc.gov
Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com
MoveOn.org, http://www.moveon.org
Museum of Hoaxes, http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/war_worlds.html
Television History - The First 75 Years, http://www.tvhistory.tv
The New World Border, Guillermo Gomez-Peña. City Lights Books, San Francisco, CA 1996.
Spectres of the Spectrum, Craig Baldwin. Other Cinema DVD.2005 (film originally released 1999).
Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information, Erik Davis. Three Rivers Press, New York, NY, 1998.
Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson, Eds., Duke Univ. Press, Durham, NC, 2004.
Independent interview with Harry Quillian, former legal advisor for Commissioner Anne Jones at the Federal Communications Commission from 1979-83; Senior
Lawyer in the Legal Office of the Federal Communications Commission from 1983-84.
