This research project coincides with the Marconi Foundation's year-long celebration of Marconi’s 1909 Noble Prize in physics. This important international moment offers an occasion to reassess and revisit Marconi’s inventions at the dawn of a new wireless era of the Internet and mobile computing devices. In the past hundred years, we have moved from the presence of analogue-based stationary transmitters and receivers to the use of mobile digital devices – from a broadcasting model predicated on the movement of information from one to many to new modes of communication that are many to many and highly interactive. These reverberations were set into motion with Marconi's single 'click' created by an electromagnetic impulse first received in St John’s, Newfoundland. Today, these same impulses are capable of transmitting sound and moving images in real time from 'terra firma' to satellites circling the earth.

 

It is precisely these reverberations, impulses and interactions that our research team seeks to investigate, interrogate and harness creatively for both exhibitions and academic purposes. For these reasons the project collaborators have chosen to with the metaphoric trajectory dubbed by Marshall McLuhan – the “Marconi Galaxy.”