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Marconi’s Ruins artists: Michael Longford & Robert Prenovault
Vernissage: Thursday, February 10, 4:30 – 6:30 PM |
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The small community of Marconi Towers, located a few kilometers south of Glace Bay in Cape Breton, is home to what remains of the first commercial transatlantic wireless station established by Guglielmo Marconi and the Marconi Company of Canada in 1907. Linked to it’s sister station in Clifden, Ireland the Glace Bay Station was the first in what would eventually become a global communications network and a Canadian landmark in the early history of wireless telegraphy and radio. The station remained in operation to the end of the Second World War, after which the property and buildings were sold to Russell Cunningham. To this day, the site is privately owned by the Cunningham family who still occupy the Station Manager’s home and maintain what is left of the Condenser House, the only original Marconi station structures left in the world today. Through a mix of photography, sculpture, and original artifacts, Longford and Prenovault explore the site, what remains and has been lost of the industrial infrastructure – the condenser house, coal fired generators, towers supporting huge antennae arrays, spark transmitters and banks of vacuum tubes – required to send the pulse of energy translated into the dots and dashes that made up the language invented by Samuel Morse. In its day, the powerful station could be seen and heard for miles around. Today it is silent, hidden from view by the surrounding forest as the remaining structures fall in on themselves slowly deteriorating over time. |
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Artist Biographies Michael Longford is the Associate Dean of Research in the Faculty of Fine Arts at York University. He is a Co-Director of the Mobile Media Lab (MML), which is made up of an interdisciplinary research team exploring wireless communications, rich media content development for mobile technologies, and locative media practices. He is also a co-editor of the recent publication, The Wireless Spectrum: The Politics, Practices and Poetics of Mobile Media (2010), and a co-editor for the Visual Communication Journal published by Sage.
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