In February of 1880, Alexander Graham Bell, alongside his assistant Charles Sumner Tainter, invented the Photophone, a machine that sparked a revolution in communication. The machine allowed for wireless, optical communication of audio over short distances, a feat which had not previously been accomplished. Despite his invention of the telephone only 4 years earlier, Bell considered the Photophone to be his greatest invention.
The Photophone was in many ways a fairly simple invention. On one side, a flexible, parabolic mirror is pointed to angle the sun’s rays to the desired point. The person who wishes to send a message would then stand behind the mirror and speak into it, which would cause its shape to modulate, and become alternately concave and convex. This, in turn, would modulate the light being reflected from the mirror, scattering and refocusing the light beam based on the pressure waves released from the speaker’s voice. These light beams were focused on a Selenium cell, (in later developments a photocell), which would output a metric of the amount of light it received. This Selenium Cell would then be wired to an amplifier or speaker, which reproduced the noise of the initial speaker.
Bell and Tainter were able to construct a rudimentary Photophone in their lab in February of 1880, in which Bell was able to hear Tainter sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and by April created a larger model which transmitted a signal across 79 metres. By June, the pair achieved transmission over 213 metres. The Photophone was critically the first known wireless telephone system, and an important precursor to the field of Fibre Optics. Bell wrote to his father shortly after their first experiment, stating:
‘I have heard articulate speech by sunlight! I have heard a ray of the sun laugh and cough and sing! ...I have been able to hear a shadow and I have even perceived by ear the passage of a cloud across the sun's disk. You are the grandfather of the Photophone and I want to share my delight at my success.’
While it had great potential, the Photophone was initially ineffective at replacing many already existing wireless forms of communication, such as the signal lamp. The advantage the photophone did have over these tools, however, was that it was much harder to intercept. As such, the technology quickly garnered attention from the military, and was developed by German and British forces during the first and second world war. This greatly accelerated the speed of development for the photophone, and by 1935 the German Armed Forces employed infrared photophone communication up to 8.7 miles.
Despite this, improvement and military use was not to be the legacy of the photophone, and the invention is instead best understood as necessary to the invention and widespread adoption of fibre optic communication. This happened as a result of the later discovery that optical fibres could be used to transfer information, alongside the invention of lasers.
Simply To Bang a Drum was an exhibition by Angus Hamilton James (myself) and Finley Highton shown in April of 2024 in the Reid Building at the Glasgow School of Art. The exhibition consisted of a single, collaborative artwork, constructed as a sculptural installation/performance, which produced an ongoing archive of the exhibition as time progressed.
At the centre of this system was a pen plotter (also referred to as a CNC machine), which sat atop two chairs. Below this was an upturned bass drum, which would have small sheets of paper taped to it, which were then used to draw on by the plotter. The mechanical sounds of the pen plotter and the striking of the base drum was picked up by a contact mic inside the drum, which was fed into an oscilloscope. The oscilloscope visualised this noise, alongside the reverberations of the space, into a sound wave. The display of the oscilloscope was configured so that it would display the wave moving from left to right, only ever showing a 2 second window of sound. The Oscilloscope stood on a plinth facing parallel to the plotter and drum, and was faced by 3 cameras which stood in a line. Each camera focused only on the screen of the camera in front of it, and each was set on automatic settings. These cameras fed into a macbook on a second plinth, which was wired to the pen plotter. Every 8 minutes, myself and Finley would sync the production of the next pen plot and the release of a thermal print from the oscilloscope. To do this, we would stand on alternate sides of the system and count down from 3, screenshotting the computer screen of the macbook and pressing print on the oscilloscope at the same time, though sometimes more in sync than other times.
This thermal print would be stuck on the wall, and once the pen plotter was finished with its drawing the drawing would be taken and stuck alongside it, at which point the next drawing would begin. Purely by coincidence, the spacing of our hanging meant that these prints looped around the wall exactly 1 time by the end of the exhibition, and the pen in the pen plotter ran out of ink on the final few prints.
The exhibition was not professional. As we chatted with guests, the 8 minute window frequently got missed, our releases often fell out of sync, the pen plotter smudged, pulled and pushed paper around, camera batteries died and were swiftly replaced, screenshots required prompt coding into vector files (which was sometimes done less gracefully than it needed to be), prints fell from the wall or had to be repositioned, staff of the Reid brought large amounts of furniture into the room unprompted, and eventually the exhibition became inseparable from the tables and chairs at the back of the room covered in tape strips, water bottles, food, exhibition text, our laptops, and other possessions, from which we sat between maintenance of the system, talking with our friends and girlfriends as we all waited in the space for the 3 day run, unable to leave the system alone.
It is hard to argue that ‘Simply to Bang a Drum’ contained a consistent transfer of information in the same way as the photophone. Yet I think of these two systems as incredibly similar. The photophone truly emphasises the simplicity of transforming the relationship of light and sound from phenomena to data carrier. Simply to Bang A Drum was a fragile system, which did not attempt to minimise interference like the photophone had. Friends dipped their heads between the cameras, breaking the chain and allowing their subsequent image to be free from the digital noise of data which polluted all other outputs.
In this context, one may think of the transfer of information instead as a force which actively noises information, layering it with digital detritus (through the buildup of different toolbars and displays) and converting it between data representations, which reduce the exhibition to simplistic and sterile archival material. Part way into our exhibition a visitor stood next to our oscilloscope as we readied to sync the release of the thermal print and the pen plot screenshot, and as we counted down he screamed. But the scream was quickly disassembled by the system, undergoing multiple stages of total transformation. The scream registered across the oscilloscope as a tall sound wave, the screen glowed brighter, the cameras adjusted their ISO, their screens dimmed, and the scream transformed. The scream as much became the soundwave as it did the dimming of the camera screen, the changing of numbers on the camera's display, the echo in the space and the echo's subsequent appearance in the oscilloscope. It is hard to say that any aspect of the exhibition is signal or noise, For Bell, the sound of clouds passing over the sun caught by his invention - despite being likely unintelligible, was not noise but song.
In a similar way the data focused aspects of the system are not only a noising force, and in fact form a technical support for the content of the artwork. As such, data does not become a tool to be intentionally decoded and understood (though it may be), but instead becomes a conduit for meaning which is largely isolated from the data itself. To put it simply, while the presentations of data in these systems may be understood in this context as noise, the variation and presentation of this data can be understood as signal. This signal acts to highlight the relationships of different parts of the exhibition. In many ways, the initial idea that is present in the exhibition (the idea that information is being continuously kept within a loop and transformed over time through this repetition), is almost entirely not present within the artwork. By preempting our release with a countdown from 3, and using an oscilloscope which only showed the past 2 seconds of sound, we ensured that almost all prints only showed the countdown, and the space between numbers was the only element of reverberation.
As such, Simply to Bang a Drum, for us at least, was an odd contradiction, a system which sought to noise and denoise itself until both became at once noise and signal. It was an artwork which continuously distanced or transformed information to be unintelligible, which in turn formed the basis of what we actually wanted from the artwork. Maybe the system that dominated the room and our time in it existed only to distract from the true nature of the exhibition, from the contrast between our desire to be professional and our failure to do so. Looking back, my focus shifts from this system. I think of the two chairs the room happened to contain before the exhibition, our only tools the correct height we could find to prop the pen plotter up on, and I wonder if they are, in fact, all the information which really needed to be conveyed at all.