Radiation and Telecom: Émission

Émission” refers to both radiation and broadcast in the word’s French usage, identifying an important relation between electromagnetic frequency radiations and new technologies, especially communications technologies, in our world now.

The title frames a set of critical fictions based on current research, speculations on future convergences between EMF radiations of different sorts, public health, and the built environment. These scenarios look at the air constructed and mediated by architecture as highly saturated with invisible elements in dynamic play with our bodies.

First presented as an installation in a Modernist villa that once housed a doctor’s office, posters and objects for consultation imagined where we are going in the next 25 years. Each poster described a possible scenario involving health, law, materiality and modernist culture. These narratives have specific places and dates that corresponds with real global changes documented in research, with references to the sources. The didactic posters take form as one might find at the doctor, with an associated anatomical model or instrument from these speculative futures. In this way, architectural, urban and global development scenarios are explained through the intensive mix of influences that are distant results of Modernist ideas.

Project Team:
Jordan Geiger, Adam Laskowitz, Daniel Barry

Commissioned by “Diep Biennial” International Arts Festival and funded by the Ministry of Culture of France and the FRAC, Normandy.

R(ad)io Therapy
Émission / Year 2019

The early twenty-first century’s trends in lifestyle medicine and medical tourism (lasiks in Bangkok, anyone?) gets a further turn as cancer patients give new meaning to “getting a Brazilian.”

Rio de Janeiro’s resorts have cleaned up safety issues around kidnapping of the wealthy, and their use of new self-administered radiology tools around highly controlled doses of spot-therapy for cervical cancers.

These cancers occupy a strange place in medicine, as their increase in occurrence is unexplained and yet they are not met with popular alarm since treatments have drastically cut their life threat.

Sources

Medical Tourism: Crossing Borders to Access Health Care
bioethics.georgetown.edu/publications/scopenotes/sn47.pdf

Radiation and Cancer
cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/othercarcinogens/medicaltreatments/radiation-exposure-and-cancer

Meridian Park
Émission / Year 2020

Jordan emerges as the middle east’s nexus of modern democracy and new technological innovation under Queen Dowager Noor, with the side effect of new consumer electronic usage and a movement for digital landscape urbanist interventions in the nation’s capital.

Amman therefore establishes an elevation clear-zone, a parks district between 800-830 meters above sea level: Meridian Park.

The park is protected from wireless emissions and intended for day-today recreational use, pulmonary health and for more general testing against dangerous rads, this cuts an invisible band across the city’s 21 hills and valleys where wireless signal would usually drop off anyway in the past. Now, it serves as a kind of haptic elevational mapping tool: if your radio or phone signal drops as you walk or drive up a street, you have entered the Meridian. Also, the Meridian is an empirical device: since it has no EMF in the lower bandwidth, it leaves testing for any leakage from nuclear power facilities in Asia to be clearly identified if it enters the city’s atmosphere.

The Meridian is constructed with disruption nets around the city that sparkle with flashing OLEDs as they detect and cancel signal, much like blue-light flyzappers. These nets are made from recycled silicon and aluminum detritus of the tech industry to the south and in neighboring Israel.

Sources

World Health Organization on Cellphone Radiation and Cancer: “Possibly Carcinogenic” – May 2011
well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/cellphone-radiation-may-cause-cancer-advisory-panel-says

ITU (International Telecommunication Union) founded in 1934, it regulates all international frequency allocation, orbital positions, parameters of satellites, frequency coordination, and notification/registration. Approved Frequency Ranges: 806-960MHz, 1710-2025MHz, 2110-2220MHz, 2500-2690MHz

Cell Phone Towers and Cancer
cancer.org/Cancer/CancerCauses/OtherCarcinogens/AtHome/cellular-phone-towers

Mogadishu Siesta
Émission / Year 2023

After mass availability of TCR (tooth chip radio), technologies and infrastructure advance for widespread TCC (tooth chip communications).

People are not only connected but the connection is physically implanted on the body, thus exponentially increasing stress levels. 6 years after mass implantation, the Somali Parliament declares a 1-hour relaxation period to support the practice of sieste that was cultivated during Italian colonial rule.

This allows wireless communications to be run by the government for that hour, transmitting synchronized meditative aural and physical rhythms over the air throughout Mogadishu.

Sources

electronics.howstuffworks.com/cellphone-implant.htm

Bone Induction Earphones Channel Sound Into Your Skull
switched.com/2008/09/28/bone-induction-earphones/

Excuse Me, Is Your Tooth Ringing?
wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2002/06/53302

Infertility Cycling
Émission / Year 2030

In 2020, Holland’s efforts to build new dykes for stemming rising sea levels are supplemented by an unexpected development in the form of Passive Population Reduction.

Early 21st century cell phones antennas, long confirmed to emit wavelengths harmful to male fertility, are reintroduced to market. Government subsidies have for decades funded the retrofitting of urban dwellers houses with EMF-blocking “(H) airnet” roof tiles, and the canals of Amsterdam are regularly imbibed with copper particles that heighten conductivity in the waters, thereby drawing stray EMF from the air, and then promote algae growth once out to sea.

Together, these invert the objectivity of space as proposed by Gerrit Rietveld and contemporaries, subjecting bodies selectively while maintaining open domestic spaces of sex for a new society of willfully infertile men.

Sources

Cell Phone Use and Infertility:
thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-06-02/do-cell-phones-cause-infertility/full/#

EMF Blocking Fabrics
lessemf.com/fabric.html

Ink Defense
Émission / Year 2031

Conductive ink tattooing has presented the artistic practice with a new upscale market.

Recent trends have shown that many individuals are now readily shaving their heads in order to have a protective shell tattooed around their skull as a preventative measure against the biological risks associated with cell phones. As a continuous conductive surface, the tattoo redirects electromagnetic fields around the brain, limiting the potential for the penetration of microwave radiation through the blood-brain-barrier. Some opt for full body murals, a medical-ornamental status symbol. Gradually infants start to be given full body tattoos, a sort of latter-day innoculation, as a lifelong EMF shield.

This gives rise to “Clean” Camp Colonies, summer camps for pre-teens where activities like Archery, Horseback Riding and Kayaking are reintroduced in an EMF-free zone that hosts kid on an architectural and landscape of equal ground: no augmented reality, no GPS, no assisted communications. Children in the American Northeast develop muscle tone, tans and basic hunter-gatherer skills as a break from the urban setting of their school year lives.

Sources

How to make conductive ink
ehow.com/how_5031497_makeconductive-ink.html

Mobile Phones and Cognition: The rise of mobile devices has initiated many studies into cell phone EMFs as a series of preventative measures to avoid biological risks.
web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/moral-control-0330.html
journals.lww.com/neuroreport/Abstract/2000/03200/Effects_of_electromagnetic_field_emitted_by.21.aspx

The God Helmet: Other researchers have developed similar prosthetics such as ‘the God helmet’ which allows people to experience spiritually phenomenological events through similar electromagnetic coils to that of Tesla. It is a pretty famous project, so there is a lot of documentation on it. Here is the wiki and a Science channel video narrated by the one, the only, Morgan Freeman.
youtube.com/embed/nN3ggRgY7Ac
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet

Wisdom Channel
Émission / Year 2035

Small cities along the English Channel such as Dieppe and Dover had been suffering economically for decades at the erosion of tourism and maritime industry, as warmer climes like Mallorca won out on the former and tax policy favored faraway nations in Asia for the latter. As early 21st century population migrations saw the Earth’s population tip over 50% urban for the first time in history, so too came an unprecedented concentration of urban airs saturated with all spectra of electromagnetic field radiation.

At this time, cities like Dieppe saw an unexpected revival as a new form of spa landscape and the site of a new European Union Research Zone. Sea water had long been known to have high electrical conductivity due to its salinity, but the particular spray found around these cities on the channel—with their high chalk cliffs — were discovered to dissipate dangerous wavelengths.

More provocatively, fishermen and locals who had spent their lives in contact with the waters had developed resistance in their very bloodstream to ambient EMF, yielding an unusually long lifespan up and down the channel. The entire zone was cordoned off by the EU in 2022 to and major landscaping projects, and huge swaths of lands seized under Eminent Domain toward the construction of a constellation of universities under the protective mists. Between them, wealthy urbanites come for months on end to heal in the seaspray.

Sources

Residents living next to a phone mast vs. the mobile phone company Bouygues Telecom

French mobile operator Bouyges Telecom was 4 sentenced in February to remove a mobile mast in Charbonnieres, France. The neighbors said they had health problems of the mast.

Court sentence translated into English: next-up.org/pdf/France_Versailles_Court_Of_Appeal_Judgement_Local_Living_Phone_Masts_Against_Compagny_Bouygues_Telecom_04_02_2009.pdf

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity_and_conductivity#cite_note-15