Diane Bertolo

Net artist Diane Bertolo’s project from 2000, channelUntitled, addresses three revolutionary technologies: the telephone, the radio, and the computer. The opening words of the site sit on a black screen are a quote from Friedrich Kittler: “...the tapping of specters of the spiritistic séances, with their messages from the realm of the dead, appeared quite promptly at the moment of the invention of the Morse alphabet in 1837.” From there we can interact with multiplying ringing telephones, contact spirits through communicating with a medium via the keyboard, or listen to haunted radio frequencies where enigmatically “clicking is futile.” ChannelUntitled uses fragmentation and frustration, user input and invisible emissions to remind us that the data world that surround us so comfortingly with ever faster and more facile means of communication between real people, are also filled with other voices, incorporeal transmissions.

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