TransmissionS

Through a fluid visual and aural collage, TransmissionS explores the history of 20th-century communications, and probes the cultural and personal implications of technology’s power to effect change. Through a fusion of allegory, documentary, science and autobiography, d’Agostino creates a trenchant, often poignant analysis of communications technology as both witness and catalyst to history. A quick succession of fragmented images - the camera obscura, Marconi’s Wireless, Edison’s early films, early television, mammoth radio telescopes - generates a virtual index of the evolution of communications technology. In the segment titled In the Well, a human drama illustrates television’s omniscience and its limits. In a personal look at how technology encapsulates human experience, from birth to death, Generations draws on d’Agostino’s own home movie footage. The tape ends in an explosive visual fragmentation that is a virtual catalogue of 20th-century technology.