ABSTRACT
There is something inherently magic about mediation. While most media forms, as Vincent Mosco (2004) points out, reach their greatest social impact once we come to regard them as mundane and take them for granted, their transcendental power is usually the source of initial spectacle and fascination. In her study of how new electronic communication devices were introduced to the public during the nineteenth century Carolyn Marvin (1988) stresses the afnity between technological optimism and a metaphysical, even Biblical discourse. In a number of popular technical journals, as well as in other forms of public media, the performative spaces of for instance electrical light installations and sky-projections were described with words such as ‘fairyland’ and ‘enchanted place’. The following quote from the documentation of the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893 is most telling: ‘And now, like great white suns in this rmament of yellow stars, the search lights pierced the gloom with polished lances, and made silver paths as bright and straight as Jacob’s ladder. […] The white stream owed toward heaven until it seemed the holy light from the rapt gaze of a saint, or Faith’s white, pointing nger!’ (quoted in Marvin 1988, 172-3).
