Broadcasting and Taping Loops, Feedback, Delays, and Noises: Tele-Presence as a Time Machine

This chapter explores the key role of sound technologies in art experiments with telepresence between the 1960s and the 1990s, with a focus on early electronic arts. With a media archaeological approach, it will show that practices and machines activated in video and telematic arts have a common origin and intrinsic relation with sound media, a technological and artistic realm often investigated by female artists. The contribution will first conduct a historical investigation on electronic spaces, machines, and actions between 1963 and 1974; then, it will conduct a media-ar(t)chaeological excavation in which experiments with electronic devices will reveal telepresence operations and strategies related to temporality, to face the times in which “new media” flatten distances and chase simultaneity.