The IMMAGINAZIONE SENZA FILI and the Noise of Modern Life: Towards a Media Ecology of Futurism

Abstract

In this article I examine the connections running between F.T. Marinetti's Futurist manifestos and wireless communication media in the early part of the 20th century. I set forth how two literary inventions, words-in-freedom (parole in libertà) and a wireless imagination (immaginazione senza fili), inscribe the newness of the wireless in the medium of writing; becoming the indices of an altered media environment in which the components of writing are uncoupled via the installation of the wireless where outdated egos once resided. In the widening space that Marinetti grants his words-in-freedom, I show him moving decidedly away from a Romantic conception of imagination to one more properly resembling a 20^th century wireless transmission. Detailing wirelessly transmitted sense perceptions and the poet who becomes a war correspondent capable of covering theaters of war, I offer a critical perspective onto wireless technology, speed, and data streams in the manifestos. In my reading Futurism will come to mark both the ascendancy of the wireless over aesthetics and its alliance with wartime commands.