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[16/01/2025]
Telearchics
“No picture of the development of man’s conquest of the air would be complete without reference to telearchics – the remote control of mechanism by radio” (Hershey, 1943): with these words, the American geographer describes what is destined to become a mechanism for remote space dominance through an unmanned aerial vehicle, controlled from unimaginable distances and capable of reaching uninhabitable places for humans.
The vast stage for testing this new technological frontier, which would subsequently revolutionize air power, is the operation crossroad at Bikini Atoll in June 1946. This Operation is disruptive in its exceptionality because it reveals that the drone is the only aerial vehicle capable of surviving an atomic blast and photographically documenting the event while collecting scientific data on air and radioactivity. Crossroad inaugurated a dynamic that continues to influence political and military strategies up to modern wars, exploiting distance through telechiric systems or unmanned telechiric machines that are “technology of manipulation at a distance” (Clark, 1964), as well as technical assemblages that serve as perceptual and exploratory substitutes for humans in inhospitable environments. Telechiric systems reshape how we think, interpret, measure, and strategically organize spatial topography from afar (Chamayou, 2015).
The aerial photograph of the atomic cloud taken during the tests at Bikini by an unmanned aerial vehicle at the exact moment of detonation, visible in real-time to the drone operator, possesses an unsettling beauty and a newborn wonder that only an impossible perspective to the human eye can evoke.
It's no coincidence that unmanned systems and the idea of telearchics reached their peak of success and development concurrently with the discovery of nuclear energy and gases, which give rise to models of atmopower and atmoterrorism (Sloterdijk, 2009). With the atmoterrorist model, the primary functions of human life have been attacked and humanity's survival on Earth has been called into question, making it potentially uninhabitable. But it is precisely from the danger of the uninhabitability of certain places that the idea of building a telechiric device that would creep into dangerous and inaccessible places to Man, enacting remote colonization and domination through the gaze of the unmanned aerial system's camera and remote-radio control through the discovery of radio waves and electromagnetic waves.
“For this reason, drone technology can be considered a sort of absolute metaphor of contemporary entortung (dis-placement)” (Vegetti, 2017), capable of inaugurating a phenomenology of impossible and uninhabitable places, or rather, of places that cannot be experienced by human perception, except through a technological mediation that combines two fundamental dimensions of human phenomenological experience: the visual and the haptic-tactile. This is contingent upon two instruments that possess the capacity to fundamentally transform telecommunications through the ether, specifically radio and television (Chandler, 2020; Hershey, 1943; Weber, 2019).
“Telearchics – the remote control by radio of unmanned mechanism – may have some strartling advertisement before the war ends. Like all other devices, this is simply one application of the new science of electronics, child of radio and parent of television. Robot planes, guided by telearchic control, and containing television cameras, can be sent over enemy positions and flashback a running picture” (Hershey, 1944).
Dislocation is made possible not only by the conquest of the air element or the atmospheric element but also of a quintessence, which Aristotle referred to as the fifth element, different from Earth, Fire, and Water but especially distinct from Air: ether.
“Διόπερ ὡς ἑτέρου τινὸς ὄντος τοῦ πρώτου σώματος παρά γῆν καὶ πῦρ καὶ ἀέρα καὶ ὕδωρ, αἰθέρα προσωνομάσαν τὸν ἀνωτάτον τόπον, ἀπὸ τοῦ θεῖν ἀεί τὸν αἰώνιον χρόνον θεμενοῦντες τὴν ἐπωνυμίαν αὐτῷ” ("Therefore, considering the first body as something different from earth, fire, air, and water, they called it aether, the highest place, deriving the name they gave it from the fact that it moves always, for the eternity of time.") (Aristotels, 350 B.C.)
A universal medium that fills space and through which everything propagates, the ether promises immaterial spaces of power that take advantage of the fifth element as the highest and noblest, capable of occupying all spaces of existence in which electromagnetic phenomena propagate, ensuring invisibility, intangibility and ubiquity. “The conquest of the ether did not merely create new technologies ancillary to war: it has constantly transformed the character and pace of operations, and also created a new theatre of war as rival users sought to jam opponent’s transmissions, eavesdrop on communications and practice deception” (Hirst, 2005). Power is everywhere and takes advantages of the domination of distance: for this reason we find ourselves faced with the deconstruction of place and the deterritorialization of the centers of power (Vegetti, 2009) where a definitive spatial unprooting of the theater of war (Schmitt, 1950) is accomplished through air warfare and wave warfare.
If we look at the operations that inaugurated the era of remote dominance, starting from Crossroad, up to the video presented here of the Weary Willy Operation, to the even more famous Operation Aphrodite, or finally Operation Remote - all operations concentrated between 1943 and 1946 - and compare them with the current wars fought with FPV drones, nothing has changed in substance. These are undoubtedly long-term logics that have given rise to a revolutionary strategic and spatial awareness. At Bikini Atoll, the visual remote control of the atomic perspective was ensured by two cameras: one mounted on the nose of the drone and another inside the cockpit, oriented in such a way that it focused on the instrument control panel, while the human pilot was positioned on the ground, tens of kilometers away from the event they were visually and perceptively witnessing, or on a mother aircraft where they controlled drone fleets through an immersive viewing station, a precursor to the current and more innovative technology of the headsets used by First Person View drone pilots.
And this has been the case since Crossroad onwards, through the postmodern wars inaugurated by the Gulf War and continuing with the GWOT, and finally in the war between Russia and Ukraine, where "The military environment is no longer so much a geophysical one of the real space of battles (terrestrial, maritime, aerial, etc.) as a microphysical one of the real-time electromagnetic environment of real-time engagement" (Virilio, 2005). Telearchics thus enables the expansion of space and territory, which is no longer, as Virilio argued, the geographical and physical one, but the ionospheric one of the ether, in which forms of surveillance, power, death, and colonization pass.
All translations from Italian by the author (LP)
Cited works:
Aristotles, (350 B.C.), De caelo, fragment 270b 16-22 in “Il cielo”, edited by Jori, A. (2002).
Chamayou, G. (2015). Drone theory. Penguin UK
Chandler, K. (2020). Unmanning: How humans, machines and media perform drone warfare. Rutgers University Press.
Clark, J. W. (1964). Remote control in hostile environments. New Scientist, 22(389), 300-304.
Hershey, B., & Peterson, H. (1944). Skyways of tomorrow.
Hershey, B. (1943). The Air Future: A Primer of Aeropolitics.
Hirst, P. (2005). Space and power: politics, war and architecture. Polity.
Schmitt, C. (2003). The nomos of the earth (Vol. 1950). New York: Telos Press.
Sloterdijk, P., Patton, A., & Corcoran, S. (2009). Terror from the Air.
Vegetti, M. (Ed.). (2013). Filosofie della metropoli: spazio, potere, architettura nel pensiero del Novecento. Carocci.
Vegetti, M. (2017). L'invenzione del globo. Giulio Einaudi Editore.
Virilio, P. (2005). Desert screen: War at the speed of light. A&C Black.
Weber, A. K. (2019). “L’œil électrique” et “la torpille volante” : pistes pour une histoire du drone à partir de l’histoire télévisuelle. A contrario, (2), 81-98.