Skybooks: skywide projection and media mythology

Abstract

‘Skybooks: Skywide Projection and Media Mythology’ traces the history of the media fantasy of projecting images and texts onto the sky up to the 1920s, and with respect to the variety of mass media forms that emerged in that decade. Thus, in 1918, less than a year after the October Revolution, Russian Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov wrote a piece of Utopian prose in which Walter Benjamin, had he known it, might have recognised another instance of social dreaming projected upon modern technology. The word ‘skybooks’ (neboknigi) used in the title of the essay is borrowed from there. Khlebnikov's global village of the future is populated by the race of inventors and creators in habit of using the sky as a giant pad to share with each other latest news, scientific formulae and lines of poetry. It was hardly by chance, Galili and Tsivian argue, that the tip of Vladimir Tatlin's famous Tower (also conceived in 1918) was to be equipped with a giant projector. Skypads need a skypen whose skyink is a projected beam of light.