The global Covid pandemic with its covert, rapidly spreading pathogenicity of mutating variants, along with the hegemonic epidemic of computer hacking and the crisis of worldwide refugee diasporas, provoke urgent questions about a range of transmission enigmas. Long before history and technology, art initiated the transmission circuit. Prehistoric caves housed vividly painted images of wild animals that continue to enthrall and mystify thirty-five centuries later. In radical contrast, technophilia, the compulsively seductive allure of our hyperactive media, continues to become increasingly endemic. Powerful synaptic algorithms incessantly propagate synergetic labyrinths of instant information transferences whose interconnectivity and obsessive fission sustain the world while threatening its survival.Ancient cave paintings, like those at Chauvet and Altmira, which feature colorful eidetic renderings of bison, aurochs, and reindeer made with pigments composed of dirt, red ochre, animal blood, and applied with twigs and bird bones, undoubtedly served the magical purpose of subduing and controlling nature’s treacherous chthonic forces. Visual and oneiric, those paintings bridged dreams, imagination, and futurity—anticipating time and history. The enigma of how they were produced—in deep, hidden, pitch-black recesses or on high inaccessible cavern ceilings—remains a mystery. Those proto-artists’ prehensile dexterity catalyzed the frontal lobes of the brain crucial for the development of language.The ingenious coordination of hand and eye undoubtedly took centuries to evolve, in fitful upsurges, and in preparation for the greatest transmission system—the miracle of language, which required centuries, if not eons, of tentative vocal experimentation before an oral tradition developed, long before the alphabet and writing. Art and history revolve around the symbolic and symbiotic enigmas of image, sound, and glyph, forerunners of the alphabet; subsequently, synergizing transferences between time and history propagated mythologies about the origins of an inchoate, unknown past. Transmissibility also entrains a totemic mystery—the diversification of clans, cultures, and societies that comprise the great chain of being, all haunted by mortality.The word transmission has numerous connotations—as a trope for the carrier of currents, images, energy, electricity, art forms, traits, symbols, cultures, traditions, information, turbo-powered engines, and now viruses. History too is an engine fueled by time and disappearance. Transmission, however, was originally physiological. The fitful synchronization of eye and ear led to the audio-acoustic streaming of surround sound, physiologically entrained by visual, electrical, and somatic impulses—signals that travel though nerve networks to coordinate sense perception, locomotion, and cognition—and now instantly ripple through the worldwide web. A surge of viscerally corporeal messages are continually relayed to the brain, supported by the autonomic system of heartbeat and circulation insuring that oxygen and nutrients course through the bloodstream to nourish cells and extract excretions.Electronic circulation and digital transmission facilitate the f(r)ission of word and image, percept and precept, hand and brain, signal and sign, body and movement, signifier and signified, symbol and icon, stimulus and response—a long, ongoing and parasympathetic chain reaction. The dialectic of word and image, eye and ear, picture and symbol has been instrumental for engineering human intelligence by catalyzing and compressing data that interconnects past and future, life and death. Machine technology and the transmission systems relaying energy and intelligence have become modernism’s performative avatars. Art telegraphs experience that speaks first in images, like dreams in shorthand.The transmission mystery of the electromagnetic pulse, originated by the telegraphic Morse code, like the digital zero-one binary, mirrors the steady-state cardiac rhythms of systole and diastole. The circulation of blood and corporeal messaging interconnects topology and geography and can be likened to the river of consciousness, whose capillaries and arterial tributaries mirror the interconnectivity of global networks. Similarly, the Covid pandemic confirms that lethal viruses and pandemics spread between bodies and nations as quickly as pulses and data do through digital systems. The complex and rapid spread of coronaviruses’ toxic variants presents another transmission mystery, pointing to possible Dark Science origins—the production of its spike protein may have been intentionally engineered—biowarfare run amok. Tampering with the source codes of psyche, software, genome, and viruses has led to humanity’s criminally endangered enterprise.Now, in stark contradistinction, tremendous streams of signals, signs, and data pulse through vast systems, networks, platforms, and brains whose instant connectivity and complex synchronization catalyze global obsessions. Internet, supercomputing mobiles, and iPhones with high-tech, multimedia formats create a synergetic fission of electrototronic mimesis, ensuring that the interactive synergy of words and images move time and memory simultaneously forward and backward with instant virtual reciprocity, reified by the Cloud. Tele- and radiophonic delivery systems catalyze the aurality of the global ear; cinema and TV synergize the omnivorous telemimetic eye; media synergize a fission of rapidly and rabidly neurogenic interconnectivity. Time and history similarly move simultaneously both forward and backward, horizontally and vertically, via the pulse of interpenetrating modalities and dimensions. Streaming data, news, and events continually accelerate cyberthesia’s transmissivity through the mimetonomics of art, symbols, signs, images, icons, and events via photography, painting, cinema, literature, and media, creating instant hybrids relayed by highly permutable digital and social media formats. Heraclitus anticipated Zen: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” That proverbial river is now synonymous with digital consciousness: fields, screens, windows, portals, software, and streaming data—time and relativity were tacit even before Einstein. Like a magic looking glass, hyperactive media performativity magnifies the electromimetic ubiquity of consciousness, mirroring and reflexing multiple realities and dimensionalities, with psychotropic transformations.Along with ancient cave paintings, mysterious stone monuments—Stonehenge, the Great Pyramid of Giza, Göbekli Tepe—contained designs resembling star maps and astronomical alignments, suggesting a magical atavism and secret archaic transmission. The development of cuneiform writing, dated by historians to five thousand B.C., provided the watershed event that enabled mankind to transmit records, accounts, and experiences to future generations—the invention of writing produced in turn (the idea of) history. The alphabet did more than revolutionize transmission—it duplicated (the creation of) the world. During the centuries that followed, drawings, engravings, and portraits channeled culture’s historiography.Renaissance 3D perspective brokered a radical landmark breakthrough that galvanized a greater disseminative gateway—depth perspective, visual compression, multidimensionality, and spatial intervallics—and art and science were not yet separate endeavors. The Gutenberg press alleviated scribes’ cumbersome toil of copying papyri by transforming writing into print’s mechanical reproductive transmissibility. The seeds of the premodern era began at the end of the eighteenth century with two inventions: the galvanic cell, a precursor of the battery capable of storing electricity, and the steam engine, which launched the Industrial Revolution of factories, looms, and automation. Railroads replaced stagecoaches for delivering goods, mail, and travel.Art begins with images, and images with percepts. Images and percepts create ideas, which can be discovered in the most unexpected places, most importantly and presciently in art. Probing origins propagates principles and laws, which in turn develop precepts—systemic variables that promulgate, then exceed the originating rules. In the 1950s, two decades before Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction philosophy became a brand and practice, Merce Cunningham deconstructed dance by using chance operations to make Untitled Solo, which he composed by cutting up a series of movements written on scraps of paper for different parts of the body—legs, arms, and head. While these scrambled sequences weren’t always easy to coordinate and perform, they created a new kinetic syntax. Around this same time, artist Brion Gysin created another unexpected chance “cut up” technique when he used a blade to cut through layers of newspapers to protect a tabletop. This scrambled syntax inspired the literary experiments of his friend, William Burroughs. During the 1920s, Tristan Tzara proposed creating an instant poem by pulling words out of a hat. In 1776, the image of a boiling kettle gave James Watt the idea on how to improve the steam engine. In 1786, the Italian scientist Luigi Galvani, observing how the nerves of frogs’ legs responded to electrical stimulation, anticipated the galvanic cell. In 1800, Alessandro Volta created the first battery, a voltaic pile. Neither could have conceived how electrical and digital impulses would eventually transform both the body and the entire planet.Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s 1839 invention of the daguerreotype, the first camera, created the eureka verisimilitude of arrested time by magically capturing images, which in turn liberated painters from representation, realism, and portraiture. Ancestors could be preserved for future generations as memento mori, miniaturized photographs of deceased relatives worn in lockets around the neck: the past resurrected through an oculus of veridical memory.Even before the discovery of the subconscious, the secret mimesis of art and oneiric dream-work catalyzed the subliminal mysteries of image transmission. Maverick nineteenth-century painter Joseph Mallord William Turner realized a canvas could capture much more than realism and representation; it could reveal the subtle, elusive, ineffable elemental enigmas of light, color, and form—indelible atmospheric harmonies, essences, and numinous qualities lurking on the threshold of visibility, elusive even to the aperture of the camera’s omnivorous gaze. Turner started the modernist chain reaction that anticipated Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. The pointillist masters Seurat, Pissarro, Signac, and Monet delivered pixel mania before anyone could realize its importance. Pixels, the miniscule, subliminal atomistic dots and photonic quanta comprise the virtual filaments underlying the configurative codes and perception of visual data. Like the granular configurations comprising newsprint, painters peeled back the composite skeins and pictorial membranes underlying appearances decades before “relativity.” Like Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen’s invention of the x-ray, suddenly near-invisible ultimate particles—pixels, quanta, photons, and soon genes, atoms, cells, molecules, and later fractals and bytes, turned the world into a streaming semiotic puzzle. Curiously, at the same time, the Victorian novel created comparably complex, thrilling psychological “cinemimetic” narratives in the work of the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot.Pixels are the primal supports underlying any visual field that entrain the configurative matrices whose granular composites transmit and reify visuality—photonic quanta bundled together by saccadic concatenations of eidetic data. Wittgenstein: “And nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye.” Iconoclasts and artists continually break codes to create new forms, now amplified by constantly accelerating computer software. Even before digitality, the valences and tensions between subjectivity and objectivity, interiority and exteriority, form and content became increasingly transformed by the synergy of reciprocal transferences. Pixilation heightens mimetic detail through the vibratory dilation of image transparency; physiognomic seeing prepared the eye for assimilating the configurative mosaics necessary for navigating all digital media. Art’s transhistorical connectivity is reinforced by the essential elemental mystery, ineffable illumination: the disappearing threshold between the visible and invisible. The great nineteenth-century painter Camille Pissarro was a master of pixel granulation, as Cézanne was of the isomorph. Isomorphs reveal structural relationships between shapes and forms, decades before gestalt theory and Rorschach inkblot tests whose configurative elements subtly superposed the matrices that synergize retinal apperception—how visual signs are selected, processed, “read,” and interpreted to make vision, psyche, and reality cohere. Like picture puzzles that challenge users to find how a jumble of unlikely pieces fit together, the shift from pixel to compressed data, and to art’s deconstruction of form, plane, and imagery, prepared the eye and brain for physiognomic seeing that can shift rapidly between discursive and abstract configurations, and now informs all digital information systems.When Paul Cézanne was in his early thirties, he worked alongside his friend, Pissarro, who was a decade older. For more than twenty years, until 1885, they forged a unique camaraderie engaging in probing and challenging discussions about light and the intricacies of perception, nature’s elusively rarified mysteries. Pissarro understood how photonic effusions emit the feints and resolutions that maintain visuality and how paint could capture elemental essences. His challenging and exacting technique undoubtedly catalyzed Cézanne’s x-ray vision, just prior to the invention of cinematography. Just as the telegraph transmitted encrypted codes, the lucid psychotropic visual transparencies of the Post-Impressionist painters prepared the way for Cézanne’s uncanny double vision that deconstructed geometry. Breaking apart the connective “lattices,” hinges, and isomorphic supports that hold reality and perception together also prepared viewers for Cubism and the movies. Cinemimesis, or the cinematology of constantly changing image repertoires via the intervallic symbioses of frames, mosaic overlays, and media superposition, activates galaxies of intricate constellations. What had been tacit in painting and photography led to a fission that exploded the anatomistics of retinal acuity through the wizardry of superposition, animation, kinetic montage, informatics, and later the pixilated mnemonics of MTV technology. Now touch-sensitive screens on mobiles and smart phones enable thumb and forefinger to frame, grab, and instantly expand pixel resolution, enabling viewers to magnify details compressed and hidden within the surface of paintings, photographs, and screens.The telegraphic transmission of pulsing electrical signals anticipated the digital revolution whose encrypted messages launched a global delivery system. The Morse code is comparable to the zero-one digital binary, transmitter of bits, bytes, and the fission of data that simultaneously enforces and liberates duality by conflating and mixing the real and unreal, and skewering veracity via deceptive sleights-of-hand: fake news, deepfakes, vocal and photo dissimulation, and conspiracy exposés. Disinformation and misinformation continue to coarse through media systems and the body politic like viruses at confounding and disturbing velocities. The communications revolution prefigured informatics—the synergy of cyber data continues to quicken AI’s frontier of a transhuman metaverse. Informania manipulates reality and truth via subversive political subterfuge—for example, the Warren Report’s implausible slam-dunk lone gunman verdict regarding JFK’s assassination, 9/11’s overload of disturbing contradictory evidence that led to a surge of conspiracy theories, and the 2008 financial meltdown perpetrated by criminal mortgage brokers and fraudulent big bank manipulation that was never prosecuted. Conspiracies or histrionics, the curious and maddening machinations of media manipulation turn reality into a duplicitous hornet’s nest riddled with division and deception. Truth has become more scabrous than Damocles’ sword.■Industrialization originated in Manchester, England during the 1840s when power looms (first water-driven, then galvanic) automated the manufacture of garments and gave birth to factories. Branwell Brontë, the brilliant but wayward brother who encouraged his three prodigal sisters to write commercial novels, worked as a clerk on the early Leeds-Manchester railroad between 1840 and 1841. The distant motors of modernism were already humming. Another transmission enigma had begun in 1822 when a lowly monk breeding peas in his garden became preoccupied with observing how his plant’s traits and patterns altered seasonally. Gregor Mendel sparked the genetic revolution by probing the secrets of inherited traits and the transmission of characteristics, precursor of genes and chromosomes. By 1905, the Danish botanist Wilhelm Johannsen had already conceived of the “gene,” five years after Max Planck discovered quanta, the elemental particles of light. Just as photons and pixels are the corpuscular transmitters of light, sight, and information, genes and chromosomes transmit biogenic codes—epigenetic messengers. Letters are used to designate the proteins that encode the structure of chromosomes, the hidden instruction templates that modulate conditioning, behavior, and destiny. Memory depends on proteins, and there are at least one hundred thousand in the human body. The streams of transmission began transforming art into science. Ultimate particles—pixels, photons, cells, atoms, electrons, molecules, genes, fractals, and bytes—became the new icons and idols of the quantum age.Thomas Alva Edison’s invention of the light bulb in 1875 provided another eureka transformation—artificial light made illumination transmissible to dark distance places, following Nikola Tesla’s invention of AC/DC motors. The next year, Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone opened the sonic gateway—paving the way for the human voice to be transported instantly over long distances, creating a circuit of ears—and the “live wire” became more than a trope. Curiously, Bell’s mother and wife were both hearing-impaired; his father had given him a human ear to dissect so that he could figure out how it worked. When Helen Keller’s distraught and desperate father brought his deaf-mute daughter to Bell in 1886, she surprised him upon entering his study by immediately running to his bookcases and rubbing her hands over their spines. Bell knew at once that she was highly intelligent, and they became lifelong friends. Without sight or hearing, but through the kinetics of touch, Helen Keller eventually broke through the sense barrier and learned language. Braille enabled her to develop a very keen and acute intelligence, learn several foreign languages, attend college, and graduate with honors.The transmission of the recorded voice was just as mysterious. Although Edison is credited with inventing the phonograph in 1877, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville made the first known vocal recording on a phonautograph machine more than a decade before, in 1860, a twenty-second recording of someone singing the classic French folk tune Au Clair de la lune, but the machine could not play it back. Bell and Edison made the human voice transmissible.Nikola Tesla’s remote-controlled, thirty-one-foot model boat, displayed at the 1898 World’s Fair at Madison Square Garden, the first electric wireless that could transmit radiophonic signals over airwaves, created a new global medium. Though Marconi claimed first rights, Tesla was certified radio’s patented inventor in 1943. The wireless inaugurated the global broadcast system—transmissible conduits riding the ethers. By 1918, at the end of World War I, the radio quickly became a household appliance.At the same time, medicine reached a milestone in 1885 when Louis Pasteur discovered the first vaccine. The transmission of antibodies, which could prevent diseases, also has correlates with art, pixels, and genes, as a microscopic delivery system of biogenic antidotes, forerunner of nanotechnology, enabling mankind to circumvent infection. Art, too, can be likened to antibodies that purge and enhance perception and boost cognition. The highly and mysteriously transmissible coronavirus of the present pandemic has challenged geneticists and biochemists to find ways to deliver messenger RNA into the nucleus of cells in order to turn off its lethal codes. Pandemics can be compared to invisible armies of contagion that race through the global infrastructure.Eadweard Muybridge’s motion capture photography during the 1870s, followed by cinematography’s celluloid strip of composited images that orchestrated sequences of motion, mimicked the blinking of the eye, whose stopgap saccadic synapsulation created optical intervallics. The mystery was crepuscular transmissibility—light is necessary to activate the celluloid inside the camera, and after processing with chemicals, projects the filmstrip onto a screen. Edison’s Kinetoscope, forerunner of the motion-picture film projector, was invented with William Dickson in 1891. Motion capture heralded another transmission revolution, comparable to how the genome ensures the transfer of human, plant, or animal traits; moving images could instantly break the time barrier just as the supersonic jet plane broke the sound barrier in 1947. Celluloid was the precursor of digital memory that would make reality virtually transmissible—history’s eidetic preservative. Computers and AI can detect and magnify subatomic calibration, the invisible particle substrates such as quarks, bosons, and mesons that quantum physicists can only observe as blips on a computer screen. Saccadic reflexes also inhere in language via its syntagma whose phonemic concatenation promotes subliminal messaging.■Media and technology transformed landscape and mindscape. The telegraph made messaging instantly transmissible by converting language’s elemental codes into an electrical pulse—a currency more essential than money. On April 7, 1927, another incredulous event occurred when newspaper reporters and dignitaries gathered at the AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories auditorium in New York City to see the first American demonstration of television—vision transformed into a broadcast phenomenon. Cinemimesis preceded but was intensified by the cathode ray tube. Upton Sinclair’s Mental Radio (1930) explored neurological transference and telepathy, anticipating the enigma of media synchronicity. “Tele-vision” revolutionized the transmissibility of retinal bilocation and remote perception across space-time, which led to cyber virtuality, the resolution and interactive synergy of images and information on our digital platforms. The television became a household appliance in 1950, three years before Crick and Watson discovered the double helix, the key to the genome and genetic code. The transmission of images and recombinant data ensured that technophilia would fast become a vast, all-consuming global enterprise. TV instigated the uncanny seismic shift, upping the ante of broadcast spectacles and transforming the home into a private movie theatre. Like telepathy, invisible streams of remote images pulse across space-time, and across psyches and media entraining extra-linear dimensions, a conundrum Maurits Cornelis Escher captured in his paradoxical mirror-reversal drawings.Performativity moved from vaudeville, stage, radio, and movies to instantly transmissible media. TV morphed into the personal computer and internet, enabling multimedia to conflate reality and unreality, high art and popular art. Virtuality, or digital mimesis, creates a bewildering double reciprocity of superimposed realities and interpenetrating dimensions. During TV’s early-fifties heyday, one of the most hilarious early sitcoms, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, used the TV itself as an agitprop and ingenious programmatic decoy. George cued in-home viewers while he spied on his wife Gracie’s ditzy, double-talking, scatter-brained antics. The improbability of a TV-in-TV as a double surveillance entendre was both comical and ironically polemical and prophetic, given today’s dangerous viral and invasive clandestine super spywares, such as PROMIS and Pegasus. Only a few years before, George Orwell’s famous dystopian 1948 novel 1984 anticipated Big Brother’s omnivorously autocratic surveillance TVs that now operate throughout all digital equipment—watching became synonymous with being watched. By the eighties, MTV escalated the bombardment of fast-byte, scrambled image repertoires and turned fragmentation into a Rorschach blitz, while the NSA surreptitiously orchestrated the backdoor surveillance of surveillance.Just as TV preempted radio in the emerging and merging media landscape, theatre and dance also began synergizing during the fifties to create a hybrid dance-theatre genre after mavericks Alwin Nikolais, Martha Graham, and Merce Cunningham, the latter two having formidably commanding dramatic stage power. The electronic pulse transformed Hollywood, rock music, and downtown experimental art, and produced crossover forms, hybrids, and multimedia mutations. Theatre depends upon creating an empathic rapport of raw visceral emotion with often underlying, knotty psychological tensions and ciphers; dance demands sustained muscular agility and kinetic bravura. Actors who can dance and dancers skilled at acting are rare—except for ballerinas like assolutta Natalia Markarova’s dramatically virtuosic and diabolically fiery Black Swan, and Balanchine ballerina Patricia McBride’s exuberant feisty brio of vividly nuanced acting that characterized her New York City Ballet performances. But as artistic abstraction, fragmentation, kinetic collage, multimedia, and postmodernism emerged during the transformative sixties via the Judson Dance Theater, Judson Poets’ Theater, La MaMa E.T.C., and Caffe Cino in Greenwich Village that created Off-Off-Broadway, a new genre of performance art was catalyzed that flourished during the eighties at Performance Space 122. Performance art upstaged theatre and dance and reached an uncanny apotheosis with Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner’s incomparable one-woman tour de force 1985 Broadway production of The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (also a 1992 movie available on YouTube). Using rapid strobe lighting effects, Tomlin’s non-stop mercurial kinetic virtuosity fired by Wagner’s brilliant, poignant, and comic script was a thrilling two-hour extravaganza of lightning-quick changes between riotously mesmerizing characters, voices, and personas.■Technological breakthroughs have been pioneered by the military industrial complex’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as well as the space program. When Alan Turing conceived the idea of a universal thinking machine during the thirties, he couldn’t have realized how it would eventually transform the world into a symbiotic fusion of AI transmissivity. Cybernetics presaged digital technology.Without realizing it, sixties downtown avant-garde artists—painters, actors, musicians, filmmakers, and dancers—began pioneering multimedia with their hybrid mixed-means explorations that created the prototypes for our interactive electronic digital platforms. Similarly, Paul Berg discovered recombinant DNA in 1972, by creating the first hybrid molecule made from parts of different organisms that led to bioengineering, gene editing, and enhanced germ warfare, in addition to many future genetic breakthroughs, including the messenger RNA vaccine delivery systems to fight coronaviruses. The mirror correlatives between art and science continue to curry osmotic secrets.The digital age officially arrived in 1984, when Steve Jobs and Apple marketed the personal computer; cybernetic ingenuity has been compared to simulating the human brain. Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web in 1989 presaged the global digital revolution—the internet turned the planet into a giant operating system and humming electronic brain—that Marshall McLuhan forecast during the sixties as the global village. Just as gain-of-function increases a coronavirus’s lethality, the multifunctional personal computer with interconnecting windows and software accelerates a steady-state gain-of-systems. Instant transmissivity can be activated by a keystroke or click of the mouse. Thanks to transistors, superconductors, and microchips, an array of high-tech mobiles enables everyone to carry a miniaturized supercomputer in the palm of their hands capable of moving across all media platforms and even make movies.Genes, codes, pixels, atoms, cells, molecules, bits, bytes, and algorithms created a new holotropic metaverse of quantum digital transmission systems, including CRISPR’s gene-editing technology. Just as the atomic bomb threatened planetary survival on the macroscopic scale, the mutagenic technology of highly transmissible microscopic coronaviruses can prove similarly catastrophic. William Burroughs compared language to a virus because it invaded every brain and body and created an omnivorous cultural control system. The zero-one binary also perpetrates ideological fallout—the covert mania of cultural divisiveness with conflicting and contradictory ideologies, disaffection, and global destabilization. Hackers, like coronaviruses, can