Welcome to Field Notes, “slog” edition. I’ve been away from Substack for a while, creating with the Social Software Cycle 2 cohort, traveling to support DEMO2026, and now I’m in Berlin to participate in this year’s Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (SFSIA).
I decided to try a new format while I’m here – slogs (aka sound logs, aka voice memos). I’ve been intending to incrementally lean deeper into audio, dare I say start a podcast, and this may be a seed or an experiment. As always, open to your thoughts.
Signal-to-Noise Ratio (Kittler, 2014) begins with a reminder that, before modernity, everything traveled together. People, letters, goods were sent in the same carriages, along the same roads. Everything was equally regarded as material, a person and a message were the same kind of thing moving through the same kind of space.
Then the railway and the telegraph arrived together, splitting everything.
Bodies went on tracks. Signals went at the speed of light. The message stopped being attached to the messenger.
What strikes me about this, that I didn’t get to in the audio, is that the railway and telegraph arrived together around the 1860s, when Neptune in Aries (1861–1875) and Uranus in Gemini (1858–1866) were standout symbols in the sky. With recent entrances, these transits are recurring today. Uranus re-entered Gemini on April 25, 2026 and will remain there until May 22, 2033; Neptune in Aries takes place from January 26, 2026, to May 21, 2038, followed by a final pass from October 21, 2038, to March 23, 2039.
There are so many questions this brings up for me. If the railway and telegraph fundamentally changed the way we regarded matter and perceived signals, what will be opening or splitting in our perception over the next decade? Let me know what comes up for you. The full paper is linked here.
