Telephone: The telephone exchange was an idea of the Hungarian engineer Tivadar Puskás (1844 - 1893) in 1876, while he was working for Thomas Edison on a telegraph exchange. The first commercial telephone exchange was opened at New Haven, Connecticut, with 21 subscribers on 28 January 1878, in a storefront of the Boardman Building in New Haven, Connecticut. - Wikipedia
Radio: Over several years starting in 1894 the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi built the first complete, commercially successful wireless telegraphy system based on airborne Hertzian waves (radio transmission).
Photography/Film: Sallie Gardner at a Gallop, made by Eadweard Muybridge in 1878, is sometimes cited as the earliest film. By the mid-1890s publicly available motion picture theaters were in existence.
Fiction: HG Wells The Time Machine. Georges Méliès "Le Voyage dans la Lune" (A Trip to the Moon) (1902) - an early narrative film and also an early science fiction film. Later authors in the same vein of Speculative Fiction - Isaac Asimov, Philip K Dick, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler.
Mechanical Television: Nipkow disk (patented in 1884), also known as scanning disk, is a mechanical, rotating, geometrically operating image scanning device, patented in 1885 by Paul Gottlieb Nipkow. This scanning disk was a fundamental component in mechanical television through the 1920s and 1930s.
At the end of August 2020, Amazon received FAA approval for Prime Air Drone Delivery. Here's an interesting report on ongoing drove delivery trails: Drone Delivery WSJ Report
Pg17
"Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one - and can help build a nascent one."
"Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Television is a stream of under selected images, each which cancels it predecessor. Each still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again..." Compare the power of 1972 photo of Phan Thị Kim Phúc - nine year old girl running form napalm bombing (shot by Nick Ut) to endless hours of television coverage.
Pg19
"What determines the possibility of being affected morally by photographs is the existence of a relevant political consciousness. Without a politics, photographs of the slaughter-bench of history will most likely be experienced as, simply, unreal as a demoralizing emotional blow."
"Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel. Unfortunately, the ante keeps getting raised partly through the very proliferation of such images of horror."
pg. 24 - "Today everything exists to end in a photograph"
Related readings:
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin, 1936
Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord, 1967
Art Works
Alter Bahnhof Video Walk, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, 2012
US Aggregate, Mimi Onuoha, 2017-2019
Learning to See, Memo Akten, 2017
[Grace:AI], Mary Flanagan, 2019
Tool
Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), Google Developers
Understanding Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Joseph Rocca, 2019
Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for Dummies — A Step By Step Tutorial, Michel Kana, Ph.D, 2020
Comprehensive list of AI tolls for artists, organized by Marnie Benney and Pete Kistler