Guess: when and who!

Guess when was this said and who said it!

 The service environments available to ordinary persons,
whether of travel or general consumer services, far exceed the power
of any private wealth to provide for itself. The richest men have
become hotel hermits, unable to find any more conspicuous means of
consumption than those that are adapted to their personal or commer-
cial security. If personal wealth has become a comic and frustrating
encumbrance in a world of universal public services, the school and
university are in an equally paradoxical situation insofar as they
are committed to providing packaged information on a wide variety of
subjects. Today the general public has access to every kind of infor-
mation--quite independently of our educational programs.

        This new electric access to information has suddenly cast
the audience in the role, not of spectator or consumer, but of ex-
plorer and investigator. The immediate need and future of education
is not in the dissemination of knowledge, but of ignorance. The open
university of the U. K. made the ordinary mistake of putting the old
curriculum and old classroom on the new TV media. The immediate need
is for these media to bring to the microphone and the studio people
from every field of knowledge and endeavour to explain to the public
not their knowledge but their ignorance, not their expertise but their
hang-ups, not their breakthroughs but their break-downs. The universi-
ty and school of the future must be a means of total community partici-
pation, not in the consumption of available knowledge, but in the crea-
tion of completely unavailable insights. The overwhelming obstacle to
such community participation in problem solving and research at the top
levels, is the reluctance to admit, and to describe, in detail their
difficulties and their ignorance. There is no kind of problem that baf-
fles one or a dozen experts that cannot be solved at once by a million
minds that are given a chance simultaneously to tackle a problem. The
satisfaction of individual prestige which we formerly derived from the
possession of expertise, must now yield to the much greater chores and
satisfactions of dialogue and group discovery.

Yes, it was 1971 and the speaker was Marshall McLuhan. Convocation Speech, University of Alberta. See the full text here.

Advertising is Warfare

“We don’t understand information movement and image-making as warfare at all—we call this advertising. Actually, Madison Avenue is a major military operation, vastly aggressive, and out to conquer empires, territories, within the human heart…the human spirit”. – Marshall McLuhan

We look back at those advertising days through Mad Men. McLuhan saw this time as if he were from the future, but he was one of the few who was living in the present.

MadMen Twitter

The smartest show on TV has the smartest social media. Characters from my fav TV show, MadMen, are now talking to us on Twitter and I love it! Originally fascinated by the accuracy of the recreation of the early ’60s look and attitudes – smoke-filled rooms, (the smoking doctor!), the male/female divide, pointy bras and pre-pantyhose foundation garments, the office scenes – I moved into deeper appreciation of the storyline. Then I began to feel an understanding of the characters themselves as real people with deep backstories, mostly hidden. The characters were portrayed so well that they became real to me, and I thought of them well after the end of an episode.

We’re inundated with MadMen here, with Season 1 playing out on Bravo at 6pm Wed. and Season 2 time-progressed on AChannel Sundays at 10pm. Bouncing twice a week between times has added to my awareness of these very developed characters. I’m hardly noticing the 60′s settings anymore, they all just serve the story.

Okay, on to Twitter and hybrid media, where my innocent mention of anticipation for last Sunday’s episode brought a follow from Francine_Hanson, who I immediately connected with. She had me at “tuna casserole.” Now I’m following most of the MM characters, especially PeggyOlson, and Betty_Draper who gave me excellent dinner menu advice (NY Strip loin, spinach, potatoes) as did Bobbie_Barrett (go out and get your own meat.)

I quickly discovered I was in the 2nd wave of MM twittering. AMC had pulled the characters last Monday, but they returned next day or so with blessings. Institutions are always concerned over the lack of control over social media and its messaging.

It was really fun at first to find these characters right here in my personal twitter universe. It’s a communication into a past time as they retain all their early 1960′s attitudes. I like it best when they just relate, they should just forget any canned sneak preview comments relating to upcoming episodes. It’s better to discuss aspects of past eps. or just improvise on issues of the day.

Their Twitter numbers are miniscule (low thousands if that) and compared with broadcast viewer stats this could be seen as laughable. But it’s important to see that yes, the twits can be captured and we do go to the TV screen, paying attention for longer than 140 keystrokes. If it’s smart.

The energy released by hybrid media was a biggie for McLuhan and as an adman’s guru he would have found MadMen fascinating for many reasons. Past times indeed are pastimes, and where now are those innovative dream-makers of Madison Avenue? Well, a day or so ago Don_Draper tweeted that he’d been reading Gutenberg Galaxy over lunch. I wonder if PeggyOlson will see in on his bookshelf.

My question is, though, how long will this Twitter interest last before it burns out?

James K-M’s Upcoming Show

Image: Hearing Bone (detail), stain and acrylic on plywood, 24” x 24,” 2007

James K-M: Cave Paintings, September 2 – November 22, 2008.
Opening: Friday, September 5, 8 – 9 pm. Open daily during campus hours.

Please join us for the exhibition opening at the Teck Gallery, SFU Vancouver Campus, 515 West Hastings St, Vancouver, BC. The artist will be in attendance. Opening remarks at 8:30 pm.

Artist talk: Monday, September 15, 7pm
The artist will present a talk titled “Is There Anything Old Here?”
Room 1600, SFU Vancouver campus

Phone: 778-782-4266 Web: sfu.ca/gallery Email: gallery@sfu.ca

James K-M is a Vancouver-based painter who has, since 1983, created a vast series of hard-edge, optically charged works. These paintings reference primordial languages, the linkages between aural and visual phenomena, as well Op Art—a key historical avant-garde movement.
The question of how the social is contained within abstraction has been raised in many arenas over the twenty-five years since the first of these paintings were made. This exhibition addresses that societal role, while querying the rationales that continue to exist for new work in hard-edge abstraction. – Bill Jeffries, August, 2008

Publication: This exhibition is accompanied by a 24-page catalogue with essays by Eric McLuhan and Bill Jeffries.

Discover the Future of Literacy(ies)

Eric McLuhan just let us know that two talks he gave on the subject of The Future of Literacy are now available online. So last night James and I plugged the laptop into the telly, sat back and immersed ourselves in the McLuhan message. Terrific. If you want to learn to understand what’s going on – with everything, start here. Here’s the link for both talks, The Future of Literacy (November 21, 2007) and Dream of a Common Alphabet, November 28, 2007.

Just want a taste? click on the image to see/hear part 1.

These lectures were given as part of Bruce Powe’s McLuhan Initiative for the Study of Literacies.

See also my previous posts:
Mediaprobes
Eric McLuhan on Second Life

(Link here for a random post from my blog.)

Light On and Light Through

With client books in various stages of evolution, plus the new blog part of this business, I’ve been quite busy for the past month. There is a renewed interest in blogging of course, which is growing exponentially, but this doesn’t eliminate the book as a method of keeping, transmitting and retaining information, thought, and meta-concepts.

When a person learns to speak another language in a rudimentary way, she may be able to communicate the basics, but the subtleties and metaphysics in the language can take a very long time to evolve.

I feel new media still has a long way to go in this regard, before it can embody the rich and deep interior landscape that has been the realm of literature for the past many-hundreds of years. The place of the book is still ensured, even if the book is in an electronic version. What comes to mind here is McLuhan’s studies in the effects of light “on” a screen as in movies, and light “through” a screen as in television.

We have all felt the fascination and seduction of a strong jewel-like visual image on the computer screen, followed by a let-down when that image is printed and looks flat, and rather emptied of the illumination. “Light through” brings it to life, “light on” – not so much. With text it is a different story. The “light through” makes us feel as if we were viewing, rather than reading, and other aspects of the brain and our sensorium are activated. The process is more rapid, scanning and viewing. “Light on” – the printed word – we are back in the realm of reading. Both methods are complementary, and we prepare differently for each.

Although the books we prepare are put together on the screen, written in Word, or some such program, then laid out in InDesign, their destination is not the screen, but the page. They are created as books, not as screen-experiences, not even as documents of screen-experiences. The process is one of projecting the mind to imagine the words on the page and to imagine the page in print, working from that point of view.

Mediaprobes

In the mid-90′s, James K-M and I worked on three interactive artworks called Mediaprobes. They’ve been viewed in various exhibitions world-wide. Below is their description and a still image from each. (Originally programmed in Director, they need to be redone in another format so they can be seen without being delivered on a disk.)
MediaProbes compress concepts together to form an entirely new type of
multimedia icon. The relationships between concepts from Marshall McLuhan,
Barrington Nevitt, James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis are juxtaposed with
experimental animated text and image along with narration and interactive
events.
MediaProbes reverse our normal concept of interactivity. Instead of the viewer
interacting with the presentation, MediaProbes present sensory interactivity,
sending complex signals back to the viewer, whose limited interaction by
mouseclick is rewarded by the “probeclick” sent back by the synaesthetic icon to
the brain.

Disparate ideas are forced into compressed interrelationship and much
like a chemical reaction they become fused in a new form of iconic expression.
Found images and sounds in the communication environment are combined with
intentional imagery and text selections in a very controlled setting. Working with
the minimum of input creates a reversal effect, which is formed by this forcing
together of ideas originally expressed in different media. The only appropriate
response for the viewer is a momentary internal synaesthetic shortcircuit, an
empty moment of “unlearning”.

MEDIAPROBE #1 (1.5 MIN.):
One quote from McLuhan is illustrated with appropriated audio and treated video. The flowing vertical text on one side of the main screen is one of ten thunders from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, which usher in a new development for humanity. The opposite vertical text is McLuhan/Nevitt’s analysis of the meaning of each thunder.

MEDIAPROBE #2 (2 MIN.):

The Artist is Older than the Fish, a quote from Wyndham Lewis, is placed over text from McLuhan, in which he describes the TV viewer as a skin diver. This fragmented text appears at intervals throughout the presentation, while video shot through a rear-view mirror is the central visual image. Audio involves three simultaneous tracks on the topic of out of body experience.

MEDIAPROBE #3 (7 MIN.):
A quote from Barrington Nevitt: “The perceptive artist learns how to repeat and
magnify his errors in order to create his own distinctive style for sharing new
truth”. Behind each chair is the image of an animal. Music is a treated midi-file
from the rhythm section for The Girl from Ipanema, and carries on throughout the piece. The blue buttons, when clicked, reveal quicktime sequences of futurist
narrative by Carol Sill or sound poems by James K-M.

(Download a free pdf excerpt from my book Documentary Print. Click on the title to receive the entire SRF Interim Report Document on Living in the Future.)

(Link here for a random post from my blog.)

Eric McLuhan on Second Life TV

Here’s a remarkable interview with Eric on Second Life TV, a great media fusion! Connect to play it here.

(Link here for a random post from my blog.)

Simultaneity and Seasonal Time

I’ve been “hung up” as the beatniks would have said, on the concept of time. I’d like to be able to break the hold of time, so the simultaneity of electric living will be easy to operate within. Worth repeating from a previous post is what McLuhan associate, Barry Nevitt, said “…our present hangups are due to the incompatibility of sequential thinking with the simultaneities of electric living.” (from ABC of Prophecy: Understanding the Environment)

How do we get there (if there is a there there!)?

One of the next barriers to be broken is the time barrier. Didn’t jets have to break the sound barrier in order to go fast enough and reach the next level? I seem to recall learning that there would be a sonic boom as this was reached or breached.

Time could be like that. We can enter new time, which has more to do with time past or ancient time, more to do with the seasons than anything to do with the clock time that eventually produced our past industrial age. In fact, we could see the whole (now laughable) Y2K panic (remember that?) as fear of this transition in the perception (and tyranny) of time.

It may have been the explosion of the atom bomb that first broke the time barrier, for after that hipsters like Neal Cassidy were playing in time, outside of time, and the jazz musicians were doing it too, literally going way out beyond time. It’s easier to do this late at night when all the markers are gone, the others who reinforce the old time-based worldview are asleep or at least neutralized. Then time has no dominion because the sun is not radiating its rays which transition through our beings each minute or nanosecond, changing position and influence as the day “moves on”.

Let’s look at it this way. Time is no longer a horizontal progression to the goal at the horizon, but a vertical progression up and down your own personal axis. Yes the rays hit you and move, and there are shadows created by this which move in a circle on the ground, but you are not progressing in time – instead you are simply standing vertical as time circles and cycles. You are like a maypole or a sundance pole. With that image/model, time is not a motivator, nor is it a dimension, it is another influence.

Now the seasons are different. They are not “time” as we understand it in Western culture – a day broken into bits that are traversed until sunset, evening, night. Seasonal time is the place to be, to experience time on that scale is a far better way to step outside of the time barrier. Even the round of days and months are artificial when counted on a calendar. We can step out of that artificiality more and more. Time is used for appointments, like a map, but isn’t necessary in life.

This wall clock by Jim Cummins shows that he understands the jail quality of time. I found the clock in the recycling at our building – recognizing Jim’s work, I washed it off, and found it a good home.

(Download a free pdf excerpt from my book Documentary Print. Click on the title to receive the entire SRF Interim Report Document on Living in the Future.)

(Link here for a random post from my blog.)

Food, the Final Frontier

Last Saturday we went to the Trout Lake Farmer’s Market, and strolled along through the happy people buying organic veggies and lining up for tomatoes, tasting artisan cheeses and feeling very healthy and environmentally good. The trucks parked in the lot were marked with the names of the farms and growers, and the food was bright and sparkling in the sunshine. A beautiful experience, but very expensive. In the world of healthy goodness, this is very high end – to buy direct from the grower who has trucked the newly picked veggies in to the market. It is a charming scene, a theatre of food and choices. Well, after spending over $40 on some lovely basil and mushrooms, a bag of fresh picked peas and some delicious organic cherries – oh and don’t forget the amazing pickled beets, we still needed groceries. So it was goodbye to the theatre, the play of being a certain kind of shopper.

On the way home we stopped at the Sunrise Market on Gore, and we had our Sunrise yellow and red shopping bags at the ready. Who knows who grew these veggies? I pushed into the Saturday crowd at Sunrise. They are not so artisanal – Chinese shoppers mix with East Side residents and a few others. Foodies? I don’t think so. I got red peppers, veggie chicken, tofu, organic oats for oatmeal, free range eggs, romaine, green onions, radishes, zucchini, tomatoes, dark apricots, grapes, and more for under $40. Was this so different from the trendy market? Well, yes. The woman who was yelling in Chinese at the man who was selling her chicken was getting the best she could out of the Sunrise market, not playing at buying, then bringing home a precious potato or a rare hand-selected edible frond.

McLuhan had it right when he said, “Past times become pastimes.” The farmers’ market has become an entertainment. I am somehow reminded of those science fiction stories in which there is a rare plant that yields food and people kill one another for it, the shards of the past life being held as ultra-valuable. The only way to do this right is to grow a garden of your own. Then the sheer wealth of nature reveals itself. You can’t even give away all the zucchini harvest!

But I’ll keep going to the market from time to time. It is, after all, real food, and the taste of some of these fresh veggies can be very intense – compared with the iceberg lettuce versions of irradiated genetically modified commodified food shipped to us in containers from all over the world – grown who knows where by who knows who in who knows what.

And about the iceberg, we’ve seen a fantastic iceberg wedge served as a salad at Joe Fortes – looks elegant, tastes crisp, and it has an ironic fun quality. I think I’ll pick some up at Sunrise next time I’m there!

(Surprise: Link here to see a random post from my blog.)