British Art Studies

In Yoni Van Den Eede, Joke Bauwens, Joke Beyl, Marc Van den Bossche, and Karl Verstrynge, editors (2012). Proceedings of 'McLuhan's Philosophy of Media' - Centennial Conference / Contact Forum, 26-28 October 2011, Brussels: Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts., 2012

Marshall McLuhan was an encyclopedic thinker, and as such difficult to categorize. His intellectual roots penetrate transversely the entire Western tradition of the humanities, his insights mock rigid disciplinary specializations. Being indeed intuitive, experiential, explorative, McLuhan’s approach to knowledge can embrace different pursuits and combine disciplines that are apparently diverging. In other words, McLuhan’s method is essentially holistic, and can only be approached having accepted such peculiarity that made him one the most brilliant minds of the entire 20th century. For these reasons, in order to capture the essence of McLuhan’s encyclopedism, it is first of all necessary to consider the function the different disciplinary fields perform within his thought system, just like it is necessary to look for the relations, or reactions, the different disciplines express when they connect with McLuhan. Only in this way, could a serious survey be similarly developed about McLuhan’s peculiar contribution to enlarge the borders of a specific discipline, or about what might be the effects of applying McLuhan. The case this essay intends to consider is that of aesthetics, and its reinstatement, according to McLuhan’s sophisticated interpretation, into the media realm. First of all, it should be recognized that combining aesthetics and media means defining a disciplinary field that in many ways is still untapped. Therefore, new functions emerge when aesthetics is read through McLuhan, just like untapped reactions and relations emerge when aesthetics, and in this a certain primacy should be recognized to McLuhan, is applied in the media field. If one reads his works in the light of this preventive consideration, or of the attempt to survey the relations between media and senses – aesthetics’ specific domain – McLuhan clearly appears as the one thinker who first recognized such connection. For this reason, I provocatively propose that this great belletrist is awarded yet another label, that of “aesthetician”.

Media Ecology Association, 2019

The denial of the spiritual in the history of modern art raises questions about the relationship between art and media. It questions the mechanistic view of communication theory and the role of technology to rebuff spiritual concepts. McLuhan predicted these effects of media through his writings and lectures. He began to address human ecology in his work Through the Vanishing Point. To counterbalance the void of spirituality in society, artists and psychologists have used the work of Carl Jung to explore the connotative and reflective meanings of messages. Now it is time for media ecologists to incorporate these psychological concepts into communication theory to create a new type of human ecology that focuses on people rather than technology and enables spiritual messages to unfold. Thus, human ecology needs to move us beyond media ecology.

Choice Reviews Online, 2013

Inhabiting the technosphere. Art and technology beyond technical invention Prepublication Manuscript "Media convergence under digitality actually increases the centrality of the body as a framer of information: as media lose their material specificity, the body takes on a more prominent function as selective processor in the creation of images." 1 The body as a framer of information: This notion, presented in the introduction to Mark Hansen's 2004 New Philosophy of New Media, could also stand as an introduction to the general condition under which art after 1989 thinks, produces and engages with technology. It marks not just a shift in thinking that concerns our general understanding of media technologies and practices-but an equally significant shift taking place within the type of artistic practice where new media and information technologies are not just deployed but are themselves also objects of thinking, investigation and imagination. The 1 Timothy Lenoir, Foreword, in Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, MIT Press, 2004, xxii task for art history is then to try to understand the newly prominent mediatic body that emerges with this shift-to discover its various manifestations in artistic practice, as well as its implications for aesthetic theory. In particular, we need to conceptualize its double relation to, on the one hand, technological media and the realm of media production and, on the other hand the notion of the artistic medium. With this shift, several influential conceptions of the relation between art, technology and media may be questioned. Firstly, the notion of the body as a framer of information challenges some of the most influential theorizations of the cultural shift that took place in the 1990's, as the Internet became a global phenomenon and digital processing emerged as a communal platform for all previously separate media and technologies of expression. One was the marginalization of art in the realm of new media. Digital media leave aesthetics behind, Friedrich Kittler claimed, with all the apocalyptic gusto of the early computer age: In distinction to the consciousness-flow of film or audio tape, the algorithmic operations that underpin information processing happen at a level that has no immediate correlate to the human perceptual system. Humans had created a non-human realm that made obsolete any idea of art based on the sense apparatus. And this turn of events was related to the way in which technologies of the information age severed any tangible connection with human existence beyond what pertains to the control practices of capitalist superpowers, notably warfare, surveillance and superficial entertainment or visual "eyewash". 2 Yet, against Kittler's bleak description of posthuman technologies it could be argued that information will still necessarily have to be processed by human bodies-even if the interaction between the human perceptual

IMAGINATIONS, 2017

Abstract | In this paper I present two views of Harley Parker, Marshall McLuhan’s longstanding collaborator. In the first I underline how Parker’s training in the arts as a typograph- ic designer was put to work on the print projects for which he is best known, namely, on the original series of Explora- tions. I debate the claim that his work on Explorations 8 was not his own, and in this phase of argument I draw upon the legacy of other notable designers working in Toronto, name- ly, Allan R. Fleming of Cooper & Beatty Inc., the developers and promoters of Flexitype. Second, I resituate Parker’s link to installation and performance art in Canada by following the line established by his eldest son Blake Parker as resi- dent poet of the experimental electronic band Intersystems, whose activities in 1967-68 included installations and perfor- mances at Perception 67 on the University of Toronto cam- pus. The Mind Excursion psychedelic maze had its debut a few weeks after Harley Parker’s Hall of Fossils opened at the Royal Ontario Museum and marks the group’s origin proper. The connection between father and son is explored through the influences of elder Parker’s artistic proclivities as a paint- er, typographer, exhibition designer, critic, his collaborations with Marshall McLuhan, and the blend of McLuhan’s ideas, psychedelia, and kinetic art that animated Intersystems. Resume | Dans cet essai je présenterai deux perspectives de Harley Parker, qui pour un longtemps collaboré avec Mar- shall MacLuhan. Premièrement, j’explique comment Parker a utilisé son training typographique pour le travail dont il est plus connu, le journal Explorations. Je dirais que son travail sur l’Explorations est original et son propre en utilisant l’his- toire des autres designers notables à Toronto, spécifiquement, les producteurs de Flexitype, Allan R. Fleming de Cooper & Beatty Inc. Deuxièmement, je désire à resituer le connexion entre Parker et l’exposition au musée d’art et le performance au Canada, par suivais la ligne de son fils, Blake Parker, et la groupe musique expérimentale d’Intersystems. Pendant 1967-68, cette groupe a performé dans un labyrinthe psy- chédélique, The Mind Excursion, durant l’évènement du Per- ception 67 à l’Université de Toronto. Le Hall de Fossiles de Harley Parker au Musée Royale d’Ontario a ouvert en jan- vier et quelques semaines plus tard The Mind Excursion a ouvert. Le groupe d’Intersystems a commencé avec cet évène- ment. J’explore les relations entre père et fils par voie des in- fluences artistiques de Harley, et son collègue MacLuhan, et la combinaison la culture de psychédélique et l’art kinésique. Ces idées ont animé d’Intersystems.

2017

New Explorations, 2020

To examine computers as a medium in the style of Marshall McLuhan, we must understand the origins of his own perceptions on the nature of media and his deep-seated religious impetus for their development. First we will uncover McLuhan's reasoning in his description of the artist and the occult origins of his categories of hot and cool media. This will prepare us to recognize these categories when they are reformulated by cyberneticist Norbert Wiener and ethnographer Sherry Turkle. Then, as we consider the roles "black boxes" play in contemporary art and theory, many ways of bringing McLuhan's insights on space perception and the role of the artist up to date for the work of defining and explaining cyberspace will be demonstrated. Through this work the paradoxical morality of McLuhan's decision to not make moral value judgments will have been made clear.

Art and social critic Hal Foster (2002) once suggested that much cultural autonomy — Kraus’s (1912) ‘running room’ (Spielraum) — has collapsed into a world where “everything from jeans to genes seems to be regarded as so much design” (17). For Foster, this ‘total design’ has co-opted the semi-autonomy of art and architecture and placed society in a narcissistic loop of hybrid aestheticism from which its members cannot escape. In this sense, Foster suggests art and life have finally connected but “according to the spectacular dictates of the culture industry, not [by] the libratory ambitions of the avant-garde” (19). Foster traces this conflation to it roots in Art Nouveau’s pledge to Gesamtkunstwerk or ‘total work’ and the Bauhaus’si attempts to mediate modernity by transplanting aesthetic concepts about beauty, through fitness of form, into mass produced objects. These two instances of aesthetic and utilitarian conflation are unique, however, only insofar as they occurred within the burgeoning market-driven juggernaut remaking society in the late 19th and early 20th Century. Throughout history, for good or ill, in large and small ways, fine and applied artists have been called upon to turn their aesthetic endeavors towards larger social ends, the primary variable being the cultural milieu, ideology, or political force pressing them into service (Carroll, 1998) — art endowed with moral content (Armstrong, 2003) or propaganda valorizing state imperatives (Devereaux, 1998), for example.