DUE: March 24th
This project is has three parts:
(1) Choose a technology/medium, or a combination thereof, that you use, on a daily basis and that is important to you. DO WITHOUT the use of that medium for a period of 100 hours (approx. 4 days). Some examples of media: email, cellphone, instant messenger, video games, tv, cars, clothing.
(2) Write a 4 page (min) essay • What is Marshall McLuhan’s theory of media and the artist? (What are the implications of his analysis of media for how we understand the role of the artist? USE AT LEAST ONE IDEA ABOUT PERCEPTION FROM YOUR FIRST PROJECT – RELATE IT TO HOW TECHNOLOGY SHAPES PERCEPTION.
(3) Create, in any medium, a self-portrait (of the artist) – that is, of you – as a user of a McLuhan medium? (e.g. car, cellphone, internet, IM, MySpace, television, etc. ) Your self-portrait MUST SHOW THE SENSE IN WHICH THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE.
If you are confused about the second part, do the first part first before you think about it.
Some things that Marshall Mcluhan says about ART:
1. The ARTIST is the person who
invents the means to bridge the
gap between biological inheritance
and the environments created by
technological innovation.
2. The ARTIST is a person who is
especially aware of the challenge
and dangers of new environments.
Whereas the ordinary person seeks
security by numbing his
perceptions against the impact of
new experience, the artist delights
in this novelty and instinctively
creates situations that both
reveal it and compensate for it.
3. The ARTIST studies the distortion of
sensory life produced by new environmental
programming and tends to create artistic
situations that correct the sensory bias
and derangement brought about by the new form.
4. ART at its most significant is a Distant Early
Warning System that can always be relied
on to tell the old culture what is beginning
to happen to it.
5. As the unity of the modern world becomes
increasingly a technological rather than a
social affair, the techniques of the ARTS
provide the most valuable means of insight
into the real direction of our own collective purposes.
6. The audience, as ground, shapes
and controls the work of ART, as figure.
7. Without the ARTIST’s intervention, man
merely adapts to his technologies and
becomes their servo-mechanism. He whorships
the Idols of the Tribe, of the Cave, and of the Market.
8. We become what we behold.
We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
9. No society has ever known enough about its actions
to have developed immunity to its new extensions
or technologies. Today we have begun to sense that
ART may be able to provide such immunity.
10. In the electric age there is not longer any sense in
talking about the ARTIST's being ahead of his time. Our
technology is also ahead of its time.
11. The ARTIST can correct the sense ratios before
the blow of new technology has numbed conscious
procedures. He can correct them before numbness and
subliminal groping and reaction begin.
12. ART holds out the potential for communicating exact
information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order
to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties.
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