Exhibition and symposium project elaborating the experimental synthetic publication practices of Marshall McLuhan and the Toronto School
http://westdenhaag.nl/exhibitions/17_09_McLuhan
Towards a New Integration FEEDBACK↩ is a series of exhibitions and symposia planned for the Hague, Berlin, Paris and Toronto in 2017-2019 examining the role of literature and the arts as guides in times of acceler
ated technological progress. This project has at its core a travelling display of archival materials from the Kelly Library collection at the University of Toronto, which demonstrate McLuhan's radical attempts to synthesize his analyses and those of his peers in exquisitely designed print objects. Extrapolating from this display and recontextualizing the objects for the present is a selection of works of art, text and emerging hybrid practices. Always-on! Nano-ethics! Pure Information! Sceptical Narcissism & the Madness of Crowds! FEEDBACK brings artists, designers, scholars and thinkers together to probe, encounter and contest the light-speed electronic information environments we inhabit today. Exploding out of the wreckage of World War II the early cyberneticists Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon, sketched out a future where even thinking could be automated. Marshall McLuhan saw in the electronic information of global instantaneous mass-communication of the satellite and tv age, the end of the rational tradition of enlightenment humanism, and the emergence of a “Global Village”, and “Global Theater” where people would be caught up in their interconnectivity and develop new social artforms[1]. McLuhan considered that artists have a vital new role in an age of instantaneous communication and invisible cybernetic processes. Artists, McLuhan proposed, were the sensitive members of society, attuned to the changes brought on by the introduction of new technologies. By studying the work of artists we can find clues for how to survive and thrive in conditions of rapid transformations. Though McLuhan’s insights into media technologies are known around the world, what is less well known is that he also had an artistic, creative practice. A scholar of the effects of the Gutenberg press, McLuhan’s artistic responses took the forms form of exquisitely detailed printed publications, magazines, periodicals and experimental pamphlets and posters. The practice of publication implies large-scale communication with a public. But what constitutes a public today where the exchange of information takes place less in public fora than between “private” individuals scattered across a network? Vilém Flusser considered the citizen of the electronic age to be “Bodenlos”, a migrant, cast adrift from all traditional modes of life. Flusser worked to turn the migrant identity into an advantage. The migrant sees the contemporary situation much more clearly than those who cling to nostalgic cultural figures. McLuhan calls this latter nostalgic tendency “living in the rear-view” mirror, when he argues that “the content of a new media is always a previous media” since we always lack the cultural tools to grasp the technological condition which is upon us, we make do with analogies from the past. The pace of technological transformation, automation and globalization has resulted in massive human migration to the industrialized countries. Publics are formed and dissolved algorithmically according to need, no longer on the level of opinion or knowledge, but according to advanced social cybernetics of the advertising economy. The medium is the message, The artists hear the message and proposes emergent emblems of concern. This project examines how the utopian instincts of artists can help guide us in a world where the action happens beyond the senses and where even the notion of place, public or politics is always shifting under our feet.
