And finally, in The Electronic Age of Retribalized Man (involving full sensory involvement) that "instant communication" online will bring people together again: by being able to speak to practically anyone in the world at any time, people will "retribalize." The relationship of man’s senses to media isn’t just a matter of importance but of mental response resulting in social consequences in which any changes in the hierarchy of man’s senses changes man himself. Industrial or visual man, who is divided into rational parts by way of economics, is the ultimate individualist because of the partitions he has learned from the alphabet and the printing press. One of the greatest potentialities of our new tools of communications--described by Marshall McLuhan as extensions of our senses--is to make visible those existences and experiences which cannot be perceived directly.
However, up until the seventeenth century, Western society valued the parts of the human body and understood that they worked together, the brain included. This was part of an organic philosophy that respected nature as a living organism: mature was seen as female, it was nurturing and motherly, satisfying the needs of human kind. At the other hand, nature could at times be wild, unpredictable, and the originator of chaos. According to McLuhan, it was the role of the scientific revolution to perform two functions on nature: to mechanize it and to control or have power over it. Although seen through early Christianity and Platonic philosophy, it is at this time when Western ideas made a profound shift away from organic theory and towards Enlightenment, thus marginalizing nature, Earth and the body. The Enlightened philosophical movement of the seventeenth century, which is characterized by the prevalence of human logic and reason over the illogical quality of nature, was in part a product of René Descartes' (1596-1650) notion of existence, "I think, therefore I am."
The Enlightenment theory further assumes that knowledge resides in the rationality of brain and because it is objective and independent, it is separate from our world and our bodies and is essentially disembodied. Our bodies are thus part of nature, which according to Enlightenment, is something to mechanize and have power over. This Enlightened point of view is the driving force behind the notion that “Virtual Reality” works of art facilitate a disembodied experience. These theories show the means of communication’s effects originated from creative individuals’ capacity to understand the perceptive changes, which came from technological effects over artists. Thus, McLuhan believes that the artist can solve disequilibrium problems made by the surfacing of a new mean. “The artist can correct the relations between feelings before new technology’s impact put the conscious procedures to sleep.” (McLuhan, 1964, p.86)
According McLuhan’s theory of three stages history, all societies and cultures can be distinguished on the basis of which media predominates (oral, print and electronic); oral societies are closed, static, communal and the ear is most important sensory organ; print societies are open, oriented towards progress, individualistic and the eye is the central sensory organ; electronic societies are global villages where temporal and spatial boundaries blur and all our senses are engaged subsequently leading to perceptual overloaded. This raises the question: what is peculiar to the electronic medium? What can we identify as its impact on the ‘scale’ and ‘pace’ of human perception? McLuhan suggests, for example, that the electronic world is integrated but decentralized, everything is connected but there appears to be no single centre. It is like a cubist painting which form or medium of communication is highlighted more than content: there is no perspective or illusion of three dimensional space, different pictorial planes get jumble up, brought in many different vantage points they make the word chaotic at once, denying “…the continuous, visual, linear structuring that arises from phonetic literacy” (McLuhan p.267). As for example in Pablo Picasso’s Factory in Horta de Ebbo,1909 (Figure I), the chaotic, yet carefully composed word could be a visual representation of such a medium of communication as radio which is “…not only a mighty awakener of archaic memories, forces and animosities, but a decentralizing, pluralistic force, as is really the case with all electric power and media” (McLuhan, Understanding Media/Radio, p.267). Thus cubism by seizing on instant total awareness, suddenly announced that the medium is the message... “Before electric speed... [t]he message, it seemed, was the “content”, as people used to ask what a painting was about’( McLuhan Understanding Media, p. 13.)
With the concession of mind over matter driving Western culture, it is no wonder that the quest for disembodiment, especially that of knowledge, existence, and experience, has manifest itself in the television realm. There was a desire to use new technology to enter a pure state of consciousness, one that leaves the body behind, as for example in Nam June Paik TV Garden installation of 1974 (FigureII-IV), where the viewer is invited to play a role of Narcissus falling in love with himself by looking in his selfamputated ”electronic image” mirrored by TV screen as it were reflected in a pond. (FigureIII)
Assuming Marshall McLuhan's conception of television as a "cold medium," i.e, a medium in which the receptor/viewer is not overloaded with data, but must actively participate in the dialogue, television is a highly appropriate vehicle for such representation of the body. In his TV Garden Paik does not impose a certain, pre-defined way of thinking on his audience but rather, embraces, multiple, and often opposes different perspectives on the role of the media in transformation of the society. Paik says: "Like [Marshall] McLuhan say, we are antenna for changing society. But not only antenna - we also have output capacity, capacity to humanize technology. My job is to see how establishment is working and to look for little holes where I can get my fingers in and tear away walls." ()
The function of media in society is a subject that has been investigated by Marshall McLuhan and, in another side, Gillian Wearing, (a British artist, born in Birmingham in 1963), a winner of the prestigious Turner Prize in 1997, she draws her inspiration from the formats of television documentaries and popular confession-type programmes, turning to photography and the use of video to explore the most intimate aspects of our relationship with others and with our own self. The theories that Marshall McLuhan proposes in Understanding Media are highly relevant to Wearing videoworks, as is Gillian’s portrayal of mediated societies to McLuhan's theories. McLuhan and Wearing both focus on the relationship between electronic media and the human condition, and the possible affects of this relationship in the social sphere.
In Wearing’s videos, such as 60 Minutes of Silence, 1997 (FigureV) Drunk,2000 (Figure VI), and Trauma,2000 (Figure VII) which we could see at in 2003 in her first Canada and United States survey Mass Observation, media introduce new patterns into human affairs as a result of the formal qualities they possess. Wearing in her unique way literalizes McLuhan's description of the electronic age by creating video narratives that revolve around media technology operating within the social sphere. In relation to McLuhan's theory that "the medium is the message" one could say that the television and television documentaries and popular confession-type television programmes have created new forms of experience. Gillian’s exceptionally frank work provides a sober picture of some aspects of contemporary British life, although they could easily be extrapolated to most of western society. (Figure V-FigureVII)
Therefore, McLuhan's identification of the formal elements of media, and consequent effects, illuminates the way media function as patterns of organization in our society. His emphasis on the human involvement and interaction with media illustrates how media organizes patterns of social practice and perception. Media disseminates information by converting data into forms of sensory stimulation, and the age of electronic media has created a social climate of increased media stimulation. Wearing depicts this relation between human beings and media technology as being an inevitable factor in the shaping of our consciousness. Media technology is indeed viewed as being a direct extension of man, which creates new and diverse experiences within the network of communication, therefore altering the terms of human experience. In the voyeuristic worlds of Gillian Wearing’s videos human existence is situated within a structure of media technology that is indeed a part of our consciousness, and physical everyday existence.
Resources
Art In Context http://www.artincontext.org/artist/p/nam_june_paik/images.htm
Amelia Jones, Activating Otherness in New Media
Art (http:// ) Parachute 113, 2004
Searchlight (Consciousness at the millennium)
California college of Arts and Crafts, 1999
