Notes on a Process: April 2013

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Filling Station

"Filling Station". oil on canvas. 6 x 4 feet.

Painting 200 final, we were asked to produce a horizontal composition with an environmental theme, I began thinking about bottled water, water ownership rights, etc. I imagined a scene built around something like a gas station where water is as equally commodified a resource. Progress shots below:

"McLuhan Invokes a Shamanic Analogue"

(This is a midterm essay I wrote for the class "Technology & Contemporary Art". We were required to discuss the writing of Marshall McLuhan in relation to several artists and their work. It's a few pages so I hid the rest under the jump break.)

McLuhan Invokes a Shamanic Analogue

Prevailing Western cultural myths surrounding technological advancement plot a trajectory of cumulative “innovations” that propel civilization – and by extension the individual – in a progressively more rational, mechanized, automated and abiological direction: away from the natural world and the animal body. It is generally accepted that technology represents a triumph over nature via a body of progressive improvements on tools and other media, and while that can be demonstrated to be categorically true, any analysis of the underlying side effects of individuals submerged in the techno-industrial milieu, especially negative observations, are met with skepticism, confusion or derision and occur late if at all. In the mid-20^th century, Marshall McLuhan presented an alternative interpretation that reversed the trajectory of the previous Weltanschauung; specialized, machine-like Cartesian man was a biproduct of print technology, print itself was a detour and the new electric technology promised to paradoxically deliver humanity back to an audile-tactile, whole field perception illuminated by the image of an instantaneously connected global tribe. It is the purpose of this paper to describe McLuhan's pioneering and prescient analyses that continue to run contrary to the generally accepted view of the techno-human condition (a mindset itself, according to McLuhan, that is a relic of long obviated print-oriented sense ratios[1]) in relation to individuals working in the arts and their role in the potential elucidation of the hidden yet profoundly transformative effects of the ubiquitous experience of media.

"The idea of a dimension-roving lens vehicle, once articulated, was never far away."
Inspired by Terence McKenna and Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984).
Watercolor and ink on watercolor paper, 6x4 inches.