The Global Village

 It's a pretty easy concept to grasp, the world is getting smaller. In McLuhan's lifetime it was things like satellite news, long distance telephone calls, and international mass-marketing of consumer items, like the Beatles. Now we have auto-translate, zoom, and instagram, the app which is making everyone visually literate. McLuhan's musings on his 'global village' were rather dark, rooted in the cold war, which wasn't really over until after McLuhan's death. The last section of the book opens with a picture of Marilyn Monroe attending the 1959 visit of USSR leader Nikita Khrushchev to the US.

This visit coincided with a period of aggressive build-up of nuclear weapons by both countries. Next comes...

"The (media) environment as a processor of information is propaganda"

A line that's definitely worth pondering.

"Propaganda ends where dialog begins."

 

 

Now with interactive media, do we really have any true dialog? Is instagram all the commercials with none of the programs? And with only the most smug, cliche comments?

Next;

"Quảng Đức's self-immolation came in response to the persecution of Buddhists by the government under Diệm." Students from Vietnam always have much to say about how misleading the narration here is. Then...

"God is dead."

Interestingly interpreted by McLuhan, a devout Catholic. Then, symmetry with the beginning. "You" becomes "...and who are you?" ...it all depends on who you're with.

How do you end this?...with a New Yorker cartoon that propagandizes McLuhan!

Found Magazine

Found Magazine #2, published in 2002.

 Found Magazine was created by Davy Rothbart and Jason Bitner. In the early 2000s it was published as a magazine and wow, it really was a cool project that had a huge following.

Some back issues and compilations are still available on their website or you can follow them on instagram, where they are still actively posting items.

More Robert Frank

Thank you Gerald Fox for doing this beautiful documentary.

 

 Know it didn't come so easy but that may help it be so good.

 

Robert Frank's Journey to the Outside

Sarah Greenough discusses the structure of The Americans in this video. She authored the 528 page volume that investigates Frank's Guggenheim project and the resulting 180 page book, first published in the United States in 1959. More here

Pemiere Pro Tutorial

This is a fairly tolerable tutorial and completely in sync with our assignment;

 

 

From Work to Text

This essay extends the notion of 'the death of the author' to an analysis of forms. The Work is the physical product, The Text is the consumption, where the ideas can live on and mutate. It's almost cliche now to look at an artwork and talk about 'the text that surrounds it', but this idea is relatively new, and represents for many the transition from Structuralism to Post-Structuralism. 

Here it's very clearly explained by Tom Nicholas;

Acknowledgment of the text can transform meaning;

These images could be decor in a clinic. When put in the context of power and race they become powerfully loaded.

Robert Hughes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Roland Barthes and Us

 Welcome! In this class we will be working on term-long projects and looking at some of the ideas of Roland Barthes. Translations of ideas originally written in French. Even if we can't follow the words the tone of his speech is significant;

Here's a very friendly overview of the structuralist theory we will be exploring;

Tom Nicholas doesn't get to Barthes until 15 minutes into this video but the linguistic theory that informs structuralism is good background on the origin of Barthes' concepts.