~ MARSHALL MCLUHAN® + VILEM FLUSSER’ COMMUNICATION + AESTHETIC TH OES REVISITED EDITED BY MELENTIE PANDILOVSKI AND TOM KOHUTVILEM FLUSSER AND MARSHALL MCLUHAN - MATRIX AND WAVE: Toward a Quantum Media Model (Transcript) Philip Pocock (A video Skype session between Berlin and Video Pool, Winnipeg, Canada, May 2012, and subsequent insertions.) I've threaded some voices of the people involved: Vilém Flusser, Marshall McLuhan, Erwin Schrédinger, Werner Heisenberg, Albert Einstein, and Niels Bohr and assembled inklings of a proposal, an in- formal one, for a Quantum Media Model, a poetic, art-world equiva- lent to the Standard Model of Quantum Mechanics. Trouble is that no one, not even theoretical physicists claim to have a complete understanding of quantum theory. Quantum mechan- ics’ great communicator, Niels Bohr, himself lamented: “If thinking about the quantum theory doesn’t make you dizzy [schwindlig], then you haven't understood it.” That makes it all the more fun to think about as an access point to gain understanding into the entanglement of consciousness and computation in contemporary social media and the future of video. Erwin Schrodinger demonstrated in 1926 that quantum mechanics is valid if a light quantum (photon) is considered to be a wave instead of a particle, His contribution in this regard was a three-dimensional wave equation, As opposed to the other proponent of quantum mechanics, Werner Heisenberg, whose abstruse matrix mathematics rendered the physics abstract and unvisualizable, Schrédinger was doggedly con- vinced that physics must remain imaginable in the mind’s eye, visual- izable in the Newtonian tradition. Einstein agreed.60 MCLUHAN & FLUSSER’S COMMUNICATION & AESTHETIC THEORIES REVISITED Werner Heisenberg, who had already put his quantum mechan- ics stock in probability rather than visuality as a means to model our subatomic world, chastised Schrédinger immediately for his classical Newtonian view of physics. Instead of picturing that world, Heisenberg preferred to calculate its possibilities with matrix mechanics, a matrix being an arrangement of numerical values or other mathematical ob- jects represented in two-dimensional tabular form, a database. Ie’ easier to make this comparison if I construct a dialogue between Schrédinger and Heisenberg, Bohr and Einstein, assembled in large part from Louisa Gilder’s remarkable book The Age of Entanglement (2009). At times, these protagonists seem to contradict themselves, and a dazzling obscurity envelops our understanding of things quantum: HEISENBERG: “The electron and the atom do not possess any degree of physical reality, as objects of daily experience.” Bou: “Everything we call ‘real’ is made of things that cannot be re- garded as real. A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.” SCHRODINGER: “Of course, the introduction of the observer must not be misunderstood to suggest that some kind of subjective features are to be brought into the description of nature. The observer has, rather, only the function of registering decisions, i.e., processes in space and time, and it does not matter whether the observer is an apparatus or a human being.” EINSTEIN: “But you [Heisenberg] don’t seriously believe that only ob- servable quantities should be considered in a physical theory.” SCHRODINGER: “An atom in reality is merely the diffraction halo of an electron wave.” BOHR: “ When it comes to atoms, language can only be used as in poetry.” SCHRODINGER: “The fury thing was a German called Heisenberg with the help of my friend Max Born had come up with a theory half a year before me. I knew of his theory, of course, but felt discouraged, not to say repelled, by the methods of transcendental algebra, which appeared difficult to me, and by the lack of visualizability.”VILEM FLUSSER AND MARSHALL MCLUHAN - MATRIX AND WAVE BOHR: “Schrédinger, I think you are far too wedded to pictorial ways of thinking.” HEISENBERG: “The more I think about the physical portion of Schrédinger’s theory, the more repulsive I find it. ... What Schrédinger writes about the visualizability of his theory is probably not quite right, in other words, it’s crap.” BOHR: (paraphrased by Heisenberg) “Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a con- nection though we can only speak of it in images and parables. In this case, the images and parables are by and large the classical concepts, wave and corpuscle. They do not fully describe the real.” SCHRODINGER: “He [Bohr] is completely convinced that any under- standing in the usual sense of the word is impossible. Therefore the conversation is almost immediately driven into philosophical questions.” Bonr: “The very existence of quantum entails the necessity of a re- nunciation of the classical ideal of causality and a radical revision of our attitude toward the problem of physical reality.” HEISENBERG: “ Words can only describe things of which we can form mental pictures. Fortunately, mathematics is not subject to this limi- tation, and it has been possible to invent mathematical terms. ... For visualization, however, we must content ourselves with two incomplete analogies - the wave picture and the corpuscular picture.” EINSTEIN: (to his best friend Michele Besso) “Heisenberg has laid a huge quantum egg. ... A real sorcerer’s multiplication table, in which infinite numbers replace the Cartesian coordinates.” HEISENBERG: “I believe that one can formulate the emergence of the classical path of a particle as follows: the path comes in to being only because we observe it.” SCHRODINGER: “His [Heisenberg’s] theory had no space and time within the atom. | don’t know what that means! And because of the, to me, very difficult-appearing methods of transcendental algebra much otote et oo self.word = word pst) Parner] Stee ot Sta ed psresene ester) coon pore se eee) eee ee erat nero gy) Cina cPesth tte stoner ect} Pay (vale): Coat Pe teens Freer earn peer pol eed ce oT A€(1en(self.words) > 1000)! salf.words = self.words{10:] ea words_old = [] tay FIGURE 1 UNMOVIE (2001-| video server Python scriptVILEM FLUSSER AND MARSHALL MCLUHAN - MATRIX AND WAVE harder than what we're doing here and because of the lack of vividness (Anschaulichkeit) I felt deterred by it, if not to say repelled.” HEISENBERG: “It could be like you are watching a film, and often the transition from one picture to another does not occur suddenly ~ the first picture becomes slowly weaker while the second becomes stronger, so that in an intermediate state we do not know which picture is in- tended. In the atom too, a situation could arise in which — for a time - we just do not know what quantum state the electron is in.” SCHRODINGER: “There is nothing new in the postulate that in the end exact science should aim at nothing more than the description of what can really be observed. The question is only whether from now on we shall have to refrain from tying description to a clear hypothesis about the real nature of the world.” EINSTEIN: (to Schrddinger) * You are the only person with whom Lam actually willing to come to terms. ... Almost all the other fellows do not look from the facts to the theory but from the theory to the facts; they cannot get out of the network of already accepted concepts; in- stead, they only wriggle about inside.” HEISENBERG: “What the word wave and particle means, one no longer knows ~ there are too many classical words for the quantum world.” EINSTEIN: “Don't you see, Heisenberg? It is theory which first deter- mines what can be observed.” HEISENBERG: “ We have to remember that what we observe is not na- ture herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” BOHR: “Heisenberg, the nicest mathematical scheme in the world won't solve the paradoxes we are up against. Classical words like wave and Particle are all we have. This paradox is central.” Heisenberg’s denigration of the role of the visual in quantum theory is based upon his Uncertainty Principle that states that the position and speed of a particle cannot both be known to an observer (human or ma- chine) at the same time. The measurement (observation) of a particle’s 6FIGURE 2 UNMOVIE Fountain-Image (BubbleCam Kinetic Koan]VILEM FLUSSER AND MARSHALL MCLUHAN ~ MATRIX AND WAVE position necessarily disturbs its momentum (speed) and vice versa. It’s analogous to observing a fast moving object. Fither the measuring de- vice (the eye or camera) pans in sync with the motion and pinpoints the object’s position, or it doesn’t and all the observation does is reg- ister a blur, a measure of the object’s speed. Neither a camera nor an observer can measure both “realities” at once. One might argue that at the macro level of everyday existence, the level at which life is lived, unvisualizable quantum theory seems like a clever solution, but what’s the problem? Quantum invisibility pre- sents a paradox illustrated by the Schrddinger’s Cat thought experi- ment, intended as a critique of Heisenberg’s obscure matrix approach to quantum theory, the result of which reads like a Wild West bill: Cat Wanted: Dead AND Alive. Parallel paradoxes abound in social media. Is a Facebook profile a virtual death mask posted to screens AND a real world diary accessible to the powers-that-be? Is a 3D metaverse a virtual world, a pixilated necropolis inhabited by tribes of zombies AND a laboratory space for modeling real world (tt) identity? Common sense aside, quantum theory, its codes and provisions ask, as Jacques Derrida does, what comes before the question? I’m go- ing to play a couple of very short quantum theory clips that F've culled from YouTube. They’re wonderfully spacey, and each runs about 20- 30 seconds. If one enters transcoding mode and thinks “social media,” then quantum parallels abound. Then the speakers in these clips begin to take on both a Flusserian and McLuhanesque hybrid character. Let me know if Skype lets you see these videos over there. [Skype video of Schrédinger’s Cat novelist Robert Anton Wilson plays. “All physical matter, everything we have around us is the result of a fre- quency. And what that also means is that if you amplify the frequency, the structure of matter will change.” Ok, so that’s a little bit abou the more contemporary cosmology of quantum physics, namely, superstring theory, which contemporary Physics communicator Brian Greene describes as a search for “what stuff is made of.” As a superstring theorist, he believes that subatomic Particles are not the basic building blocks of matter, and that inside all of these particles and subparticles, you end up with a frequencyFIGURE 3 UNMOVIE Fountain-Image (Wireless art data cascade detail]VILEM FLUSSER ANO MARSHALL MCLUHAN ~ MATRIX AND WAVE, or a superposition of frequencies that may be shared, entangled with other vibrating subparticle strings anywhere in the universe, or in one of countless parallel universes. Does that mean that matter is made of sound, so to speak? Is mass a force produced by immaterial vibra- tions? Sounds like art and rings like McLuhan’s notion that we are naturally immersed in acoustic space, and that we were for a time banished from this continuum with the arrival of the phonetic alpha- bet that transformed our ears into eyes, and which is now dissolving in the electric age, re-immersing us again in an artificially ubiquitous and deeply resonating environment. McLUHAN: “Electric information is always lacking in visual connect- edness and always structured by resonant intervals.” FLUSSER: “Everything aesthetic begins as a terrifying enormous noise (big bang’), and as it grows more habitual (‘redundant’) it ends in a quiet whisper (‘whimper’)? [Skype video of Robert Anton Wilson continues.| “The modified Copenhagen view is that light is neither waves nor par- ticles until we look, and the things adjust themselves depending on what we're looking at and what with. An electron is not anywhere un- til we look, and when we look the electron decides to be somewhere as long as we're looking; as soon as we stop looking the electron is everywhere again” Ok, one last short clip, this one from Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics by Prof. Michio Kaku: [Skype video plays. “In other words, the electron is a point particle, but you don’t know quite where it is, and the probability of finding it at any given point is given by a wave, the Schridinger wave. So we have this beautiful syn- thesis of waves and particles.” The cult novelist Wilson accents the Zen far-outness artists prefer to read into quantum theory (as Schrddinger did later in life), while the 6768 MCLUHAN & FLUSSER’S COMMUNICATION & AESTHETIC THEORIES REVISITED physics professor Kaku compliments that spirit with a succinct, down- to-earth take on the wave/particle duality in quantum physics. Both pay homage to the reconciliatory stance Bohr took in his Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics in which light is considered to have a dual wave/particle nature. I remember my high school phys- ics teacher joking with us that on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays light is a particle, and the rest of the week it’s a wave. The wave/particle complementarity Bohr brought to quantum me- chanics some physicists deem positivistic, others diplomatic, and every- one incomplete. Nonetheless it can be seen to cohere with what might be advanced as the basis for a quantum theory for electric media pool- ing the dual mediologies of McLuhan, who tends towards Schrdinger’s more Pop position (wave) and Flusser, tending toward Heisenberg’s more phenomenological position (matrix). Perhaps one day media artists and theoreticians will speak of a Winnipeg Interpretation of Quantum Media © Let me improvise an imaginary script with our Prairie pundit McLuhan and the Czech exile Flusser to juxtapose their quantum-related ideas, as well as their kinship to Schrédinger and Heisenberg respectively: MCLUHAN: “The revolution that de Broglie [Schrédinger’s muse] describes is a derivative not of the alphabet but of the telegraph and of radio.” FLUSSER: “Behind the keyboard, on which they hit, is a swarm of par- ticles. And this swarm isa field of possibilities, which can be realized.” MCLUHAN: “Electric speed is approximately the speed of light, and this constitutes an information environment that has basically an acous- tic structure. ... You are drawn into that [Tv] tube, as an inner trip. You're totally involved. You have no objectivity, no distance. And it is acoustic. It resonates.” FLUSSER: “Mere observation of an object by a subject may change the object. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the praxis of ethnol- ogy are merely two among many examples.”VILEM FLUSSER AND MARSHALL MCLUHAN ~ MATRIX AND WAVE MCLUHAN: “Modern physics abandons the specialized visual space of Descartes and Newton, and re-enters the subtle auditory space of the non-literate world.” FLUSSER: “The TV program is the result of scientific theories (texts) ... it needs texts (for instance, telegrams) for it to function. The new types of images are best called techno-images. ... Imagine culture as a gi- gantic transcoder from text into image. It will be a sort of black box (news about events, theoretical comments about them, scientific pa- pers, poetry, philosophical speculations), and they will come out again as images (films, rv programs, photographic pictures): which is to say that history will flow into the box, and that it will come out of it un- der the form of myth and magic. ... The box is the fullness of time. ... From the point of view of the images that come out of the box, this will be a situation in which history becomes a pretext for programs.” MCLUHAN: “Heidegger surf-boards along the electronic wave as trium- phantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave.” FLUSSER: “A lecture may be considered a natural communication in this way .... The lecturer is a sender (he emits sound waves), the public is a receiver (it receives the waves), and the air in the room is a medium (it transmits the waves). Now, this is a thermodynamic process, and part of the energy invested in it is degraded into heat. The sum total of information in the room diminishes as the lecture goes on, But the lecture may be considered a cultural communication in this way: The lecturer isa sender (be emits words), and the language is a medium (it transmits words). Seen thus, the lecture is not a thermodynamic process, but is of a different order. The sum total of information in the room increases as the lecture goes on, if seen thus. And this is in fact the rea- son why it increases information, why it is negentropic.” MCLUHAN: “In electric simultaneous time, we are encompassed by the new electric space which is simultaneous and acoustic, ive., we hear from all directions at once creating a space which is a sphere with cen- tre everywhere and margin nowhere. ... Quantum mechanics stresses the discontinuity and the resonant interval in all material structures. But modern physicists are visual thinkers to a man, in spite of this.” 670 MCLUHAN & FLUSSER'S COMMUNICATION & AESTHETIC THEORIES REVISITED FLUSSER: “We are forced to split up the things and processes of the world into three orders of magnitude. In the medium order of magni- tude, which is measurable in our measures, that is in centimetres and seconds, Newton is still valued. In the big order of things, that is, the one measureable in light years, the Einsteinean rules are valued. In the smaller one, which is measureable in micro-microns and nano- seconds, the rules of quantum mechanics are valid. In each of these three worlds, we have to think differently, try to imagine differently, and act differently.” I'm going to put on a video document of an algorithmic film piece I made with a terrific team of former students: Axel Heide, Thorsten Kloepfer, and Oliver Kauselmann, and a Zen monk and space sculp- tor Gregor Stehle for the Future Cinema exhibition that began its tour at the zKm Centre for Art and Media, Germany, co-curated by Peter Weibel and Jeffrey Shaw. [Skype video of uvMovie plays.] This document was videoed by the curator of the show, Margit Rosen, back in 2002. The work UNMOviE is rather long. It opened on November 11th, 2001, and ran 24/7 for several years online and inter- mittently in museums, including incarnations at Banff’s Walter Phillips Gallery, co-curated, I might add, by Winnipeg’s Anthony Kiendl, Galerie Oboro on Montreal curated by Florian Wiist, as well as the 1cc Tokyo, the Kiasma in Helsinki, and the location depicted on our screen now, the Lothringer 13 Kunstehalle in Munich (figs. 1-2). Our UNMOVEE actors (or actor-media, as Gilles Deleuze would characterize them) never got tired. They are synthespians, that is, con- versation simulators commonly known as chat bots. They are very ar- tificially intelligent and draw upon a set of linguistic algorithms, open source ones, that generate what Flusser terms pretexts ~ “History be- comes pretexts for programs. In sum, the future of writing is to write pretexts for programs while believing that one is writing for utopia.” These pretexts or bot dialogue scenes occur on a screen-stage that may be populated as well by anyone logging in over the internet or locally via rcp-1P in any one of our exhibition spaces. The bots write the script that semantically culls “pattern-alistic” online-user videosVILEM FLUSSER AND MARSHALL MCLUHAN ~ MATRIX AND WAVE that Flusser would consider posthistorical techno-images - “The new type of images |techno-images] are unlike their prehistoric predeces- sors in that they are themselves products of texts, and in that they feed on texts. They are products of history. ... Imagine culture as a gigantic transcoder from text into image. ... Alll texts flow into that box (news about events, theoretical comments about them, scientific papers, po- etry, philosophical speculations), and they will come out again as im- ages (films, rv programs, photographic pictures): which is to say that history will flow into the box, and that it will come out of it under the form of myth and magic.” Our synthespians act according to the classic tetrad of cinematic states of behaviour (listen, talk, chase, flee). When they feel like con- versing on stage ~ at times they feign reticence and wander ~ they simulate dialogue which is fed into the uvMovie black box of our software and technology which Flusser would consider an apparatus- operator complex (his black box described above and its functionaries or programmers necessary for the complex to operate) in which our meta-cinematic codes (scripts and cues) act upon text input from the UNMOVLE stage in real time to output a never-ending UNMOViE stream of Internet user-generated videos, that is, until one looks away or logs off. Observers are invited to become observer-participants (You's) and improvise scenes with the bots on stage, initiating what Flusser would consider narratologically Buberian (“I and Thou”) dialogic situations. ‘An UNMOViE participant logging in online or at the show became a You as we called their cloud-like avatar representations on stage on screen. (This is four years before YouTube entered the picture). You dialogue was “remembered” by the interlocutor bot and entered its digital memory, available to it to utter in phrases generated by an- other You it connected with and addressed at a future time on stage. I realize now how Flusserian it all was. From the t generated by the bots and You-sers on stage, under certain circumstances that we had scripted with our code, words that recur in dialogues (chat bots generally match words to simulate conversation) drummed up play- lists of user-generated online video and streamed them in montage or montrage (Deleuze) through our early apps virtually and variably em- bodied within datatectural (data interwoven with dwelling) installa~ tions, including our UNMovEE (Wall-Image, Fountain-Image, Stand-in, nFIGURE 4 UNMOVIE The Mind Cannot Rest on Anything Water Phillips Gallery, BanffVILEM FLUSSER AND MARSHALL MCLUHAN - MATRIX AND WAVE Two Tourists, Kiasma Extension Proposal, The Mind Cannot Rest on Anything, and Mandala) productions (figs. 3-5). [Pause. Video plays while speaker reads texts.] As algorithmic cinema, UNMOVIE proposes distributed audiences act as participants (“you's”). Entangling past-present-future scenarios in what quantum physicists call a slice of Now, UNMOvIE is all middle ~ no beginning, no end ~ curiously predicting an immanent Quantum Media Model brought about by advances in hardware, algorithms, and ubiquitous acceleration in the production of code-generated images and animations. And to recap and reinforce the irreality of the quantum Imaginary described in the YouTube videos I played earlier, et me inter- pret an absurd scenario in an imaginary light, that is, how a quantum media event happens along: a photon expands through space as a wave/ particle of light. Triggered by an observation, it’s compelled to collide with an electron, and its wave collapses. This releases energy and causes the two-dimensional surface of the energized atom to unfold and create provisionally an illusion of three-dimensional mass in space for a time. For that observer, an image of reality occurs. It is our consciousness, in effect, that catalyzes this entire process that filters a discreet world from a timeless universe, or, to rephrase an iconic line from The Matrix, we substituted the desert of wave particles for the “real.” Quantum me- dia may denigrate cultural production based on visual re-presentation and reconnect it instead with performative probabilities of visuality. As the observation is happening, a measure of energy released from the photon’s wave collapse excites other locally and nonlocally entangled wavelparticle photons to create new probabilities for future produc- tions of observed “reality.” It’s this kind of mental yoga that stimulates uNMoviE. It’s more popularly mind-bending with the proposed quan- tum media mechanics the Wachowski brothers (via Sophia Stewart’s The Third Eye novel) were decoding in Matrix. SLAVOJ Z1ZEK: “The Matrix also functions as a screen that separates us from the Real that makes the ‘desert of the real’ bearable. It is not the ultimate referent to be covered/gentrified/domesticated by the screen of. fantasy — the Real is also and primarily the screen itself as the obstacle that always already distorts our perception of the referent, of the reality B% MCLUHAN & FLUSSER'S COMMUNICATION & AESTHETIC THEORIES REVISITED out there. ... When a screen intervenes between ourselves and the Real, it always generates a notion of what is In-itself, beyond the screen (of the appearance), so that the gap between appearance and the In-itself is always-already ‘for us.’ Consequently, if we subtract from the Thing the distortion of the Screen, we lose the Thing itself. ... The Thing in itself is ultimately the gaze, not the perceived object. ... The Matrix it- self is the Real that distorts our perception of reality.” Zizek questions in another section of the passage from which the above quote is taken, asking if the Wachowski’s Matrix is not an exacting supermodern replica of Plato’s dispositif of the cave? (Matrix means womb.) And here is an indication of Flusser’s Matrix take on quantum desertification occurring in our information society. FLUSSER: “It has been demonstrated that atoms are divisible into particles and particles of particles, and that individuals are divisible. However, something far stranger has turned up. When I subdivide the object I can no longer precisely say if it is objective or subjective. And conversely, when I rationalize the subject, the individual, I can no longer say that the part I have at hand is subject or object. ... If we feed the decideme [decision] into the computer, then the computer decides. It is then senseless to ask if the computer is a subject or an object. ... The calculation shreds it as both subject and object into sand that scatters probabilities ... one facet is object, another as subject appear. And with this picture to live in, | am ina desert, a sand desert, the grains of which are neither subject nor object. Instead only potentialities of a subject and an object, a scattering cut through with overlapping fields of pos- sibilities. Thanks to computation I can then compost on this field my alternative subject and alternative object.” As I have said, uNMovre is an instance of what might be termed a Quantum Media. Three reasons why: first, it acts as an open rather than a closed digital packet-based platform (quantum means packet). Second, it deals with probabilistic rather than determined content; it performs rather than represents. Third, it allows allopatric access to its mutable source-codes and contents, an interactive database (Linux, MysQL, PHP, Python), rather than one-way access to an interreactive databank (Read Only Memory, cb- and DVD-ROM). Please don’t forgetVILEM FLUSSER AND MARSHALL MCLUHAN ~ MATRIX AND WAVE. that the Uncertainty Principle also holds for rhetoric and that excep- tions are also a rule. Not all database media are experienced interac- tively, and not all pvp media are experienced interreactively. [Pause. Speaker describes video playing.] On your screen is an instance of unmMovie we titled Fountain-Image. The cable from which we suspend our collages snakes around other objects in the work, ultimately climbing like an electric cobra up to the transmitting and receiving tip of an antenna at the top of the room. This is one example of a myriad of ways we have installed the project under various site-specific circumstances and discussions with our curators. All the data, every virtual bit, the user videos, the dialogue and key- strokes from participants at the site and remotely online gushed from the top of the antenna like an information fountain. It was a wireless fountain, raining invisible yet content-carrying waves of ones and ze- ros, lighting up screens and sounding on speakers with and for a par- ticipant audience. To compliment the as-yet (2002) uncommon WLAN fountain, we interwove with the antenna’s data cable a second circuit of water pumps and tubes through which melted snow water — it was winter at the time of the installation ~ and at points gushed and gur- gled in the installation as well. The water we used was melted from snow collected around a lovely Baroque fountain that was just down the street from the exhibition space at WeiRenburger Platz, Munich. ‘That fountain was off for the winter, and uNMoviE (Fountain-Image) was happy to act as its understudy. [Pause. Presentation resumes.] Fountain-Image was a specific instance of a purpose attributed to visual art by Marshall McLuhan, that is, to distill our shared envi- ronment out into our collective midst, to render its necessary invis- ibility as background suddenly visible and palpable, in our situation, to make data strangely with us, tangible as its waves of information energy slosh about in our space and metaphorically collapse our an tenna’s transmitted frequencies into pixels on our screens. Perhaps as information environment, it reflected upon and cast Marshall MeLuhan’s acousmatic environmentalism into the age of ubiquitous 8{anol boges 1 wk aut FIGURE 5 UNMOVIE Stage and Stream Screenshots (scriptword - BuddhalVILEM FLUSSER AND MARSHALL MCLUHAN ~ MATRIX AND WAVE computing and social media, that years after our fountain disappeared, has dawned. Inspired by T'S. Eliot's auditory imagination filtered through his Toronto cohorts Harold Innis and Ted Carpenter, MeLuhan’s original premise, that electrified humans inhabit acoustic space, again poses the possibility that a quantum media model just may be thinkable: if not now, then certainly when quantum computing comes around and the bit, either 0 or 1, becomes the qubit (a quantum-bit), a 0 and x (which is equivalent to imagining that our planet is spinning in opposite di- rections at the same time). Quantum computing swells media’s two- tone digital harmonic scale to unimaginable proportions, allowing the entire current universe of information to be stored and processed by a compact array of quantum computers. This makes a Quantum Media Model at some point nevitable (and policy is essential or unscrupulous governments will exploit this power). Curiously, McLuhan’s adherence to the acousmatic makes his mus- ings future-proof in many ways, and it makes me think that some- how he uses the words acoustic and medium almost interchangeably, whereas Flusser’s applications of the word medium are far more particilate in nature and more likely to need structural maintenance from time to time to persevere the coming Quantum Media age. MCLUHAN: “Auditory space has no point of favoured focus. It’s a sphere, without fixed elements, space made by the thing itself, not space con- taining that the thing. It's not pictorial space, boxed-in, but dynamic, always in flux, repeating its dimensions moment by moment. It is in- different to background.” That he wrote with Ted Carpenter, who was in the Toronto Communications Group back in 1960, for Explanations. FLUSSER: “The structure of a message reflects the physical character of its symbols more than the structure of the universe it communicates. This explains the famous sentence The medium is the message.” [Session brought to a close.] Transcription by Tom Kohut, March 2013 1CONTRIBUTORS, society co-constitute each other” (Technoetic Arts Journal, 2012); “Consciousness and Electronic Culture” (Consciousness Reframed: Catalogue of 4th International caiia-star Research Conference, 2002); “The Position of Culture in Southeast Europe” (Understanding the Balkans, 2002); and “On Modes of Consciousness(es) and Electronic Culture” (Glimpse: Phenomenology and Media, 2000). He has contrib- uted to the International Symposium of Electronic Arts (Chicago 1997, Liverpool/Manchester 1998, Nagoya 2002, Singapore 2008, Istanbul 2or1) and has delivered papers at international conferences in San Diego, Perth and Beijing on biotechnology and art. PHILIP POCOCK Prof, Philip Pocock is a Canadian artist based in Europe. During the 1980s, he exhibited documentary photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada and the Cooper Union in New York, where he was a faculty member at the International Centre of Photography. He co- founded the Journal of Contemporary Art in 1988 and, since 1993, has developed projects with Moma Paris, Nam June Paik Art Centre Seoul, Documenta X and zkm Karlsruhe and the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art (Winnipeg, Canada). BARBARA RAUCH Dr. Barbara Rauch is an artist practitioner and research academic. She is a Digital Futures Initiative hire in a tenure-track position at OCAD University, Toronto, in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies and Graduate Studies. Rauch is the Graduate Program Director for the Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in Art, Media, & Design (1AMD). She is the Director of the eMotion Research Project in the Digital Media Research and Innovation Institute, researching the development of emo- tion with the facilitation of data analysis using advance technology in 3 printing, sculpting, and analysis. “In the lab, we aim to designate an alternative format of acknowledging discourse around the topic of emotion in artistic practice. Situating ourselves in an academic and in- terdisciplinary research-led environment, we consider the ‘studio’ as a ge- ographic and emotional location in which process and production takes, place. Through practice-led research, we connect current studio practices to reflexive visual analysis as a transformative research methodology.” 323Canadian media theorist MARSHALL MCLUHAN and Czech-born phenomenologist VILEM FLUSSER both focused on the social, cultural, psycho- logical and physiological aspects of mass media in their work, but up until now they have rarely been associated together. Marshall McLuhan and Vilém Flusser’s Communication and Aesthetic Theories Revisited brings the two theorists into constellation over topics including: networked and distributed consciousness; cinematic and clinical modes of perception; speculative physics; digital imagery and database culture; biopolitics, cybernetics and ethics. Starting from the Video Pool Media Arts Centre colloquium held in May/June 2012, this volume presents new interpretations and modes of deploying the provocative work of McLuhan and Flusser to address our present situation of ubiquitous communication technologies which insinuate themselves into the interstices of everyday life. ROY ASCOTT SCOTT BILLINGS RICHARD CAVELL STEPHEN CROCKER CLINT ENNS DAVID E. CARRILLO FUCHS TOM KOHUT PAUL LEVINSON SIMONE MAHRENHOLZ DAN MELLAMPHY MELENTIE PANDILOVSKI PHILIP POCOCK BARBARA RAUCH PETER SCHWENGER POLONA TRATNIK MONIKA VRECAR MARCO ANTONIO CALDERON ZACAULA $29.99 CDN 2015 ISBN 1-770-63175-5 | | | 9"781770"631755