Sketchbook

In order to keep up with course specification and demands, as I travelled through the degree which I recently finished, there were often authors, artists, books and ideas I had no choice but to watch disappear into the distance behind me. I knew I would revisit some of these as soon as I was able to. Picking up Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) again has been particularly exciting because he was so very ahead of his time. I began by listening to a few podcasts and am now making my way through his 1964 book Understanding Media. I keep kicking myself for not reading it earlier, especially since I’ve evidently been so influenced by his ideas, because, of course, he had influenced so many others. There could have been a lot of quoting from it in my final essay.

During my latest research, I found a clip of an interview where McLuhan shares his ideas with a quintessential old English duffer, also popular in his day, journalist Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990). Muggeridge scoffs at the idea of phenomenology, which in retrospect and especially in relation to the most up to date theories about how sight might work (see Donald D Hoffman, The Case Against Reality, 2020) looks ludicrous. Throughout, he dismisses McLuhan’s theories along with the theorists he draws upon such as Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). ‘All words’ and nonsense, he proclaims, demonstrating a perfect example of blind, stubborn faith in the crumbling edifice of English exceptionalism, a faith that persists to this day and is, in my view and many others’ the cause of much contemporary danger, not to mention, embarrassment for this country across the globe.

I have made some preliminary experiments/sketches with the footage but am not yet sure if this practical meandering is worth pursuing. I put the footage through a machine learning app that claims to identify objects. I then took screenshots and rephotographed them, looking for feedback in the images. I have also tried setting the footage to music, composed by friend and collaborator Simon Gwynne with the help of Magenta’s Music Transformer Neural Network. Maybe some small piece of work will emerge from these experiments. Maybe not. Either way, it is certainly worth revisiting McLuhan , who I will no doubt write about again in the months to come.