Transition21 | Dreams – Marshall McLuhan @tinylinkCC | Uploaded February 2017 | Updated October 2024, 3 hours ago.
"You invent the amazing images you see in your dreams -- everybody in dreaming is a pure poet, incredible imaginative constructions."

An exploration of the thought and functionality of dreaming.

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Recontexual news / image creation:
theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/dec/29/breaking-news-turning-the-lens-on-mass-media-getty

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In Through the Vanishing Point McLuhan wrote that the coherent, connected sense of visual space that came to the fore in the Renaissance diminished the roles of the other senses, artificially reinforced the value of a single point-of-view, and promoted detachment and disengagement. In contrast, McLuhan championed what he called a mosaic approach open to multiple perspectives in space and time, which is, for example, more characteristic of pre-Renaissance pictorial representation. When we strive for the visual coherence of a unified spatial perspective presenting a single moment in time, McLuhan felt that we sacrifice the unity of the self, with its multiple senses and memories holding various pasts present simultaneously.

"Acoustic space is organic and integral, perceived through the simultaneous interplay of all the senses; whereas “rational” or pictorial space is uniform, sequential and continuous and creates a closed world with none of the rich resonance of the tribal echoland."

Visual space is characterized by an emphasis on the eye, or geometric vision. Media that stress this type of vision, like the phonetic alphabet or print, alter our way of perceiving the world by stressing linearity. Technologies that emphasize the eye over the other senses produce the impression that things in a visual plane are connected in the same way that, when you read, words build on each other by following rules of grammar and logic. These rules are the product of a way of thinking that links things that otherwise do not necessarily have any connection. This tendency, to link things together, presupposes that things are made up of parts. To understand the whole, and the connections therein, you must dissect the parts; hence, objectivity becomes a value. This is the predominant form of most industrialist technologies, such as steam power, reading and writing.

The key characteristic of acoustic space is that it engages multiple senses at the same time. It does not demand that objects be dissected to be understood; rather, the multiple parts co-exist simultaneously. To understand acoustic space, you must perceive all of it, not focus on one part. In other words, acoustic space demands that you apprehend figure and ground simultaneously, that the senses work together. McLuhan believed that oral cultures existed in acoustic space since their primary mode of communicating was speech.

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Title: Through the Vanishing Point
Date: 7 March 1968
Location: Fordham University
Introduction: by John Culkin
Speakers: Marshall McLuhan, Harvey Parker

Thanks to mywebcowtube:
youtube.com/user/mywebcowtube