Discussion with Baruch Gottlieb, Jamie Allen and David Gauthier – Marshall McLuhan Salon

1 February 2014, 14:00
Special opening hours McLuhan Archive: 31 Jan 2014, 12:00 - 18:00 and 1 Feb 2014, 14:00 - 18:00
Marshall McLuhan Salon, Embassy of Canada, Ebertstraße 14, 10117 Berlin
Free admission, please register here

transmediale and the Marshall McLuhan Salon of the Embassy of Canada present a new edition of the discussion series McLuminations, Counter-Environment - Infrastructures and Substrata of the Global Village, moderated by Baruch Gottlieb and featuring the transmediale 2014 residency artists Jamie Allen and David Gauthier. Together they will analyse the artists’ understanding of “infrastructure critique” attempting to elaborate the connections with and departures from McLuhan’s concept of “Media.” The Marshall McLuhan Salon has the largest audiovisual archive about the media philosopher Herbert Marshall McLuhan outside of Canada, and will be open during the festival.
 

CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE
Eschewing art-and-technology practices that incline towards some kind of “future,” CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE looks for a “clearer picture of what are present technologies are, what they do for us, what the say about our culture, hopes, desires, needs.” (Parikka) CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE at transmediale 2014 is a survey of the post-digital media landscape, creating projective data viewpoints and slices through the database. The new datascape, always interpreted and intensified, is interesting to us as a Mcluhanesque “anti-environment,” a couterpoint to the invisible statistical habitat in which we live, the quantified lens through which we scrutinize the world around us. The resolution, intensity and projection of instrumentally derived data, measurement and quantification realises “hot” and “cold” literacies, anew—yet again “reprogramming of sensory life.” (MM) Further, CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE creates a self-critical institutional form—a magnification of what scaffolds and subtends an art and technology festival, through points of view and lines of sight. As such, the project intends to engage with Mcluhan’s thinking of relationships between individual and institution, sense and media, the “soul” and technologies. The media-technical landscape is here home to “an administrator in a bureaucratic world... a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.
 

McLuminations, a special series of video discussion events
Initiated and directed by Baruch Gottlieb as a special series of events during the McLuhan Centennial Year 2011, McLuminations aims to elaborate in a form of lively discussions the electronic media experience. As electronic technologies give a fragmented rather than a completed image, the audience is forced to fill in the missing details, creating their own image and projecting a new reality. Without any time for reflection, interpretation or reaction, people “are less in habit in abstracting single aspects, single levels” and in establishing individual critical approaches, instead through total involvement of their “whole being” they “are accustomed to a more inclusive and totally sensuous commitment to situations”. McLuminations employs archival video material of Marshall McLuhan in attempts to articulate the contours of what McLuhan calls the “in depth” participation of the inhabitants of an instantaneous electronic media environment.