Essay #4: Defending Amateurs & Medium is the Massage

Marshall Mcluhan’s “The Medium is the Massage” repeatedly suggests that people generalize incoming perceptual information by a means of identifying data through preconceived notions. These notions are founded in the belief that one’s ability to compartmentalize information is due to the medium through which one intially recieves or interacts with that specific physical and/or psychic information. I believe that this is a process by which, yes, the mass due interpret data – so is it completely final to assume that one cannot separate himself from the said perceptual process and learn to achieve living amid a scenario in which he or she can operate sincerely (blind to all preconceptions brought about by the language of their medium)? This is a question which MUST be addressed in order for an individual to realize truth in their artistic design.
Specifically, the Mcluhan uses the example of the relationship between a child and the alphabet to support the idea of the process as a means of comprehension. He asserts, “Words and the meaning of words predispose the child to think and at automatically in certain ways.” There is a sense that this predisposition, through a said learned process, invites one to unknowingly dismiss details in information by merely allowing it to be identified by casting it into whatever categories correspond to a ‘word’. This is clearly a handicap when considering a creative process for visual and aural art. Stan Brakhage wrote, in “Metaphors on Vision”:
Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass, to the crawling baby unaware of “Green”?
Brakhage assumes the same philosophical viewpoint as Mcluhan here. The question of “words” acting as an insufficient substitute for pure and simple perception is one that invites a creator to consider a palate complete and uninhibited. It has occurred to me that in terms of industrial and/or commercial design, however, it is important for the creator to consider a means by which will not bear so much subtlety that it can not be verified for its worth by a consumer market. Perhaps this parallels the approach the Eames’ took when applying minimalism as a means for universal function and a simple, truthful design language.
Mcluhan’s study for the application for electric information as a pool of individualism and an overall creative force has maintained immense relevance since its conception. For artists, technology is not merely a tool anymore but has claimed its own independence in his or her creative discourse and form. Artists deliberate with their tools in order to prepare results. For instance, many sound artists use the limitations of their instruments’ designs as an esthetic advantage, and make use of their limitations by exploiting them. Take the prepared pianos of John Cage for instance. Cage weighted the strings inside the box so that they could not resonate, creating an entirely new instrument altogether…thus characterized by clunks and bangs, instead of resonated tones.