i was kind of confused as to how to do this presentation, but idk, hopefully i make the point clear
i have been more or less influenced by art history as someone who makes art, and specifically prefers new media, and i think this project might have brought the two together, i don't really know
well here are some pictures and links to some things that have to do with McLuhan and Nietzsche,
i really suck at philosophy and interpreting it, but i think Nietzsche's still pretty cool,
so yeah here are some things i think that are pertinent to their common thoughts.
they're both pretty into being super experiential,
so with the whole "God is dead", the "Newtonian Universe is dead" sort of a thing, Nietzsche's urging us to stop listening to dogma; through McLuhan's eyes, he's telling us to stop sticking to one medium and explore all different kinds, because you never know where you go when you start to diverge (where modern science has taken us today)
so basically just try and experiment because the possibilites are endless (the divergence from Christianity/religion has been incredible)
wishing we could all sleep and wake up like this baby
"One must be disinterested, accept that a sound is a sound and a man is a man, give up illusions about ideas of order, expressions of sentiment, and all the rest of our inherited aesthetic claptrap.” -McLuhan
A sound is a sound, a human is a human, a snore is a snore and i am scared [by it].
i was staying over at a friend’s house.
he snored very loudly.
i woke up many times because i could not stay asleep with the noise.
why not snapchat it.
lumbering giant
monster machine being awoken
so afraid
can’t do anything
have to stay where i am
no where else to go
need sleep, have to stay here, don’t wanna wake anyone up to help me, to tell them to be quieter
it’s biological, natural
what’s natural makes me scared
what do i do
so helpless really startled scared is it done no its not oh it's subsiding nooooooooo can't get away from it
^these are a combination of things i felt while i continued to keep being awoken by my friend, as well as memories of staying over in hotels on family vacations with my dad snoring even louder, since the hotel room was only so big for me and my four other family members. we all have to sleep, otherwise we'll be cranky the next day...
i feel like there are multiple applications of this quote to Rasheed's talk. one way of looking at it is, there's literally this insane crazy ass subculture of voguing and pageant drag queen balls, something i was never exposed to until the Paris Is Burning viewing. so in this sense, yes, clearly something is happening and i am not aware of it, or at least i wasn't until a few days ago.
there's this world that exists, that has existed for so long, and i may never actually experience it, being a part of the crowd that hollers and pounds the runway when voguers drop to the beat, or one of the voguers themselves.
there's another way of drawing parallels between this quote and the talk - i was talking with one of the art history professors later about rasheed, and she told me how she'd never been into video art, she'd always been pretty turned off by the pervasive incomprehensiveness.
to that i told her, the more incomprehensiveness, the more meaning there is.
or at least that's what i think.
in response to rasheed's 'incomprehensible' work, yeah it was weird, but there's so much more to be said. about how his work is a reaction to the perpetuating oppression blacks experience in america, how the founding idea of collage trickles down into all of his pieces to express the fragmentations and collisions of his identity
"Everyone is in the best seat. Everything we do is music. Theatre takes place all the time, wherever one
is. And art simply facilitates persuading one this
is the case."
-McLuhan, 119
he first talks about how he's like bell hooks, how both believe the "pedagogy lies in popular culture"
there's a lot to learn from what's being thrown at us again and again and again and again
yay warhol for showing us that there's no such thing as high and low art
i've always been a proponent for the idea that art is inherently democratic
audio, visual, whatever form
multimedia artists like rasheed set me alight
(sorry if these few sentences are a bit banal, considering we're all in a new media class)
i've grown to the conclusion that rasheed-like artists are the most anti-social beings (according to McLuhan), if i could choose.
for the reason that they see how fluid art is, how ubiquitous it is, and they act as the laisons between these profound messages lessons meanings etc. that exist in our day to day, and they make stuff out of as much media as possible to convey to social beings just how much beauty (whatever that is) rests, jumps from, rolls about in our environment(s)
