Sound Cultures

Listening opens the imagination and changes our perception of space, time, presence, and emotion. Sound is rich in that it contains elements of a social system in motion. The importance of listening varies between cultures with a significant difference between industrial and non-industrial societies. Listening allows one to face the challenges of our environment and [...]

The Age of Excess

The massive reproduction of artwork has changed the nature of how an image is perceived by contemporary society. In a short essay by Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, the author explains that art has always been reproduced throughout history. However, the extent and methods in which it is [...]

Improvisation

The New Media Reader provides a comprehensive guide to new media and the evolution of media, critical analysis, content, and understanding throughout history. Janet H. Murray provides a hopeful introduction with a brief history of new media and the notion that media will provide a shared structure of meaning and “invent communities of communication at [...]

A Method to Present a Message

Extreme fragmenting of activities and thinking, enormous social and cultural changes, excessive rituals of watching, have all been evoked by media and was foreseen by Marshal McLuhan, a philosopher and scholar of media theory and communications, in 1967. In The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan discusses the power of electric technology and how it is [...]

Reconfiguration and Normalization

The Flesh Machine, by Critical Art Ensemble, discusses western culture and its excessive consumption. The authors present examples that show a close inspection of authoritarian ideology that justifies repression and oppression. These processes are done through the sight machine, flesh machine, and war machine, which coexist in a pancapitalist society driven by production, consumption, and [...]