Thoughts On: Understanding Media

Having read Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan I have to admit to finding it both dated and still ahead of its time in many ways. McLuhan asserts that each new media influences and eventually changes the culture, and that these effects are not only not understood, but not even documented.

Pornify This!

Everywhere there is the pornification of a subject. The horror film genre birthed the sub genre of torture porn on the back of the success of the Saw franchise. In torture porn films the aim is not so much to scare, surprise, or terrify the audience, but rather to titillate by means of the macabre. Audiences are unnerved by imagery of hooks in flesh, of peeling skin, and all manner of contusions. Thereby they are invited to empathise with the image and so they find themselves stimulated. In the same way in which the viewer of a pornographic film may feel him or herself lightly goaded into reaching for his or her genitalia, so too does the viewer of torture porn find him or herself clutching the skin, or reaching for the ear to assure of its continued attachment. Pornography (in practice though certainly not in principle), is ritualistic. It inculcates a mechanical attitude toward sex and torture porn extends this mechanisation to bodily mutilation. Consumption of pornography leads to lack of sensitivity, a heightened threshold for arousal and a devaluing of sex and similarly torture porn cultivates a numbness to violence. Far from being a malapropism, the term torture porn is quite apt - it succinctly describes the real nature of such media: a pornification of horror.

Issues Endemic to Class-Based Thinking

In economic and political thinking of the twentieth century, Marxist theory looms large. It is trotted out with regularity and with reverence, creating both a framework and a shorthand for describing social relations. Marxist theory casts the world into a class struggle, and in this paradigm the resolution of this struggle becomes the ultimate goal.

However, such a view hardly seems durable in the face of a long view on history nor is it particularly resonant among the working class with whom it is supposedly so sympathetic. It attributes societal composition as entirely due to arbitrary cultural impositions and humanity as endlessly fungible under culture’s influence. Meanwhile biology sits quietly but comfortably in the room, daring anyone brave enough to reckon with it.

2017: Year in Review

2017 was very much a year of writing for me, well, of reading and writing. Having been accepted into studying illustration at Camberwell, I put aside working on my portfolio and decided to work more on further developing my ideas. I returned to the manuscript that I had aimed to complete in November and set about finishing it.

To be sure, not all went to plan...

A Year's Reading: 2017

I fell into reading a fair amount early this year and that put me on the track to wanting to continue and finish the year strong, with a good amount of reading under my belt. When I consider the handful of books I ordinarily pick my way through over the course of a year it is evident that I am not a prolific reader. In fact it would be difficult to say that I do much reading at all. Even so, the number of books that I want to read, that I tell myself I will read one day, only continues to grow in number.

What do you figure?

This is a coursework motivated post, with the aim of describing and analysing three different approaches to depicting figures/beings of my choosing (from a curated set).

The figure is an endlessly interesting subject for art, and as such has been subjected to seemingly endless treatments. As much as we may take an interest in the world around us, such is the condition of our self-obsession that we must seek to experience this world through the lenses and sensory inputs of other beings, even if those beings are merely figments of our imagination. The presence of the figure makes explicit what otherwise is only implicit: our relation to the external world.

For this post I'm interested in the depictions of figures by Antony Gormley, Christoph Niemann, and Robert Weaver.

A Few Thoughts on the Enlightenment

I took a visit to the British Museum and spent a good amount of time in the Enlightenment room. There one will find all manner of objects and books relating to the earliest period of the Museum's history, along with placards explaining and describing the thinking and knowledge of the time. There are weighty tomes sealed behind glass, some of which appear as though they might crumble if improperly handled, along with various scientific instruments, orrerys and collected artefacts from around the world. It very clearly creates the impression of a collection, as if some wealthy child grown tired of postage stamps had set out and gobbled up whatever he could find to catch his interest from the furthest reaches of the globe. What follows are a few jumbled thoughts of mine on this habit of collecting and the need to organise.