On not reflecting, but sensing
Potentially, ours is “…a world of no-boundaries in which information emerges not from fixed positions but anywhere and everywhere. It is the world of music, myth, total immersion.” For media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, this is what he calls ‘acoustic space’ – a term he uses to talk about the world before the printed word. The era of print, he argues, has been dominated by the visual - an eye-culture - but the electronic and then digital world that has superseded print can, once again, be a culture of the ear.
From voice recognition to SensAble’s haptic interfaces, virtual technology looks increasingly to activate all the human senses. Back in the analogue, urban world, and practitioners like David Byrne draw attention to our perceptual limitations of the environment around us – often this is done by allowing the audience to experience it anew, through unexpected senses. So, in a recent installation at Färgfabriken in Stockholm, he asked visitors to sit at a keyboard, rigged up to the walls, the pipes and so on – so they literally ‘play’ the building. And then there is the sensory overload of recent work by Paul McCarthy’s - his work includes, amongst other things, orgies of onanism and violence decorated with lashings of tomato and chocolate sauce – providing a nutritious palette for mind and eye alike.
It is increasingly apparent that the realm of the senses has emerged as a central concern of contemporary creative practice. Thus, to vision and sound, we add touch, taste and smell. This is to centre the way we think about experience in the body, which opens up what the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls a ‘human space’ …the world of emotions, dreams, myth, and madness - as well as the world of reflection.
Now, to look for a ‘human space’ is not antithetical to a world where the ‘total immersion’ is digital – it’s complementary. Moreover, it provides a necessary realignment of perception and engagement with the physical world. For now, at the butt-end of the modernist experiment, the individual is trumpeted supreme - but as a figure often characterised as having been disembodied by alienating consumption and virtual connectivity. All of which have contributed to, at best, the obsession with the visual and, at worst, a loss of the real. Creating a focus upon and preoccupation with the image of the self – following a spiral from Warhol through reality/celebrity TV to the branding of cult graffiti artist Banksy’s mystery persona; “in the future everybody will be anonymous for 15 minutes”.
In Michael Forrester’s book Psychology of the Image (Routledge 2000), he tells us we are in the middle of a reinvigorated perceptual experience - which is more than just ‘watching it’. He argues vision renders the world and us passive, static and depersonalised: whereas for him, the world of sound perception is fundamentally dynamic in nature. The difference, perhaps, between looking through someone’s photo album and their record collection. The former documents a(nother) life whilst the latter provides an avenue of shared experience.
A renewed interested in the sensual then, in activating the emotions, re-connects us to the world. But in a different way. It gives us music and myth. It gives us poetics.
Monika and Colin
“As it stands, Graphic Design is the social and cultural placebo for Boredom.”
- this is fantstic - what a provocative, evocative comment! - it’s also apt that the term ‘graphic’ design evokes both looking and explicitness at once. I’m not one for simply changing labels, but sometimes if we think hard about the labels we use, we can start to see the inherent bias they hide. The move towards ‘visual’ communication as a field of enquiry seems to promise little more - it certainly can’t convey the sense that communication is a full bodily experience or that it is a ‘live’ experience. This opens up so much potential for a new sensibility in the way we approach design - much of which, ironically, it’s hard to quanitfy, here, in words of course because, like images, words can only conjure up an image of the experience being evoked and it is always already in the past - they can’t make you ‘live’ it.
/Lila B 14/01/2006