First we make our tools, then our tools form us…
The famous quote, above, is often attributed to Marshall McLuhan, but a number of people can lay claim to this insight about the relationship between man and machine.
I’ve spoken, in stage one, about the way that modern society is a system of machines (machine ensemble) that is accelerating and getting bigger, and that produces its own image culture.
The platforms provide you with a range of tools and techniques with which to engage with the world…and possibly to change it. But those tools and techniques also shape the world that you start from. They’re not neutral.
In my lectures in stage one, I described how the advent of high-quality hand-held cameras transformed the photographer during the 1920s and 1930s and created a optical cybernetic extension to the human body that, in turn, produced all sorts of new and dynamic perspectives. the same thing happened with cinema too…and that the dynamic immersions of the film experience have shaped our own experience of architectural and digital spaces. So, each platform’s tools and techniques provide for a kind of image-making machine and produces its own system of representation (Hall) and with its own forms of cultural capital (Bourdieu).
The cultural consequences of the machine system are a kind of long-form production beyond that which is being made. Being part of the system of is transformative.
On Monday, I spoke with Mikael about the concept of technics…this is an idea that describes the way that the tool-kit of tools and techniques produces its own kinds of specific outcomes and capital. The American writer, Lewis Mumford described this in Technics and Civilization (1934) The book presents the history of technology and its role in shaping and being shaped by civilisations. According to Mumford, modern technology has its roots in the Middle Ages rather than in the Industrial Revolution. It is the moral, economic, and political choices we make, not just the machines we use.
These ideas can provide you with a bigger and more wide-ranging context in which to position your projects…and you can describe this context as a conversation between the various people we have introduced. You’re building a special machine, identified as a community of practice, that could in different ways transform the world.