07_Turned On

I wanted to use the still from the movie in which Marty McFly is watching the multi-screened projection in his living room. This version of the multi-screen is even more interactive (than the Eames version, cooler than the Mcluhan version) in that the user is able to choose the sources of the various images displayed through voice command as if having a conversation with the television.

 

Media Hot and Cold by Marshall Mcluhan (39-50)

 

Citation:

 

“’Comfort’ consists in abandoning a visual arrangement in favor of one that permits casual participation of the senses, a stated that is excluded when any one sense, but especially the visual sense, is hotted up to the point of dominant command of a situation.” (50)

 

I chose this quote because it explains the problem of media that is highly defined toward one form of perception. As definition increases toward one sense, participation and thus comfort wane.

 

Alternate: “Intensity or high definition engenders specialism and fragmentation in living as in entertainment, which explains why an intense experience must be ‘forgotten,’ censored,’ and reduced to a very cool state before it can be ‘learned’ or assimilated.” (40)

 

Enclosed by Images by Beatriz Colomina (6-29)

 

Citation:

 

“The structure of their exhibitions has been compared to a scholarly paper, loaded with footnotes, where ‘the highest level of participation consists in getting fascinated by the pieces and connecting them for oneself’”. (23)

 

I chose this quote because it describes that even when the Eameses direct media in a strictly visual format as in Glimpses of the USA they distribute the images in a manner that still elicits high participation by the viewer. The participation of connection is amplified when sound and smell are introduced as in Rough Sketch for a Sample Lesson.

 

Alternate: “The Eameses’ innovative technique did not simply present the audience with a new way of seeing things. Rather, it gave form to a new mode of perception that was already in everybodys mind.” (12)

 

 

Supermannerism by C. Ray Smith (138-159, 297-303)

 

Citation:

 

“What is of interest to the analysis of perception and phenomenology, as to the new design, is a nebulous area between precise perception and the hallucination of infinity.” (140)

 

Smith uses Venturi’s association of ambiguity in architecture with richness of meaning. Presumably the richness in ambiguity is gained by the user when he or she makes decisions about the building that were left initially undecided or confusing by the architect. This user participation in meaning would be negated if the ambiguous matter was clarified by the architect in built form.

 

The Fact of Television by Stanley Cavell (192-218)

 

Citation:

 

“The experience of a film on television is as of something over whose running you have in principle, a control; you are not subjected to it, as you are by film itself or television itself.” (215)

 

Alternate: “The intimacy of such a difference prompts me to emphasize that by monitoring and viewing, I mean to be calling attention to aspects of human perception generally, so that film and video will not be expected to capture one of these aspects to the exclusion of the other, but rather to stress one at the expense of the other – as each may be stressing different aspects of art; video of its relation to communication, film of its relation to seduction.” (211)

 

 

Building on the Life Drive: Architecture as Repitition by Peggy Phelan (289-299)

 

Citation:

 

Like Freud’s germ cells, they [unrealized buildings] persist by serving as instigators of repetition; every realized building is a consolidation of the repetitions by which it negotiated its existence. (293)

 

Done