Marshall McLuhan in Conversation with Norman Mailer

This is the best McLuhan conversation I found so far:

Marshall McLuhan in Conversation with Norman Mailer, 1968

[Mailer]Look Marshall, we’re both agreed that man is accelerating at an extraordinary rate into a super-technological world, if you will. And that the modes and methods by which men instruct themselves and are instructed are shifting in extraordinary –
[McLuhan]We’ve gone into orbit.
[Mailer]Well, at the same time I would say there’s something profoundly autoerotic about this process, and it’s sinister for that reason.
[McLuhan]It’s psychedelic. When you step up the environment to those speeds, you create the psychedelic thrill. The whole world becomes kaleidoscopic, and you go inward, by the way. It’s an inner trip, not an outer trip.

Reading the Media

Founded by a collective of radical media makers in 1981, Paper Tiger Television pioneered edutainment. Broadcast on public access television, the collective took a grassroots, DIY approach to media production that showcased how television was made through television, while critiquing corporate media and attempting to build a more equitable form of moving image. As one of the founders put it: “It is one thing to critique the mass media and rail against their abuses. It is quite another to create viable alternatives.”

The Beauty of Degraded Art

“The distorted guitar is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to it” – Brian Eno

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Media Burn: the ultimate media event

Media Burn integrates performance, spectacle and media critique, as Ant Farm stages an explosive collusion of two of America’s most potent cultural symbols: the automobile and television. On July 4, 1975, at San Francisco’s Cow Palace, Ant Farm presented what they termed the “ultimate media event.” In this alternative Bicentennial celebration, a “Phantom Dream Car”—a reconstructed 1959 El Dorado Cadillac convertible—was driven through a wall of burning TV sets.”

more documentation here

Media-Burn-by-Ant-Farm ant_01 ant_05