Marshall McLuhan said “The Medium is the Message” and, at the risk of Woody Allen pulling Marshall Mcluhan out of the line to tell me I’ve totally misinterpreted him (one of my favorite movie scenes of all time), I’d like to present these two examples of that phenomenon which I saw today.
JeeYoung Lee
The first was the work of this young Korean artist, which was posted on my facebook page by my friend Eric, who once said to me at a poetry reading “It ain’t about the stage, it’s about the page” and that has stuck with me. I’m not so much knocked out by her artwork or her message. On the one hand, I thought the white mice, the pipes, and the attack of the crows were kind of boring tales of post-modern angst or whatever, first world bitching about the lack of meaning in life. On the other, I liked the more childlike stuff, the giant paper flowers, the cotton wool clouds, especially the one with the rocking horse. (pictured here)
What knocked me out was that it was a different form of art. Some people paint. Some people sculpt. And, I suppose, some people view interior decoration as an art form, and certainly stage setting, but she’s taken those to a higher level, using her room as a medium and then photographing it.
It’s the medium that’s the message, and I hope this woman has copycats.
The other story was kind of humorous, in a haha, look at how the government is spending millions of dollars paying people to play video games and calling it national security, kind of way.
Seriously, the NSA (National Stupid Agency) has people playing World of Warcraft and other games full time, because they think they might find some terrorists there, but the only people they’ve ever busted are each other as they trip all over themselves trying to entrap somebody.
Still, it shows how the medium is the message and it’s a harbinger of the future. Video games will become more and more sophisticated, more and more popular, more and more interlinked with real life. Of course, the government is spying on them.
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