McLuhan’s Curriculum: Riffing on City as Classroom

Conditions of the posthuman are hastened by the technologies that now fully mediate our brains and nervous systems, a circumstance anticipated by Marshall McLuhan some sixty years ago. In 1977, McLuhan co-developed a media textbook for Canadian high school students. We expand on a selection of the concepts and themes identified in City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media and query in what ways we might apply a forty-year-old media curriculum to our present-day circumstances. We riff on Marshall McLuhan’s prognostications on education during the electric age as a recalibration of his remarkably prescient work and conceptualize a hypercity in which to explore our considerations. We enmesh City as Classroom with the materiality of city spaces and theorize a posthuman critical pedagogy as a call to action.

Essay Two: MASHUP AT THE VANCOUVER ART GALLERY: REVIEWING AND RIFFIN'

MASHUP AT THE VANCOUVER ART GALLERY: REVIEWING AND RIFFIN'[1] “Arcades are houses or passages having no outside - like the dream”.[2] “Dream houses of the collective: arcades, winter gardens, panorama, factories, wax museums, casinos, railroad stations”.[3] Sponsors: There's a problem, feathers, iron[4] [5] https://www.kegsteakhouse.com/

Essay Two: MASHUP AT THE VANCOUVER ART GALLERY: REVIEWING AND RIFFIN'

ABSTRACT: [onto]Riffology, a “plug in and play” method of inquiry that riffs across technological platforms and with all manner of material, finds easy resonance in mashup and remix. We turn our riffological sights to the Vancouver Art Gallery, which hosted MashUp from February 20th through June 12th, 2016. Creative and combinatorial, mashup is identifiable in popular discourse as fundamentally humanist and epistemological in nature; however, as an interdisciplinary, ontological practise of repurposing and reconstituting, acts of mashup also exist in geological activity, far outside of humanity, and here we apply ontological focus through riffological measures. We are interested not in seeing merely what is being exhibited, but deterritorializing what is being curated. Our emergent senses of new materialisms inform our riffology here as we ceaselessly (re)encounter the exhibition; experienced as a riff arcade of dream like experience that one mayn’t exit; like the arcades of Benjamin’s mammoth project of 1927 to 1940.

Because we play: Riffing on rhizomes, attribution and voice in duoethnographic assemblage

What fractured discourses they are. Our duoethnography may be seen more appropriately as collective assemblage? Collaborative assemblage? Assemblage as remix? Can the layering of the sound of Thunderstruck against the lyrics of Eminem be understood outside a discussion of fracture and the instability of meaning? When Eminem goes back and forth from such personas as Slim Shady to M&M to Marshall Mathers, whose voice prevails? How is it that his homophobic rantings in one personae can be contrasted with that of another on stage with Elton John? Similar fractures in narratives? How do they play out in duoethnography? This is more than just adhering to some constructivist understanding of epistemology