Last night, Travess Smalley’s exhibition “Rendered Aura” opened at Gloria Maria Gallery in Milan. I’m excited to announce that I wrote an essay entitled “Flashback” to accompany the show. You can read a small teaser below, full text and press release available here.
In 1964, Marshall McLuhan writes:
After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man – the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our sense and our nerves by the various media. Whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought by advertisers for specific products, will be “a good thing” is a question that admits of a wide solution. There is little possibility of answering such questions about the extensions of man without considering them all together. Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex. (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, pgs. 3-4)
The possibilities of an expanded consciousness, ushered in from the promises of new technologies, the “electric age” and pharmaceuticals shook the historical moment in which McLuhan wrote the above, and it is responsible for producing the aesthetic, cultural sensibility and genre known as “psychedelia.” The circumstances McLuhan described in 1964 are still with us. And with it, psychedelia, which has resurfaced in varying forms over the past few decades, over and over again.
The commercial interest was there at the very start, already present in
McLuhan’s question of whether extended consciousness is “a good thing” or not. The use of psychedelia for profit is so ubiquitous and commonplace, that it’s easy to forget its original spark of revolutionary potential. Psychedelia emerges now as a stylistic motif, a mood enhancer, nostalgia. With its every resurgence, it’s imperative that we understand the surrounding conditions, as they detail how the mind is extended, and towards what end.
