The Democratic Surround: Difference between revisions
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
(→Quotes) |
(→Quotes) |
||
| Line 2: | Line 2: | ||
=Quotes= | =Quotes= | ||
*What has disappeared is the deeply democratic vision that animated the turn toward mediated environments in the first place, and that sustained it across the 1950s and into the 1960s. This book aims to recover that vision | |||
*For that reason, members and friends of the committee advocated a turn away from single-source mass media and toward multi-image, multi–sound-source media environments—systems that I will call surrounds. They couldn’t build these systems themselves. With a few exceptions, they were writers, not media makers. But they knew people who could build surrounds: the refugee artists of the Bauhaus. Since the early 1930s, Bauhaus stalwarts such as architect Walter Gropius and multimedia artists László Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer had fled Nazi Germany and settled in New York, Chicago, and other centers of American intellectual life. They brought with them highly developed theories of multiscreen display and immersive theater. They also brought the notion that media art should help integrate the senses, and so produce what they called a “New Man,” a person whose psyche remained whole even under the potentially fracturing assault of everyday life in industrial society. | *For that reason, members and friends of the committee advocated a turn away from single-source mass media and toward multi-image, multi–sound-source media environments—systems that I will call surrounds. They couldn’t build these systems themselves. With a few exceptions, they were writers, not media makers. But they knew people who could build surrounds: the refugee artists of the Bauhaus. Since the early 1930s, Bauhaus stalwarts such as architect Walter Gropius and multimedia artists László Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer had fled Nazi Germany and settled in New York, Chicago, and other centers of American intellectual life. They brought with them highly developed theories of multiscreen display and immersive theater. They also brought the notion that media art should help integrate the senses, and so produce what they called a “New Man,” a person whose psyche remained whole even under the potentially fracturing assault of everyday life in industrial society. | ||
*"Were the world we dream of attained, members of that new world would be so different from ourselves that they would no longer value it in the same terms in which we now desire it. . . . We would no longer be at home in such a world. . . . We who have dreamed it could not live in it. MARGARET MEAD, 1942" | *"Were the world we dream of attained, members of that new world would be so different from ourselves that they would no longer value it in the same terms in which we now desire it. . . . We would no longer be at home in such a world. . . . We who have dreamed it could not live in it. MARGARET MEAD, 1942" | ||
*Across the 1930s, committee members such as anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson and psychologist Gordon Allport had worked to show how culture shaped the development of the psyche, particularly through the process of interpersonal communication. In the early years of the war, they turned those understandings into prescriptions for bolstering American morale. First, they defined the “democratic personality” as a highly individuated, rational, and empathetic mindset, committed to racial and religious diversity, and so able to collaborate with others while retaining its individuality. | *Across the 1930s, committee members such as anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson and psychologist Gordon Allport had worked to show how culture shaped the development of the psyche, particularly through the process of interpersonal communication. In the early years of the war, they turned those understandings into prescriptions for bolstering American morale. First, they defined the “democratic personality” as a highly individuated, rational, and empathetic mindset, committed to racial and religious diversity, and so able to collaborate with others while retaining its individuality. | ||
Revision as of 20:40, 25 June 2018
Book on the rise of liberal thought in America.
Quotes
- What has disappeared is the deeply democratic vision that animated the turn toward mediated environments in the first place, and that sustained it across the 1950s and into the 1960s. This book aims to recover that vision
- For that reason, members and friends of the committee advocated a turn away from single-source mass media and toward multi-image, multi–sound-source media environments—systems that I will call surrounds. They couldn’t build these systems themselves. With a few exceptions, they were writers, not media makers. But they knew people who could build surrounds: the refugee artists of the Bauhaus. Since the early 1930s, Bauhaus stalwarts such as architect Walter Gropius and multimedia artists László Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer had fled Nazi Germany and settled in New York, Chicago, and other centers of American intellectual life. They brought with them highly developed theories of multiscreen display and immersive theater. They also brought the notion that media art should help integrate the senses, and so produce what they called a “New Man,” a person whose psyche remained whole even under the potentially fracturing assault of everyday life in industrial society.
- "Were the world we dream of attained, members of that new world would be so different from ourselves that they would no longer value it in the same terms in which we now desire it. . . . We would no longer be at home in such a world. . . . We who have dreamed it could not live in it. MARGARET MEAD, 1942"
- Across the 1930s, committee members such as anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson and psychologist Gordon Allport had worked to show how culture shaped the development of the psyche, particularly through the process of interpersonal communication. In the early years of the war, they turned those understandings into prescriptions for bolstering American morale. First, they defined the “democratic personality” as a highly individuated, rational, and empathetic mindset, committed to racial and religious diversity, and so able to collaborate with others while retaining its individuality.