Through The Vanishing Point


Through The Vanishing Point

Artist Talk & Installation by David Rokeby & Lewis Kaye

Through the Vanishing Point // McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, University of Toronto & Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival

Through the Vanishing Point at The Coach House


Vernissage & Artist Talk: 29 May 2011, 17:00
Opening dates: 29 May – 8 July 2011

Venue: External entrance to the Marshall McLuhan Salon of the Embassy of Canada, Leipziger Platz 17, Berlin 10117
Nearest U and S-Bahn: Potsdamer Platz

European premiere of a multi-media view into Coach House, Marshall McLuhan’s legendary academic headquarters, by leading Canadian digital artists David Rokeby and Lewis Kaye.

Canadian artists David Rokeby and Lewis Kaye were commissioned by CONTACT Festival 2010 to create site-responsive works at the Coach House, drawing inspiration from McLuhan’s work. The Coach House is the base for the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, which from 1963 till his death in 1980, was a hotbed of ideas and where McLuhan conducted his groundbreaking research on the nature of communication, media and technology. At seminars held there on Monday evenings, he refined his ideas and made cross-disciplinary leaps and connections. In attendance were artists and scholars from a wide range of disciplines. They shared a common understanding that the mediated world requires analysis of the most fundamental epistemic, ontological and metaphysical assumptions.

In two separate but complementary works, Rokeby and Kaye visually and aurally construct McLuhan’s persona. The exhibition illuminates the intellectual spirit of the great media prophet. As the framework for their work the artists drew from McLuhan’s book Through The Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting (coauthored by Harley Parker), 1968, which explores the way electronic media fragments the homogenous experience of space.

David Rokeby’s multi screen projection features images sourced from archival photographs and video recordings of McLuhan’s Monday night seminars, personal life, television appearances and public lectures. Lewis Kaye’s six channel sound composition uses archival recordings of the seminars – audience murmurs, discussions as well as interviews to evoke McLuhan and the history and aurality of the atmosphere at the Coach House.

You can find out more about David Rokeby’s work and view a short video of the original Through The Vanishing Point installation at the Coach House here.

To attend this event RSVP to [email protected]


Through The Vanishing Point
Podcasts by Lewis Kaye.

These three podcast files are designed for both the Marshall McLuhan Salon installation and stand-alone listening. You can listen to these files on any sound system, but because they use binaural recordings made within the Coach House itself they are best experienced with headphones, ideally with your portable MP3 player or mobile phone at the sound installation outside the Marshall McLuhan Salon itself.

To download the files, please click on the file name:
01) Thompson_Parker_McLuhan Download (11.1Mb):
Thompson_Parker_McLuhan by Lewis Kaye

02) McLuhan and Parker Through The Vanishing Point Download (11.9Mb)
McLuhan and Parker Through The Vanishing Point by Lewis Kaye

03) Monday Night Seminar Space Download (9.6Mb):
Monday Night Seminar Space by Lewis Kaye


Through The Vanishing Point was commissioned in 2010 by the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival (Bonnie Rubenstein, curator) and the Faculty of Information McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology (Dominique Scheffel-Dunand, director) University of Toronto, Canada.

 

The events will take place in English / Die Veranstaltungen finden in englischer Sprache statt.

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McLuhan in Europe 2011 is an initiative of transmediale in collaboration with the Marshall McLuhan Salon / Embassy of Canada Berlin, Gingko Press, and RIM. Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha