Posted on

Printed books are the new media that still fascinates me – new if your perspective includes hieroglyphics. Mine does.

Marshal McLuhan and friends identified how the Guttenberg Bible, the first printed book, created a social and political revolution known as “the Reformation”.  Once everyone could own their own copy of the Bible, hold it, interpret it themselves, it wasn’t a big leap for Jesus to become their “personal Lord and Savior”.  Jesus was less a man of the crowd, feeding the crowd; now Jesus was a friend there in the privacy of one’s own home, helping everyone who can read to understand the Word up close, personal. The priests and pope are not­ so much mediaries as meddlesome.

The media is the message, was McLuhan’s catchphrase. (Understanding Media; The extensions of Man, 1964)  Moveable type and mass printing changed everything. Then came the radio. Franklin D. Roosevelt used that well with his fireside chats, taking politics out of the public square and into everyone’s living room.  Then movies, brought faraway places into every small town.  Then television, with white people learning more and more about themselves in the privacy of their living rooms, while African Americans often gathered and watched white people, laughed at them, critiquing their lifestyle.  It was a different experience for racially segregated new medium, as Bell Hooks has so brilliantly identified. (Reel to Real; Race, class and the Movies, 2008)

Now digital media.  Now South Park, created using 3D animation but taken back to 2D animation in its look, media moving backward, reversing its progress, time’s arrow bent backward.  Why.  That’s a question for the creators, why use a more advanced technology to create an older aesthetic appearance?

Obviously, it’s just a tool.  The use of 3D as the first step, computer-generated technologies make animating the characters a faster, if more expensive process.  Yet, the real advance is the aesthetic appeal of the characters, not the process, taken even further into a primitive paper cutout look with South Park’s Canadian characters.

McLuhan was just half-right.  The medium extends our ability to imagine and create, but one medium doesn’t supplant another and there’s a dialectical relationship between medium and message.  Some call it art.  Modern graffiti artists may use spray paint, the gesture and motivation akin to a cave painter and Davinci painting a fresco.

McLuhan saw progress as time’s arrow but it isn’t anything without our imagination.  We make time; rocks don’t.  Only living things can conceive of a narrative structure.

But that’s not nothing.  We do make time, a narrative.  Time might be one of the great inventions of biological beings.  History.  The notion of progress or regression.  Making sense of sunrises and sunsets, days ‘passing’, birth and death.  We make sense.

I’m running out of time here.  To be continued…

Leave a reply on ""

Posted on

South Park games and metaphysics; Let’s back up first

So… we live in the present, the unmapped and unchartable present, that is past as soon as we formulate the experience – actually before we even ‘experience it’ which occurs in the conscious processes so already past, even if just a nano-second past.  We formulate experience as neurological phenomena.  We can only analyze media as a past experience.

Maybe gaming is not past-enough.  I’m still enjoying the metaphysical meat that old-school digital media gives us to chew on.

Early digital-era metaphysics

I first presented my analysis in a philosophy conference at the dawn of the digital media revolution, it was a “mind the gap” metaphysics.  I was pointing to the discontinuity that the media actual presents – gapped.  Someone I respected tried to explain how I was wrong.  My argument goes: digital media is gapped experience because there are open spaces within the code, similar to alphabetic texts, that we fill in because we are biological beings.  “Nature abhors a vacuum” indeed.  With photos and sound there is always something, even if we perceive it as empty space.  Not so with digital media.  It’s a code that represents, rather than presents, the experience that is decoded.

The gapped experience presented in digital media, unlike celluloid film and the imaging chemicals in photography, present us with nothing.  Really nothing.  We can’t take that in so we fill in.  We make up a continuous image, that we experience as present though it’s past.  (See everything I’ve said before about this…)

Mind the gap

My astute critic/collaborator told me I just misunderstood code.  The ‘o’ in the x and o is just another piece of code.  It could be (indeed) a ‘b’ or ‘c’ – but that is totally misunderstanding what I’m suggesting here.  I’m not suggesting that ‘0’ is like a donut with a hole in it.  I’m suggesting the gap within the code, the gap between any symbol and the next is what opens the code up to infinity.  Certainly, as biological beings, we have to fill it in.  We live as narrative beings and the narrative has to continuously unfold.  The continuity of our cellular interactions is absolutely necessary, just as continuity with our stories is necessary.  If the continuity is radically disrupted it’s called death.  With a story, it’s called ‘the end’.

Back to Kenny for a minute.  When he yells at his friends that they don’t get it, that it isn’t cool, as Kyle suggests, that he can’t die, he screams at them, “It hurts!”  He demands they pay attention to the pain – his pain.  He demands some comprehension, if not compassion, that he suffers his super-power.  Yet it’s the process of dying, not the actual death, that hurts.

Like Jesus on the cross:  “It is finished” meant that the pain stopped.

(I’m a priest; you must have known all along I’d get to this… and also if you read Vigil.)  It might be that God knew about death – as all-knowing creator actually created death – but for God to know what it feels like for a human to experience death Jesus had to do it, and even then it would only count as this experience o knowing if Jesus was indeed God.  There have been storms, fires, whole universes exploding, but no pain there.  Only biological beings experience pain, and only a human experiences human pain.)

Radical disruption of the sequence, the narrative sequence with the beginning, middle and end, happens with every space within the code where one symbol ends and another begins, where one pixel breaks to allow the next, like the alphabet – we’ve been here before but perhaps failed to notice.  Digital media in this way is closer to the printed page than to photography.

The trajectory of a theory

Just as the invention of the printing press, that radically personalized western folks’ experience of scripture, gave way to the Reformation, the invention of digital media allows for the birth of a new spirituality, highly individuated yet shared… (to be continued…)

Leave a reply on "South Park games and metaphysics; Let’s back up first"

Posted on

Kenny’s consciousness – like Jesus only not

Try this:  Think about your own future:  What’s the chances of that actually happening?  We might not be responsible for what actually happens in the future, but certainly what we think might happen is all in our imagination, therefore partly in our control. Yes, possibly it’s informed by logic, careful planning, or maybe it’s just a leap of faith but we have to will it (in time) and leap (in time).  And by the time we will and leap, that action is past.

Similarly, and more obviously, the past, rooted in actual historical occurrences, is brought back to consciousness through memory, a construction, our own construction of what happened, and we forget a lot.  (This proves particularly annoying to Kenny – that his friends don’t seem to remember that he died, again and again and again…)  Kenny remembers, and we can check his memory (if a cartoon character can have a memory) by scrolling back through past episodes, but even then…

I’m being ridiculous here – you remember.  But you might also forget, like Kyle…   Or you misremember.  In any case, memory is a process of re-creating the past from traces.

So this crazy animation represents a point I am belaboring.  Just to get to the present moment…

Which is already past….

It’s way past by the time I cut and paste this text into the blog, but it was already past by the time I thought of it, even before I wrote anything, even in the present moment by the time I thought of it as present, or as a moment.

And not just because I’m slow.  If you were thinking about your own past, present and future… well, think about it.  There it goes, you just thought about it in the present moment, and it’s past now.   By the time the present is brought to conscious awareness it’s over. That’s my point, and I’m sorry if I’m belaboring the obvious.

I just love Kenny.

When Kyle objects that maybe it’s not so bad that Kenny can’t die, that maybe it’s a good thing, Kenny loses his temper.  The point isn’t about being dead; it’s that dying hurts.  “It fucking hurts,” Kenny shouts and pulls out a gun.  “See?  Try to remember this time,” he shouts at his friends and then shoots himself.

Here’s where Kenny really isn’t a Christ figure: “Accepted death on the cross” is a phrase used in creeds, that can be misleading.   Jesus didn’t embrace the cross; he was nailed to it.  Jesus didn’t kill himself; he was murdered.  And once was enough, and it wasn’t suicide; it was murder.  It’s a lot different.

But there are some similarities to Kenny’s reality is all I’m saying… that the present moment may not have any structure in consciousness.  It certainly doesn’t have a narrative structure: past, present and future.  So, like Kenny, we live in infinity even if we die.  Even if we’re born again (like Kenny) or rise from the dead (like Jesus.)

We live in infinity, this unstructured timeless present/presence, unlike Kenny.  He’s just a comic character, but he makes this much clear which is only one reason why I love him.

[Check out this tribute video:

Kenny as Mysterion – https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-adk-adk_sbnt&hsimp=yhs-adk_sbnt&hspart=adk&p=kenny+as+mysterion#action=view&id=10&vid=d40574aa318156c9a4132847f2d9f1bb

https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-adk-adk_sbnt&hsimp=yhs-adk_sbnt&hspart=adk&p=kenny+as+mysterion#action=view&id=10&vid=d40574aa318156c9a4132847f2d9f1bb

Leave a reply on "Kenny’s consciousness – like Jesus only not"