Janine Marchessault
York University, Toronto - Canada
Janine Marchessault is a Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization at York University (Toronto, Canada), where she is the Co-Director of the Future Cinema Lab, a state of the art digital media research facility devoted to ‘new stories for new screens’ www.futurecinema.ca, as well as the Director of the Visible City Project + Archive www.visiblecity.ca which examines how artists are helping to imagine 21st-century cities. She is the author of Marshall McLuhan: Cosmic Media (Sage 2005) and the editor of several collections including Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema with Susan Lord (University of Toronto Press 2007). She is a founding member of the Public Access Curatorial Collective and the journal Public:Art/Culture/Ideas.
Articles of Janine Marchessault
McLuhan’s Pedagogical Art
This essay argues that Marshall McLuhan’s most important ideas on the media are to be found in the early writings of the 1940s and 1950s. McLuhan’s work did not provide policy makers with concrete recommendations, nor did he leave communication scholars with a theory of the media; but he developed new methodological ‘probes’ for thinking through the effects of a variety of media on environments and bodies in the newly mediated context of North America in the post-WWII period. His approach to media technology was aesthetic, interdisciplinary, transnational, phenomenological and driven by a commitment to pedagogy. His work was prophetic in terms of recognizing that electronic media would transform experiences of space and time, and the interrelation between global and local cultures.