In 2011, the University of Alberta will host the Herbert Marshall McLuhan Edmonton Centenary in celebration of the birth of the influential scholar and public figure in Edmonton, Canada, on July 21, 1911. As part of the centenary festivities, the Media Ecology Association will be holding its annual convention in the city of Edmonton to provoke academic dialogue and raise public awareness of media ecology and the relevance of McLuhan’s body of work to today’s media-rich urban landscapes.
McLuhan gave much attention to the changing environment of the city in the wake of technological change. As he stated in an article published in Canadian Architect in June 1961,»[t]oday the entire human community is being translated into ‘auditory space,’ or into that ‘field of simultaneous relations,’ by electric broadcasting. It behooves the architect and town planner, above all, to know what this means» (p. 52).
For McLuhan, the city is a «technological composite,» a patchwork of media and technologies built up over time and space. In this context, new technologies may be imagined as «punctuations» in our historical landscape, inaugurating irreversible cultural, social, and economic changes. Locating the MEA convention in the heart of Edmonton’s urban centre will provide an occasion to reflect on the significance of this Western Canadian city in shaping McLuhan’s early explorations of perspective as a fundamental artistic and communicational principle.
The 12th Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association invites papers, panels, creative projects, and other proposals exploring space, place and city in the context of the McLuhan intellectual legacy. How might media ecology inform today’s architecture and city planning? What is the relationship between urban and virtual media realities? What is the meaning of the city in the «global village»? How do new media technologies intertwine, intersect and reform today’s urban landscapes?
Blog de Octavio Islas 