All Quotes

"The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos – resonant utterance or word."

"Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration."

"To say that a body or its gravitational field 'bends in space' in its vicinity is the discuss visual space in acoustic terms."

"The victory over Euclidean space was not achieved by isolated individuals, but by a field of young rebels opposed to all absolutes."

"Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time."

"Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses."

"Interdeterminacy was a figure-ground problem arising from incongruity between the visual bias of classical science and the new acoustic sensibilities."

"The artists of our culture, 'the antennae of the race,' had tuned in to the new ground and begun exploring discontinuity and simultaneity."

"The audience, as ground, shapes and controls the work of art."

"Newton, and 'proper scientific method' after him, conducted attention to 'continuous description' of experimental phenomena instead of to causes."

"While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious."

"Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space."

"There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures."

"Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode – a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground."

"We are not Argus-eyed, but Argus-eared."

"Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users."

"Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors."

"The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures."

"The dyslexic: Everyman as cubist."

"The Chinese used the intervals between things as the primary means of getting 'in touch' with situations."

"The culture-heroes of preliteracy and postliteracy alike are robots."

"Left hemisphere industrialism has blinded the Chinese to the effects of our alphabet: pattern recognition is in the right hemisphere."

"It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds."

"Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons."

"The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation."

"In tetrad form, the artefact is seen to be not netural or passive, but an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground."

"Interface, of the resonant interval as 'where the action is', whether chemical, psychic or social, involves touch."

"The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions."

"Older cliches are retrieved both as inherent principles that inform the new ground and new awareness, and as archetypal nostalgia figures with transformed meaning in relation to the new ground."

"At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential."

"The field of 'information theory' began by using the old hardware paradigm of transportation of data from point to point."

"When Coleridge said that all men are born either Platonists or Aristotelians, he was saying that all men tend to be either acoustic or visual in their sensory bias."

"The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground."

"All words, in every language, are metaphors."

"Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression."

"The laws of the media, in tetrad form, bring logos and formal cause up to date to reveal analytically the structure of all human artefacts."

"The logos of creation, 'And God Said ...' formed the basis of Christian interpretation of the 'Book of Nature.'"

"With [Francis] Bacon, Vico continuously asserts the claims of grammar as true science precisely because it has not yielded to specialism and method."

"Each tetrad gives the etymology of its subject, as an uttering or outering of the body physical or mental, and provides its anatomy in fourfold exegetical manner."

"Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual."

"Formal cause, as logos, incorporates the patterns of side-effects as part of essential nature: tetrads restore poesis and the making process to the study of artefacts."

"New media are new languages, their grammar and syntax yet unknown."

"Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech."

"Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing."

"The media themselves are the avant-garde of our society. Avant-garde no longer exists in painting, music and poetry, it's the media themselves."

"There is no connection between the elements in an electric world, which is equivalent to being surrounded by the human unconscious. (p. 260)"

"We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of "nature." Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology."

"The unformulated message of an assembly of news items from every quarter of the globe is that the world today is one city. All war is civil war. All suffering is our own."

"Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual."

"By simply moving information and brushing information against information, any medium whatever creates vast wealth."