play is art
in the age of networked reproduction

Part I

1. 'The artist is the antenna of the race.' - Erza Pound
2. As we introduce new technologies into our culture, they release a web of hidden pressures on our psychic and social lives. It has been the artist's role to explore and reveal the hidden environments introduced by new technologies.
3. As the artist probes the invisible ground of experience, our language is updated, giving the rest of society the vocabulary and tools needed to make sense of their changing environment.
4. Art is not just entertainment or self expression. Art is a cultural survival mechanism. Art retunes our sensibilities so that we can cope with innovation.
5. "The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation." —Mcluhan
6. Artists probe our invisible environment in order to "force the evolution of language along conscious lines".

7. The artist is the member of society that is willing to explore rather than retreat from the psychic and social violence introduced by innovation.

8. The artist appears to be a fortune-teller or a prophet because the hidden environments that she probes eventually become assimilated into the visible culture.
9. "The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present." —Wyndham Lewis
10. The artist reveals the future in the present and the novel in the ordinary.

Part II

1. When art is prophetic, 'life imitates art'.
2. As the pace of change accelerates, art begins to play catch-up with real life. Our impulse is to then say 'Art imitates life', but this is not enough ...

3. In our electronic environment of instant information and ubiquitous connectivity, life is art and art is life.

4. We can see this shift beginning to happen already:
   The art gallery has become a museum.
   The artist is starting to use real life as her brush and her canvas.
5. Who needs a camera when every photo that has ever been taken or ever will be is at your disposal?
6. "We cannot evolve faster then we evolve our language. Our language is like the collective skin of our culture." —Terrence McKenna
7. McLuhan often repeated that the Balinese don't have art ... They do everything as well as they can. We are entering a similar state: For our networked culture to reach its full potential, art can no longer exist as a separate activity that we stop our lives to witness. Art must be sewn into the very fabric of our culture and our lives.
8. "Art may soon become a meaningless word." —Allan Kaprow

9. The artist is no longer a fringe or rare member of society but a role that each of us needs to play in order to sustain our electronic culture.

10. "In the best of all possible worlds, art would be unnecessary. Its offer of restorative, placative therapy would go begging a patient. ... The audience would be the artist and their life would be art." —Glenn Gould.
11. The artist as a cultural antennae, is giving way to art as 'the skin of our culture'.
12. The future of work is play.

Part III

1. "The kids are starting to experiment with fashion the way artists experiment with pigments." —McLuhan

2. For far too long we've dismissed youth culture rather than recognizing and embracing it for what it really is: a vital psychic and social playground in which the most adaptable members of society probe and make sense of our changing technological environment.

3. Rave and Woodstock weren't just recreation, but vast sensory training grounds in which we experimented with the new modes of awareness emerging at the edge of our culture.
4. "When people understand that this generation gap is really a technological gap, it will help them to get things in some sort of order again." —McLuhan
5. For more than 50 years, we've relied on youth culture to reveal the meaning of our emerging electronic environment.
6. The kids found shelter in electric music where adults could only hear noise.
7. When a culture is undergoing a radical upheaval and trying to cope with massive innovation, occasional exposure to art is not enough to retune people's sensibilities to the new environment. Art must be woven into the fabric of the culture.
8. The countercultures of the last century have all created rich anti-environments that have allowed us to submerge ourselves in art.

Parts IV V & VI coming soon