The Need for ‘Anti-Environments’ as a Mode of Perception in a Hyper-Technological World
The Role of Art in Creating These Vessels of Perceptual Awareness
WHAT IS AN ANTI-ENVIRONMENT?
Resisting the urge to contemplate nothingness as John Cage demonstrated even in ‘silence’ there is no silence; an anti-environment is not the opposite of an environment or in other words, emptiness. Instead, it can be thought of as a mode of perception that reveals the invisible nature of the environment we live in.
It was a concept put forth by Marshall McLuhan, an outspoken commentator on technology in the second half of the 20th century, where he famously argued the need for anti-environments as vessels of perceptual awareness, since environments as such are imperceptible. His premise was that environments that are created by new technologies, while they are quite invisible in themselves, they do tend to make visible the old environments.
To illustrate his point he observes how with the advent of written technology, Plato’s content was that of the old oral dialogue; the content of the print technology of the Renaissance was medieval writings and that of the 19th century industrial mind was the Renaissance. The Romantic Movement, whose muse was nature, arose from the machine age, and a move into the electronic age resulted in the machine itself as an art-object. This seems clear in Pop Art, which was a commentary on the industrial machine that our world had turned into at a time when we were moving into the digital age. Thus, each new environment translated the old technology into an art form, and because of this he looked upon the arts to provide a perceptual shift in awareness.
The dawn of the computer age however brought about a distinct change in the new environment. The rate of technological advancements and speed of data processing became so rapid that it disrupted this interplay between old and new environments, environments and anti-environments. We were in a sense for the first time catching up with our planet by examining our world as it existed and changed in real-time. Thus reemerged nature as the subject for the arts in the 60’s and 70’s as our planet itself became an ‘anti-environment’ — an art object — yielding new perceptions of the contemporary man-made environments. However this time around, nature as understood in the romantic sense ceases to exist. It no longer is an attraction to its beauty, but instead one that arises out of an awareness of the destruction of its beauty.
McLuhan sees that unlike previous environments that arose from new technologies, “the electric environment mergers the individual and the environment”, which makes it trickier to create these vessels of perceptual awareness. He sees signs of this in Pop Art where the processing of the direct outer environment and bringing it into the dialogue of art merely served to merge man with his environment in the pretense of being anti-environmental. Following this logic, what do we make of Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades that revealed the entire sphere of an already existing environment of objects as art? Joseph Beuys later took the subject away from the object (the ready-mades), and wanted it to be in each man — the notion of ‘each man is an artist’. So in essence in one generation, art morphed into everything, and everyone morphed into an artist.
To create anti-environments in a technological environment requires a “technological extension of consciousness”, wrote McLuhan; in such a scenario however, “awareness” becomes immaterial and futile. The skepticism he is alluding to is that if the arts themselves become the environment under such conditions, they stop being anti-environmental.
Therefore here we can see that quite contrary to Freud’s concept of the ‘unconscious’, McLuhan thinks of the environment as the natural state of unconscious awareness and the anti-environment as a trained state of conscious awareness.
WHY DO WE NEED ANTI-ENVIRONMENTS?
Its amazing to think that his observations predated the Internet and all the technological advances that followed, yet his words echo truer today than it perhaps ever did in his lifetime. While humans have coexisted with technology in some form or the other throughout the ages, what makes the present environment different from the past is the speed of change. As we saw earlier on, the gap between successive advances in technology used to be considerably large, which allowed the new technology and in turn the new environment to take full circle before it made way for the next break through. Even in this scenario, it was perhaps only retrospectively that we were able to get a sense of our previous environments. However what we are witnessing now is the overlapping of massive advances in technology one after the other in quick succession with each one creating a new environment with unknown outcomes — good or bad. These changes generally remain invisible until time reveals them or we have a mode of perception, a tool to asses our environment in real-time.
In order to better illustrate the subtlety of the environment we live in, and therefore the greater need to consciously step out into anti-environments as modes of perception, let us take a look at the fish bowl -
“One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in”
- Marshall McLuhan
While his observation made sense during the pre-internet era that he belonged to, what I believe is that in today’s technological environment, it’s not the water that we need help perceiving, it’s the bowl. The water determines the nature of the fish (subject), but the bowl (technology) is what holds the water; it’s what bears it. It shapes the water (nature), which in turn molds the subject (humans); but the subject only perceives the water as its true nature. So where does human nature end and the intrusion of technology into human nature begin?
In the pre-electric age, a metaphor to describe ‘speed’ was associated with an animal like a cheetah. However today to describe speed is to compare it with technology. Are we making this technological speed natural, intrinsic to living beings, thereby making it an extension of ourselves? The Guardian’s description of Usain Bolt’s 200m victory beautifully illustrates my point — “on this penultimate evening in Moscow, nothing was more electric than Bolt.” If as Merleau-Ponty states, ‘nature is what bears us’, then what bears us today is technology.
“Nature is an enigmatic object, an object that is not absolutely an object; […] it is not what is in front of us, but what bears us”
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Technological progress in the 21st century seems to be leading us to an inevitable future where the human-animal in us slowly begins to disappear until one day the animal is absent. Perhaps our disappearance is the ideal utopian future that we all dream of, or perhaps it’s not. In either case what’s more chilling is that if we never realize it happening at all.
This is where Marshall McLuhan’s notion of the anti-environment comes into play. It gives us a framework, a mindset to approach art as a medium to communicate a “trained state of conscious awareness” in a hyper-technological world. What I am particularly interested in using this concept for, is to assess the role of art in today’s hyper-technological world, and critique the role of technology in art. The dilemma today is that technology has infiltrated art, just as in life, so much so that what we find natural, without even being aware of it is the very fabric of technology. In such a scenario can there still exist true mirrors of anti-environments?
*This essay was originally published on 1:11 Journal
About Harsha Bis:
Harsha Biswajit is a new media visual artist currently living and working in Berlin. His work primarily explores transformations brought about by technology. Before he entered the world of art, he was once dabbling with economics before deciding to make the dive as a full time artist in 2010.
You can find him on:
