Week 3 - C+ Gang - McLuhan

Our group started the session by asking ourselves this question: "Is the study of Computation Arts a study of hot or cold media?"

We then looked at McLuhan's essay and tried to interpret his notions in regard to this question. We first identified some examples from the text, such as "Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than a dialogue." (24) From this quote, we surmised that since computation arts dives deeply into spectator involvement, it should be an example of a cool media. At the same time, computation arts can hardly be put under this one label as although it usually requires a lot of participation on the side of the user/participant, it can also be a treasure trove of information. For example, under computation arts, a book becomes an interactive story and thus, nothing is clearly hot or cold. Instead, it becomes a sort of spectrum.

So, at the end of the day, we decided that Computation Arts can be considered both a hot and a cold media because it involves both the involvement of participants and the mass of information within the work. On top of that, different arts within the field involve different levels of information and participation, thus blurring the boundaries even more. Also, according to McLuhan's notion of "the medium is the message", both the information and the spectator are the medium within which the message is born. Thus, we realized that this idea is very well encapsulated by Computation Arts because the creative process that goes into creating interactive media often comes from the notion of having an object or technology that can do certain things and pushing its limits of functionality in a way that generates a form of interactive art. And so, we felt that because it includes this spectrum of hot and cold media, Computation Arts is a very unique field in the way that it conveys messages through the various types of mediums it uses.