Marshall McLuhan’s vision of a global village has truly come into being. McLuhan advanced his vision in two seminal books, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man and Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, written in the 1960s, when people first became aware of the role electronic media played in everyday life. Today Facebook and Twitter raise electronic media’s influence to another level. People connect globally in a manner unimaginable even a decade ago. We daily peer into the lives of strangers, almost like the proverbial fly on the wall. Of course, people perform on Facebook and Twitter, so we can never really tell if what we are looking at is a fabrication, a manufactured illusion. Yet people put forth multi-media representations, supposedly of themselves. I find it surprising how willing people are to make themselves vulnerable in public; for there is no question but that Internet social networking occurs in public. As an artist I have found Internet social networking sites (initially MySpace, now Facebook) to be rich with content I can tap into creatively. The root images of this animation aesthetically connect two people I discovered through Internet social networking. I came across the poetry and pinup artistry of Harlean Carpenter in 2008 on MySpace. I animated her poetry and image in numerous works and devoted an entire section of Illumination Gallery to her. I came upon Thérèse Elaine's poetry, drawings, and amazing collection of pulp fiction covers on Facebook early in 2011. I created/posted the animations, Shades of Darkness, centered on her poetry/drawings, and Ode to a Ramen Society, which incorporated her pulp fiction covers. Both Harlean Carpenter and Thérèse Elaine are talented authors, possessing deep visual sensibilities. Thérèse Elaine posted a pulp fiction cover on my Facebook page, indicating it reminded her of Harlean Carpenter. My animation plays off the notion, aesthetically melding the pulp fiction cover to an image from a gallery on Harlean Carpenter’s Poetic Pinup website. I have never met either Harlean Carpenter, who lives in Northern California, or Thérèse Elaine, who lives in Chicago. I live in Lower Manhattan. This animation is a direct product of Harlean Carpenter, Thérèse Elaine, and myself transcending our physical environments in an electronically juiced, digitally rendered global village.
Animation duration: 34.6 seconds, before looping.
Peter Schmideg