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the phonetic alphabet was radically different from the older and richer hieroglyphic or ideogrammic cultures

McLUHAN: The phonetic alphabet did not change or extend man so drastically just because it enabled him to read; as you point out, tribal culture had already coexisted with other written languages for thousands of years. But the phonetic alphabet was radically different from the older and richer hieroglyphic or ideogrammic cultures. The writings of Egyptian, Babylonian, Mayan and Chinese cultures were an extension of the senses in that they gave pictorial expression to reality, and they demanded many signs to cover the wide range of data in their societies — unlike phonetic writing, which uses semantically meaningless letters to correspond to semantically meaningless sounds and is able, with only a handful of letters, to encompass all meanings and all languages. This achievement demanded the separation of both sights and sounds from their semantic and dramatic meanings in order to render visible the actual sound of speech, thus placing a barrier between men and objects and creating a dualism between sight and sound. It divorced the visual function from the interplay with the other senses and thus led to the rejection from consciousness of vital areas of our sensory experience and to the resultant atrophy of the unconscious. The balance of the sensorium — or Gestalt interplay of all the senses — and the psychic and social harmony it engendered was disrupted, and the visual function was overdeveloped. This was true of no other writing system.

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the ear, unlike the eye,

I mean space that has no center and no margin, unlike strictly visual space, which is an extension and intensification of the eye. Acoustic space is organic and integral, perceived through the simultaneous interplay of all the senses; whereas “rational” or pictorial space is uniform, sequential and continuous and creates a closed world with none of the rich resonance of the tribal echoland. Our own Western time-space concepts derive from the environment created by the discovery of phonetic writing, as does our entire concept of Western civilization. The man of the tribal world led a complex, kaleidoscopic life precisely because the ear, unlike the eye, cannot be focused and is synaesthetic rather than analytical and linear. Speech is an utterance, or more precisely, an outering, of all our senses at once; the auditory field is simultaneous, the visual successive. The models of life of nonliterate people were implicit, simultaneous and discontinuous, and also far richer than those of literate man. By their dependence on the spoken word for information, people were drawn together into a tribal mesh; and since the spoken word is more emotionally laden than the written — conveying by intonation such rich emotions as anger, joy, sorrow, fear — tribal man was more spontaneous and passionately volatile. Audile-tactile tribal man partook of the collective unconscious, lived in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual, its values divine and unchallenged, whereas literate or visual man creates an environment that is strongly fragmented, individualistic, explicit, logical, specialized and detached.

Marshal McLuhan

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The gestures of Smithson and Long and the studio performances of Nauman were staged for the purpose of the photograph, thus inverting the notion of reportage. 

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There are thus two entwined programs in the camera: one causes the camera to automatically make pictures, the other allows the photographer to play. Beyond these are further programs—that of the photographic industry that programmed the camera; that of the industrial complex that programmed the photographic industry; that of the socio-economic system that programmed the industrial complex; and so on. Clearly there can be no “final” program of a “final” apparatus, since every program requires a metaprogram on account of which it is programmed. The hierarchy of programs is open at the top.

Vielem Flusser “Kunst und Komputer,” in Lob der Oberlächlichkeit (Bensheim: Bollmann, 1993), 259–64.

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According to Dali by simulating paranoia one can systematically undermine one's rational view of the world, which becomes continually subjected to associative transformations, "For instance, one can see, or persuade others to see, all sorts of shapes in a cloud: a horse, a human body, a dragon, a face, a palace, and so on. Any prospect or object of the Physical world can be treated in this manner, from which the proposed conclusion is that it is impossible to concede any value whatsoever to immediate reality, since it may represent or mean anything at all" (Marcel Jean)

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Don wasn't about being explosive or losing control - he reminds us that music is within us all. We are music.

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After photography, for example, emerged to rival the production of paintings which faithfully depict reality in line with our perceptions, and even had the audacity to promise - quite legitimately as it turned out - that what it depicted was far closer to reality, painting was eventually obliged to retreat from the representation of the world of objects after a 50-year long struggle and to concentrate on depicting its own idiosyncratic world (i.e. surface, form, colour and the properties of materials and technical devices from the frame to the canvas). Its triumph in doing so is evidenced in the abstract painting of the first half of the 20th century. The fact that painting went back once more to creating pictures of the world of objects in the second half of the century (from Pop Art to Photo-realism) was a development that referred directly to photography. If, in the world prior to photography, painting was based directly and immediately on representing the world of objects, then object-based painting after the invention of photography came to refer solely to the world of objects as it was depicted by photography, i.e. to object-based and figurative photography. But it is not just the experiences with film and photography which have led to an exchange with painting: digital ‘Paint’ programs and the experience of working directly on the computer and the screen have given an unmistakably fresh impetus to painting. Significantly enough, they have also kicked off a new form of computer-derived abstraction in painting. Yet it is not just the western programme of visual images which has changed through the influence of the technological media: the programme of sculptures has obviously been transformed, too. We can recognise the dominating influence of computer algorithms and 3-D programs right down to the field of architecture. We could therefore be tempted to ask whether the effects of the new media on the old media have actually been more successful than the works of the new media themselves. The central movens and the central agendas of 20th century art: the crisis of representation, the dissolution of the traditional notion of artwork and the disappearance of the author – all these factors are due to the emergence of the new media. The radical turn towards the culture of reception which occurred in the 20th century, the explosion of the visual in art and science, the pictorial turn, are all consequences of the new media.

Peter Weibel, The Post-Media Condition

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When you cut into the present the future leaks out.