Spectrevision Radio

Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.

For more episodes or to support the podcast,

go to weirdstudies.com. Hi, welcome to Weird Studies. I'm Phil Ford.

This week's show is on one of our favorite thinkers,

Marsha McLuhan, and on the book of Probes, a posthumous collaboration between McLuhan and the graphic designer David Carson. In what follows, we do a pretty good job of describing this book and

probes generally, so I won't spend a lot of time on that here.

Instead, I'm going to ask you to pull up a chair and gather around as Uncle Phil tells you a story.

About eight years ago, a group of students and I started a campus club devoted to performing what are called word scores, or event scores. The word score is one of the

characteristic genres of the post-war avant-garde. Its widespread use in the 60s and 70s was due to John Cage,

he of the famous silent composition 433, in which a performer does nothing at all for four minutes

and 33 seconds and the ambient noises

of a bemused audience end up constituting the piece. At first, Cage wrote 433 in more or less

conventional musical notation, but then he realized that he could just as easily write the word

tacit on a piece of paper and

call that the score.

The composer Pauline Oliveris, whom we discussed in episode 42, took this idea and ran with

it, writing a word score for a day-long event of street theater called Bonfire.

Here is Oliveris' description of it. Bonfire is intended for performance in a city,

college, or university environment. All normal city or campus activity, as well as specially arranged

activity, is part of bonfire. Anyone who enters the city or campus during the designated but unannounced time of the performance is a knowing or unknowing participant in bonfire.

Special rituals, activities, and sites described below are to be blended smoothly with normal city or campus activity, all during the normal working day and evening. The intention of

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