Bob Cotton's MediaInspiratorium

some excerpts from articles and books and pdfs I've made....

How come every creative recognised the Sixties straight away - even me as a 15 year-old wannabe art student? It was as if the whole Sixties zeitgeist was waiting to leap into our consciousness from day one.

From the radio as an oracular medium to the oral-formulaic theory suggested by Milman Parry and Albert Lord in the 1930s, the radio filters into our consciousness in a very very personal way.

I believe that there is a collective memory - an UR memory, left over within us from our long childhood as a nomadic species walking out of Africa and into the wide world. We spent some 500-700 generations (maybe even more!) in this primordial nomadic mode. Civilised life (since Agrarian revolution and birth of writing) has only lasted about 70-80 generations...

Our contemporary, 21st century art and culture draws from AI and Quantum mechanics, as well as our 10,000 years of mediated history, now residing in Large Language models and stored very handily in our Net/Web. Some recent works celebrate this convergence...

Our little dog friend Nipper died recently...

More on what inspires us...

I've been fascinated by the artists of all kinds who lived ahead of their times and pointed to our futures....

an art-media-technology discovery through my 78-year old lens, and pointers to the ZG of Now.

From the point-of-view of 2024, its eay to trace the emergence of the Man-Machine Zeitgeist/ Here's my take on the chronology..

A short pictorial essay on Fluxus - where did it come from? Dada - and especially the mixed-media performances at Cabaret Voltaire (from 1916) must have influenced Fluxus artists.

This article argues that William James description of the experience of our own awareness, our sense of Self - as a stream of consciousness (in James:The Principles of Psychology 1890) played an important role in the development of Modernism, in literature, and in the importance of collage, photomontage and serial montage in the period 1890-1930. And that the evocation of stream of consciousness still underpins much of our 'streaming media' culture of the 21st century.