\n
Abstract\u00a0<\/strong>|\u00a0This artist-response essay examines some ethical and aesthetic contours of media-theoretical hoaxes (and of a hoaxing media theory). I accomplish this through an exploratory reflection upon my own experiences and dilemmas as a media hoax artist, a vocation that has been influenced by Harold Adams Innis\u2019s \u201cauthentic\u201d scholarly persona as well as by McLuhan\u2019s \u201cprobing\u201d methods. Whereas recent work in the field of hoax art has tended to rely on the eventual text-bound revelation of the truth of the situation, my McLuhanite method aims rather towards magic and mediation.<\/p>\n R\u00e9sum\u00e9\u00a0<\/strong>|\u00a0Cet essai et r\u00e9ponse d\u2019artiste examine quelques contours \u00e9thiques et esth\u00e9tiques des canulars m\u00e9diatiques (et d’une th\u00e9orie des canulars m\u00e9diatiques). J’accomplis cela \u00e0 travers une r\u00e9flexion exploratoire sur mes propres exp\u00e9riences et dilemmes en tant qu\u2019artiste de canular m\u00e9diatiques, une vocation qui a \u00e9t\u00e9 influenc\u00e9e par la personnalit\u00e9 acad\u00e9mique \u00ab authentique \u00bb d\u2019Harold Adams Innis ainsi que par les m\u00e9thodes \u00ab exploratoires \u00bb de McLuhan. Alors que les travaux r\u00e9cents dans le domaine de l’art du canular ont eu tendance \u00e0 d\u00e9pendre de la r\u00e9v\u00e9lation \u00e9ventuelle de la v\u00e9rit\u00e9 de la situation, ma m\u00e9thode McLuhanite s\u2019appuie plut\u00f4t sur la magie et la m\u00e9diation.<\/p>\n Henry Adam Svec<\/p>\n It\u2019s a commentary on our extreme cultural lag that when we think of criticism of information flow we still use only the concept of book culture, namely, how much trust can be reposed in the words of the message. The content of every Harold Adams Innis is always another Marshall McLuhan. The world itself has become a probe. I never meant to bamboozle. I have just enjoyed the ways that things can get in the way\u2014on stage, on record, online, on the air, on the street. Possibilities can be opened and unexpected pathways can be paved; directions one never thought possible can be made to cascade out into blooming black tops. I have not meant to conceal (I would not know where to start) but rather to embrace, which often involves only desiring and wondering: Wouldn\u2019t it be fun?<\/em><\/p>\n Marshall McLuhan\u2019s mischievous printed matters and performances have offered insight and inspiration. Although notions of \u201cthe real\u201d and \u201cthe true\u201d ironically haunt contemporary hoax artists, the approach that I have borrowed reimagines the rules of this game\u2014which can measure less than they engender and can signify less than they amplify. McLuhan offers a light for hoax artists who want not to lie but merely to have lain with others across the techno-cultural termini of all that might be, or become, or have been becoming.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n First there was Henry Thomas, the actor who played \u201cElliott\u201d in ET: The Extra-Terrestrial<\/em>, who I decided not to research except for the sparsely narrated filmography I found on the Internet Movie Database<\/em>. I knew only his image\u2014a sweet face and voice that could have been mine, more or less, from a certain distance. Wouldn\u2019t it be fun if \u201cHenry Thomas\u201d was from Southwestern Ontario and has decided to move back home to focus on his songwriting? The Boy from ET<\/em> was not a matter of obscuring, concealing, and then revealing. I saw myself rather putting into motion branching streams of possibility, joining myself up with an image and rummaging around, scavenging what I could and fabricating what I could not, and placing my final findings for pleasure within the reach of others.[2]<\/a> When \u201cHenry Thomas\u201d proper messaged me through MySpace and asked me to stop, I learned that his own version of \u201cThe Boy From ET<\/em>\u201d was also trying to make it as a singer-songwriter, which is an incredible coincidence. I eventually obliged him by adding a disclaimer and we both went onto our separate ways (see www.myspace.com\/theboyfromet<\/a> and www.myspace.com\/henrythomasmusic<\/a>).<\/p>\n In 2010 my interests shifted from former child stars to the concept of the folk. I wondered if it would be fun to have discovered tapes recorded in the 1970s by \u201cStaunton R. Livingston,\u201d the iconoclastic Canadian folklorist who believed that culture was common property\u2014and also believed that, if one wanted to document authentic Canadian folklore, one would need to scour the teams of the Canadian Football League for the players\u2019 tales, legends, and songs. (I could not have been sure why \u201cLivingston\u201d believed this, because he did not write or publish, but he was committed to the belief as far as I could discern.) Wouldn\u2019t it be fun if these folk songs of the Canadian Football League evinced a remarkable perspicacity regarding the universality of boredom and drudgery, yet also the possibility of redemption via solidarity, under late capitalism? Fun, too, if some of the coaching staff of the University of Toronto varsity football team came out to a performance, curious about this historical wormhole, asking excellent questions after the show? It was, indeed, very fun (see www.thecflsessions.ca<\/a>).<\/p>\n My dreaming has most recently been pulled by the possibility of an intelligent machine having decisively passed the Turing Test in Dawson City, Yukon (see www.folksingularity.com<\/a>).[3]<\/a> With the help of Czech computer programmer \u201cMirek Pl\u00edhal\u201d and Canadian songwriter Mathias Kom, I desired to have constructed an artificially intelligent database of folksong that can both comprehend the totality of the Canadian folk archive and simultaneously generate new yet hyper-authentic works based on the source data. (In honour of my favourite communist folklorist, we named this machine LIVINGSTON\u2122.) There were some glitches and errors, to be sure, but we nonetheless managed to redirect media evolution towards less spectacular and more egalitarian (and weirder) ends, a task as difficult as it was fun (see Svec, \u201cFrom the Turing Test\u201d).[4]<\/a><\/p>\n Obviously, there can be multiple yearnings involved in any act of communication, including a hoax performance, and for me they have not always aligned. For instance, once, in Toronto, I was kicked in the leg by a well-known playwright when I let it slip, after a show, that I was not actually an accredited folklorist and that there was not actually a basement in what I had been calling \u201cThe National Archives\u201d.[5]<\/a> Another time, in North Bay, on the day after I had autographed several CDs for artificially intelligent Canadian folk music fans at the White Water Gallery, I received an email from someone who had heard that my explanation of artificially intelligent folk music given in North Bay was an elaborate hoax and would I please clarify. I wrote back that I would not describe it that way, and we left it at that. But I was stricken with grief and with shame: my hard work of guiding others through fields of possibility had been ricocheted back to me, reappearing now only as obstruction or shroud. Having recently received a doctorate for a not-entirely-unrelated body of researches, I felt guilty in North Bay, even if the presentation I had offered occurred on stage in an art gallery and not in a university or at a folklore conference.[6]<\/a><\/p>\n In one of Marshall McLuhan\u2019s many media appearances, he is especially elusive. Audience members pose questions about the sage\u2019s controversial and famous pronouncements, while the English professor slowly spins in his chair, lobbing probes: \u201cI have no point of view. See, for example, now, I couldn\u2019t possibly have a point of view\u2014I\u2019m just moving around,\u201d he more or less explains (globalbeehive). McLuhan makes the non-articulation of a clear position into a playful Great Refusal. He will not serve print-oriented logics. At least, he would prefer not to.<\/p>\n As Glenn Willmott\u2019s book on the character and context of McLuhan\u2019s proto-postmodernism has demonstrated, McLuhan\u2019s inconsistencies and media games can be generously viewed as a performative embodiment of his analysis of contemporary media culture: \u201cMcLuhan became less and less, let us say, sincere. He became increasingly the mask-wearer of postmodern satire, a master of the \u2018put-on\u2019\u201d (172). Thus, as McLuhan himself had already gone to great pains to remind his readers in many of his books, his work should not solely be judged from within the conventional paradigms of scholarly practice in the humanities. As Willmott describes:<\/p>\n To [the \u201cirrational\u201d grammar of modern existence], McLuhan submitted himself, in his postmodern masquerade as the first imaged, incorporated, commodified, and disseminated \u2018Pop\u2019 philosopher. . . . When \u201ctotal\u201d is worldwide and technological, rather than tribal and verbal, the self can no longer hope to recognize itself in an ontological mirror projected upon it: the individual boundaries and coherence of the self are increasingly problematized as a collective techne penetrates and absorbs everything in sight. (134)<\/p>\n The corporeal and inter-subjective modes of communication and awareness fostered by \u201ccool\u201d media demand multiplicitous modes of perception and exposition (see McLuhan, Understanding<\/em>), which McLuhan\u2019s complex personae, performances, and texts aim to open. As McLuhan himself put it in The Medium is the Massage<\/em>, \u201cThe main obstacle to a clear understanding of the effects of the new media is our deeply embedded habit of regarding all phenomena from a fixed point of view\u201d (68).<\/p>\n Yet McLuhan\u2019s splintered optics and playful modes of exposition, if logically consistent and rhetorically necessary, famously sat unwell with many of his contemporaries, despite (or perhaps because of) McLuhan\u2019s mainstream successes. As Theodore Roszak declared, \u201cMcLuhan\u2019s assertions are not, he would have us believe, propositions or hypotheses. They are \u2018probes.\u2019 But what is a \u2018probe\u2019? It is apparently any outrageous statement for which one has no evidence at all or which, indeed, flies in the face of obvious facts\u201d (268). McLuhan\u2019s method from this angle seems nothing but charlatanism\u2014a spectacular show for the spotlight.<\/p>\n Even critics sympathetic to Canadian media theory sometimes prefer to see McLuhan as an inauthentic echo of the originary source, Harold Adams Innis. Such distinctions appear both intellectual and personal. Consider James W. Carey\u2019s opening to his influential essay on Innis: \u201cDuring the third quarter of this century, North American communications theory\u2014or at least the most interesting part\u2014could have been described by an arc running from Harold Innis to Marshall McLuhan. \u2018It would be more impressive,\u2019 as Oscar Wilde said while staring up at Niagara Falls, \u2018if it ran the other way\u2019\u201d (109). Carey goes on to render Innis as an un-commoditized hero with integrity, swimming against fashions, currents, and colleagues. Using words and phrases such as \u201ccommitment\u201d and \u201crevolt\u201d and \u201cransacked experience without regard to discipline\u201d and \u201crescued\u201d and \u201cfreed\u201d and \u201cattempted to restore\u201d (114), Carey paints Innis with vigor and virility.<\/p>\n Although McLuhan has been given his due since the backlashes (we have recently seen edited collections, conferences, and centenary celebrations), it has seemed to me that, at least in water-cooler discussions in subterranean folk-music archives, one of the two progenitors of Canadian media theory is rendered as committed intellectual, the other as celebrity sellout. One toils away in relative obscurity, bucking trends and pursuing truth, the other riding his predecessors\u2019 coattails, making cameo appearances in films and spinning in his chair on television. I am not endorsing these judgments but am merely pointing out that they have had some weight, durability, as Innis himself observed of oral dialogue in The Bias of Communication<\/em>.<\/p>\n However, personas and the affects they let loose, like arguments articulated in academic monographs or journal articles, are raw materials for the hoax artist. Thus, both ideas and performances are to be found in the \u201cToronto School\u201d of Canadian media theory, both content and media, which just so happen to have drawn me out of the ethical impasse I encountered in North Bay. Innis\u2019s and McLuhan\u2019s convergent theoretical propositions and their divergent styles of being and thinking together make up a palette of signals and noises in which we can find both truth and hocus-pocus, both authenticity and that against which it has historically been defined, and in potent combinations.[7]<\/a><\/p>\n I had already been toying with Innis\u2019s work and with the myth of the committed rebel-scholar. Consider the biographical details of \u201cStaunton R. Livingston,\u201d the character whose recordings of CFL players singing authentic Canadian folk songs I claimed to have found in the basement of \u201cThe National Archives,\u201d and after whom I named my artificially intelligent folk database, LIVINGSTON\u2122. Staunton R. Livingston was born and raised in Windsor, Ontario (is there a more authentic city?); he was an autodidact who briefly studied at the University of Toronto but who dropped out before taking his degree (Innis was one of his teachers); he was a communist folklorist who did not publish or hold an academic position; and he died in 1977 in Trois-Rivi\u00e8res, QC of heart failure. Like Innis, Livingston was a \u201cmarginal man\u201d (Watson), on the outside looking in, paying little attention to disposable and external processes of validation or accreditation. Livingston was a truthful seeker of truth, a capturer and assembler of real voices; he refused even to write or to publish, thoroughly committed as he was to the arts of orality and phonography. Audiences seemed to love this side of our hero and to desire more reliable information.<\/p>\n Consider too Livingston\u2019s approach to his folkloristic arsenal of tools, in particular the magnetic tape recorder, which was marked for him by an insatiable desire for presence, touch, and time; Livingston sought to dig below consciousness and meaning, down to the fundamental grounds of authentic existence.[8]<\/a> As I rendered his folkloristic method in my play On Livingston\u2019s Method<\/em>:<\/p>\n If you were to take the tapes that Livingston made of CFL players in the 1970s, if you were to lay these tapes across the ground, and if it were possible to see on tape the grain of the music, you would see nothing but this grain on Livingston\u2019s tapes. It would not be possible to see, there, the lack that is the opposite of the grains of music. This means that to listen to The CFL Sessions<\/em> is not to hear a singer who is simply passing on a song. If we follow the path Livingston has laid out for us, in The CFL Sessions<\/em> we can hear the singer become something other than a mere channel of a message; we can hear the singer reach towards communion\u2014an instrument for itself and yet longing for others.<\/p>\n Sound, in this light, has a utopian ringing built into it, which magnetic tape recording has a unique ability to locate and magnify. Livingston\u2019s use of phonography\u2014given that he did not record for a record label or even for a public institution\u2014can thus be understood as a folk approach to folksong collecting: he figured himself as a pure reservoir for pure reservoirs, a clear window for clear windows. So the legend goes, I claimed.<\/p>\n Signals can get crossed, however. Clearly smitten with Livingston\u2019s life and methods, I myself (Livingston\u2019s legacy\u2019s caretaker) tended to misuse my sources, variously reading too far and not far enough (see www.folksongsofcanadanow.com\/<\/a>). In speaking and in making digital archives, and in writing and singing, I tended to get in the way. The work of a \u201cGutenberg man [sic]\u201d (McLuhan, Gutenberg<\/em>), my academic discourse contended with Livingston\u2019s implicit pleas for being together, for I essayed too much (see http:\/\/www.folksingularity.com\/faq.html<\/a>). I could often see it in my audience\u2019s glazed-over eyes\u2014could feel the disdain and, sometimes, contempt for their too-tight relay. They wanted Livingston, and his Folk, but were stuck in the middle with me.<\/p>\n And yet, in spite of the calculated incompetence of his progeny, even and perhaps especially when our \u201ccover\u201d was blown, Livingston\u2019s method functioned across both time and space. Some kind of authenticity echoed out and away from our ceremony (and from all its other incarnations), in which folk-singing footballers can sing and revel and make poetry, and in which technology can be recalibrated towards human and un-commoditized ends. \u201cDon\u2019t let the sound of your own wheels make you crazy,\u201d as the machine LIVINGSTON\u2122 wrote in \u201cTake It Easy But Take It to the Limit,\u201d ironically entranced therein by its own powers of composition. Which is to say that in spite of the glitches and noise communion was made to happen. No lie. I could feel it.<\/p>\n In my experience, it is impossible to predict how an audience will react, but it seems to me that ideal auditors have suspected, doubted, believed, wondered, accepted, delighted, and revolted altogether. As the contemporary McLuhanite media theorist Siegfried Zielinski puts it, \u201cIt is of vital importance to know that a magical approach toward technology continues to be possible and to be reassured that investment in it is meaningful\u201d (Deep Time <\/em>255). Thus for me it was important not to include in my work a hoaxer\u2019s reveal. Zielinski again: \u201cWhen the spaces for action become ever smaller for all that is unwieldy or does not entirely fit in, that is unfamiliar and foreign, then we must attempt to confront the possible with its own possibilities” (Deep Time <\/em>11). Livingston\u2019s radical phonography and LIVINGSTON\u2019s authentic archive are only two possibilities within late-modern media culture, but I wanted to foreground them\u2014and to make them both real and durable.<\/p>\n Yet, \u201choax art\u201d has often tended to require a moment of unmasking, a moment at which the personas are deflated and at which the true meaning or intentions of the artist are revealed. According to Chris Fleming and John O\u2019Carrol, this strategy makes hoaxes an inherently educative type of text or performance: \u201cLike irony, the hoax means the opposite of what it says and its ultimate truth, if we are still brave enough to talk in these terms, depends on its falsity being taken <\/em>for truth. The deception, in this respect, is temporal and temporary\u2014the hoax is no good if it cannot, at some stage, be revealed (unless, of course, the aim is simply to defraud)\u201d (48). Fleming\u2019s and O\u2019Carrol\u2019s theorization of the hoax draws on Jacques Derrida\u2019s engagement with J.L. Austin; although they acknowledge that hoaxes operate across numerous genres and can exist as texts or performances, they see the hoax as a primarily parasitical (and inherently discursive) form of communication. \u201cHoaxes are at once textual and metatextual in their strategies of attack\u201d (57), they write.<\/p>\n Some of the most high-profile hoax artists of late would seem to agree with Fleming and O\u2019Carrol about the inherent textuality and metatextuality of the form as well as its educative function of writing truth to falsity. One of the most visible practitioners, The Yes Men, have especially required moments of unmasking in which their deconstructive intentions have been revealed. They spend weeks or months or days joining up with and inhabiting various media apparatuses and ideologies; setting truth and representation aside, they meld their bodies and clever faces with the military-industrial-entertainment complex in a way that foregrounds and heightens its absurd logics and tendencies (see Hynes, Sharp, and Fagan). But the satirical function of The Yes Men\u2019s performances requires a moment at which we realize that it has all been a polemical act: masks are stripped away, costumes discarded, and they finally help us to see their point of view<\/em> on the global consequences of various neoliberal policies. In other words, despite their clear knowledge of and investment in the tactical guidelines of media theory, the knowledge that The Yes Men have to offer is a print-based and visual knowledge. In their first documentary The Yes Men<\/em> (2003), for example, while explaining their mission and role one of The Yes Men points to stacks of printed newspapers and magazines that have covered their antics, implying that their real work is the drawing of attention (using media stunts) towards print-based argumentation.<\/p>\n Another influential and famous hoax artist, Iris H\u00e4ussler, has also required a moment of unmasking, though as a visual artist she is motivated by a different set of disciplinary concerns than The Yes Men. Gilles Deleuze\u2019s claim that \u201c[e]very actual surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images\u201d is concretized in her expansive artworks (Deleuze and Parnet 148), which invite the viewer into apparently limitless worlds. I had the good fortune of attending H\u00e4ussler\u2019s He Named Her Amber<\/em> (2010) at the Art Gallery of Ontario. After being led through an exquisitely detailed excavation site at The Grange by a guide who explained and recounted the most fanciful of historical tales in a way that made the story feel all-too-real, we were given a letter by our tour guide and sent on our way. It was in this letter, on this page, that we learned of the artist\u2019s imprint on the site and narrative: \u201cFinally revealing the fictitious nature of Amber\u2019s story\u2014after a time of reflection\u2014is absolutely as much a part of my artwork as constructing the story is in the first place\u201d (H\u00e4ussler, “Disclosure” n.p.). In reading the artist statement, which according to H\u00e4ussler is necessary, the expansive \u201ccloud\u201d of virtualities were thus cast into the dustbin of the individual imaginary of a single creator.<\/p>\n I admire both The Yes Men and Iris H\u00e4ussler (and even Alan Sokal), and also recognize that they are in different leagues than my poor folk. But for me the hoax is not a text, nor should it end with one. It is ritual, enchantment, and community. It is a bringing together and a making possible, not a lie but a kind of hocus-pocus, which is the originary meaning of \u201choax.\u201d[9]<\/a> According to Fleming and O\u2019Carroll, many contemporary media and academic hoaxes have an educative function: \u201c[The hoax] commences with the premise that it has superior knowledge of some kind\u201d (57). However, following McLuhan\u2019s lead(s), my kind of hocus-pocus is not so severe or print-dominated, because it does not reveal superior, discrete knowledge from an authentic margin, or even articulate a point of view. I am rather joining up with others, including machines, and expanding, multiplying, and thickening (or at least trying). \u201cA moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born,\u201d as McLuhan observes of media hybridization in general (Understanding<\/em> 80). Similarly, the unrevealed hoax is not necessarily untrue, and does not need to be framed as such. It is rather a new form of truth\u2014a new kind of revelation.<\/p>\n It might seem like a paradox, or entirely inauthentic, that I am following up an allegedly McLuhanite, mixed-media hoax project with a peer-reviewed \u201cartist response\u201d essay on the work. It is, in a way. Certainly the communist folklorist Staunton R. Livingston\u2014who, again, never wrote or published\u2014avoided such indulgences. But this article is merely a component pointing throughout to others (e.g. www.loststompintomsongs.com<\/a>), a meeting place for the hybrid media assembled by my comrades and me. Which is to say that this document does not contain the final word but perhaps just the first one, which leads to others (and not just words) even more real. Such as the output of LIVINGSTON\u2122, the artificially intelligent archive of Canadian folk music that I built in Dawson City, Yukon:<\/p>\n I\u2019m gonna burn all my bridges Who will join in this ceremony of witnessing, digging, singing, and sounding? Who will join in this ceremony of burning?<\/p>\n Featured Image: Kate Beaton,\u00a0The Song Collector<\/i>\u00a02011.<\/p>\n Bendix, Regina. In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies<\/em>. U of Wisconsin P, 2009.<\/p>\n Carey, James W. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society<\/em>.\u00a0Routledge, 1992.<\/p>\n Deleuze, Gilles, and F\u00e9lix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia<\/em>. Translated by Brian Massumi, U of Minnesota P, 1987.<\/p>\n Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogues II<\/em>. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Continuum, 2002.<\/p>\n Fleming, Chris, and John O\u2019Carrol. \u201cThe Art of the Hoax.\u201d Parallax<\/em> 16.4 (2010): 45-59.<\/p>\n globalbeehive. \u201cMarshall McLuhan: The World is Show Business.\u201d YouTube<\/em>, 27 April 2010,<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=9P8gUNAVSt8<\/a>.<\/p>\n H\u00e4ussler, Iris. \u201cDisclosure (Excavation Notes 01\/2009).\u201d Iris H\u00e4ussler<\/em>,\u00a0http:\/\/haeussler.ca\/amber\/artist.html<\/a>. Accessed 10 October 2016.<\/p>\n —. He Named Her Amber<\/em>. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2008-2010.<\/p>\n \u201cHenry Thomas.\u201d The Internet Movie Database<\/em>. IMDb.com, Inc, n.d. Web.\u00a01 Oct. 2017. <http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/>.<\/p>\n Hynes, Maria, Scott Sharpe, and Bob Fagan. \u201cLaughing with the Yes Men: The Politics of Affirmation.\u201d Continuum<\/em>, vol 21, no. 1, 2007, pp. 107-121.<\/p>\n Innis, Harold Adams. \u201cA Plea for Time.\u201d 1951. The Bias of Communication<\/em>. U of Toronto P, 2003, pp. 61-91.<\/p>\n —. Empire and Communications<\/em>. U of Toronto P, 1972.<\/p>\n Innis, Harold Adams. The Bias of Communication<\/em>. 1951. U of Toronto P, 2003.<\/p>\n Keightley, Keir. \u201cReconsidering Rock.\u201d The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock<\/em>. Edited by\u00a0Simon Frith, et al., Cambridge UP, 2001, pp. 109-142.<\/p>\n LIVINGSTON\u2122. \u201cTake It Easy but Take It to the Limit.\u201d Artificially Intelligent Folk Songs of\u00a0<\/em>Canada, Vol. 1<\/em>. Independent, 2014 [www.folksingularity.com<\/a>].<\/p>\n —. \u201cWinter Is Cold and Good.\u201d Artificially Intelligent Folk Songs of Canada, Vol. 1<\/em>. Independent, 2014 [www.folksingularity.com<\/a>].<\/p>\n Miller, Karl Hagstrom. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim\u00a0<\/em>Crow<\/em>. Duke UP, 2010.<\/p>\n McLuhan, Marshall. Counter-Blast<\/em>. McLelland and Stewart Limited, 1969.<\/p>\n —. From Clich\u00e9 to Archetype<\/em>. The Viking Press, 1970.<\/p>\n —. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man<\/em>. U of Toronto P, 2011.<\/p>\n —. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man<\/em>. 1964. Edited by W. Terrence Gordon, Ginko Press, 2003.<\/p>\n McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage<\/em>. 1967. Ginko\u00a0Press, 2001.<\/p>\n Peterson, Richard A. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity<\/em>. U of Chicago\u00a0P, 2013.<\/p>\n Roszack, Theodore. \u201cThe Summa Popologica of Marshall McLuhan.\u201d McLuhan: Pro & Con<\/em>. Edited by Raymond Rosenthal, Funk & Wagnalls, 1968, pp. 257-269.<\/p>\n Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction<\/em>. Duke\u00a0UP, 2003.<\/p>\n Svec, Henry Adam. \u201cFCJ-183 iHootenanny: A Folk Archeology of Social Media.\u201d The\u00a0<\/em>Fibreculture Journal<\/em>, vol. 25, 2015.<\/p>\n —. \u201cFolk Media: Alan Lomax\u2019s Deep Digitality.\u201d Canadian Journal of Communication<\/em>, vol. 38, no. 2, 2013, pp. 227-244.<\/p>\n —<\/em>. \u201cFrom the Turing Test to a Wired Carnivalesque: On the Durability of\u00a0LIVINGSTON\u2019s Artificially Intelligent Folk Songs of Canada<\/em>.\u201d Liminalities: A Journal\u00a0<\/em>of Performance Studies<\/em>, vol. 12, no. 4, 2016, pp. 1-7.<\/p>\n —. On Livingston\u2019s Method<\/em>. The Rhubarb Festival. Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto,<\/p>\n —. \u201cPete Seeger\u2019s Mediatized Folk.\u201d Journal of Popular Music Studies<\/em>, vol. 27, no. 2, 2015, pp. 145-162.<\/p>\n The Yes Men<\/em>. Dir. Dan Ollman, Sarah Price, and Chris Smith. Perf. Mike Bonanno and Andy\u00a0Bichlbaum, United Artists, 2003.<\/p>\n Turing, Alan M. \u201cComputing Machinery and Intelligence.\u201d Mind<\/em>, no. 49, 1950, pp. 433-460.<\/p>\n Watson, Alexander John. Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis<\/em>. U of Toronto P, 2006.<\/p>\n Willmott, Glenn. McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse<\/em>. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,<\/p>\n Zielinski, Siegfried. Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr\u2019actes in History<\/em>. Amsterdam University Press, 1999.<\/p>\n —. Deep Time of the Media<\/em>. The MIT Press, 2006.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> In addition to McLuhan, my methods owe much to the \u201cimaginary\u201d media research of Siegfried Zielinski (Audiovisions<\/em>; Deep Time<\/em>), who runs very far with the media-theoretical maxim that our communicative ecologies are contingent and thus could be otherwise. Perhaps not surprisingly, as Zielinski\u2019s first major book Audiovisions<\/em> made clear in a way that his more recent researches have not, he is a card-carrying McLuhanite.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> The work of Gilles Deleuze and F\u00e9lix Guattari also informed my early attempts at hoaxing, in particular A Thousand Plateaus<\/em> as well as Deleuze\u2019s \u201cThe Virtual and the Actual,\u201d an essay in his book of interviews with Claire Parnet, Dialogue II <\/em>(148-59).<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Alan Turing\u2019s famous examination is won when a machine successfully impersonates a human in the eyes of another human judge, performing not through the body but through the manipulation of symbols (Turing). So, given that it involved a human (me) impersonating a computer impersonating a human, my A.I. hoax was in a sense a hoax of an originary hoax.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> I have skipped over two of my hoaxes for brevity\u2019s sake. I also claimed to have retraced the steps of folklorist Edith Fulton Fowke, re-documenting that which she once documented (see www.folksongsofcanadanow.com<\/a>), and under a moniker (Staunton Q. Livingston) I appeared to have found a lost recording by Stompin\u2019 Tom Connors that was influenced by The Beach Boys\u2019 Pet Sounds<\/em> (see www.loststompintomsongs.com<\/a>).<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> As I myself learned after a show in Ottawa, from an actual archivist at The National Archives, \u201cThe National Archives\u201d is not even what that place is called (it is in fact \u201cLibrary and Archives Canada\u201d). It was from this kind archivist, too, that I learned about the lack of a basement there.<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> For evidence of these researches, see Svec \u201cFolk\u201d; Svec \u201ciHootenanny\u201d; Svec \u201cPete.\u201d<\/p>\n [7]<\/a> In making these performances and in thinking about them now, I am indebted to so much great work in media and cultural studies on the discursive production of \u201cauthenticity.\u201d See, for instance, Bendix; Keightley; Peterson; Miller.<\/p>\n [8]<\/a> Thus Staunton R. Livingston is a carrier of what Jonathan Sterne has described as \u201cthe audiovisual litany,\u201d a Christian ideology that identifies sound and hearing with presence and salvation, on one hand, and sight with alienation and individuality, on the other (Sterne 14-19). I very much had Sterne\u2019s discussion of \u201cthe audiovisual litany\u201d in mind when constructing Livingston\u2019s approach to song collecting.<\/p>\n
\nL(a)ying with Marshall McLuhan: Media Theory as Hoax Art<\/h4>\n
\n\u2013 Marshall McLuhan (Counterblast<\/em> 119)<\/p>\n
\n\u2013 Staunton R. Livingston<\/p>\n
\n\u2013 Marshall McLuhan (From Clich\u00e9<\/em> 12).<\/p>\nA Hoaxer\u2019s Dilemma <\/strong><\/h5>\n
Authenticity and Media Theory<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Authenticity, Media, and the Folk<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Hocus Pocus <\/strong><\/h5>\n
Conclusion<\/strong><\/h5>\n
\nBut can I get a witness?
\nI\u2019ve got a shovel.
\nI\u2019m gonna dig a tunnel.
\nIt ain\u2019t gonna be long but
\nIt\u2019s going to carry my song.\u00a0 (\u201cWinter Is Cold and Good\u201d)<\/p>\nImage Notes<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Works Cited<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Notes<\/h5>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/88x31-1.png\")
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"