A series of poetic probes and philosophical musings based on 7 pechakucha presentations, and featuring 140 original collage illustrations, Massaging the Medium features famed poet Adeena Karasick at her best: incisive, insightful, ironic, illuminating, and always devoted to free play and humorous juxtapositions as she surveys our current semantic and media environments. The topics she takes up include the language and literature, symbols and meaning, media and technology, mysticism and spirituality, communication and communion, telephone and theatre, and general semantics and media ecology.
In the alternate universe where Roland Barthes was a TikTok star and Marshall McLuhan an Instagram Influencer cloned with a generation of super-whiz critical-wise-cracking kids to produce super-hip trend-smart media brand collage-critique they might have ap- proached the extra-orbital velocity of Adeena Karasick’s high-powered cultural insights. The sheer scale of her inventory of references is enough to overwhelm the synapses and explode the constellationary possibilities of trying to process the world we live in. We, not the medium, are what is being massaged, manipulated, and mangled-and Karasick artfully exposes these many machinations while keeping her cool voice and ludic edge.
Mordantly clever these compressed works are full of edge and insight. Up-to-date and totally timely, the dense fields of text-image resonate with current associations and indexical trails of the familiar frames according to which we mediate the culturally pro- duced encounters with our daily lives. Accurate and terrifying, lively and vivid, Adeena Karasick’s format manages its hybrid pata-para-pechakucha parametrics with dizzying and dazzling energy and skill. In other words-WOW.
-Johanna Drucker, author of The General Theory of Social Relativity, Downdrift, Iliazd: Metabiography of a Modernist and the forthcoming Inventing the Alphabet
Massaging the Medium is a fascinating, sensory media-mix…[where] you can hear Kara- sick’s voice and feel the rhythm of her reading-about technology and the senses, culture, communication, and imagination, Postman and Korzybski, the Golem, the body, lan- guage, talk, and truth. This is a book you can dance to.
-Eva Berger, Secretary of the Institute of General Semantics, author of The Communication Panacea and Context Blindness: Digital Technology and the Next Stage of Human Evolution
Language juggler Adeena Karasick did it again. By letting images speak, she crammed an unjammable aural experience in less than 200 pages.
An absolute Mcluhanesque pastiche that seizes the allatonceness of our memetic cul-ture. A book to read with your ears.
-Paolo Granata, University of Toronto, author of
The MediuM: a Marshall McLuhan Board Game
