Eli Miller

 "...The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation."  "Everyone is in the best seat." "Everything we do is music." (John Cage quoted in McLuhan pp.118) McLuhan and John Cage both understand the importance of sound as a medium we can't escape in life.  "Cold Milk" Original photograph "We simply are not equipped with earlids." (McLuhan 111). Importantly, since visual art has the capacity to be abstract or even non representational, sound is allowed to be dissonant or even exploratory in a way where the main take away is how the listener feels.  Taking my inspiration from John Cage's "Water Walk" I decided to use strange liquid sounds as a way to challenge the listener while also leaving the door open for them to laugh if they can't listen past the strangeness. Where my project differs is that I wanted to trigger an intense feeling in my listeners. I

  Photo titled "Eat your Words"     We were asked to shoot 100 photographs on a Sony NEX-5 with a thematic attachment to McLuhan's "The Medium is the Massage". We chose and edited the most representative 20 photographs of our vision and presented them digitally on an Instagram account. I chose to take photos of things that seemed starkly out of place in the city of Appleton Wisconsin. I was pleasantly surprised with my ability to pick photography back up like riding a bike and am extremely happy with the outcome of my vision and selection. From garbage and metropolitan nuisances out of place amongst nature, to candid shots that feel unsettling in an indescribable way, I am helping the viewer feel a part of themselves that is disturbed by striation from the norm. As McLuhan puts this phenomenon:  "The poet, the artist, the sleuth —whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely "well adjusted," he cannot go along with currents and tr