The BrainFarm

Boom boom!

2006-10-18T19:29:00.000Z

Spotted in Cowley, oxford

Tonight's sketches

2006-08-28T22:31:00.000Z

The MobileEye is Active!

2006-08-23T19:00:00.000Z

This politically charged piece of street-art reveals the anger felt by a community at the recent Lebanon campaigns.
Spotted in Cowley, Oxford.

H for Hegemony and ‘V for Vendetta’

2006-08-23T18:35:00.000Z

Analyse a Text Which You Feel Challenges the Hegemony:
H for Hegemony and ‘V for Vendetta’

This analysis intends to reveal the extent to which the comic series ‘V for Vendetta’ might be considered counter-hegemonic, an aim achieved through reflection on how themes addressed within the text relate to real-life, and through a critique of the text in relation to its less subversive counterparts within the genre of adult comic.

Here at the outset, it is imperative that the terms used henceforth should be clearly defined: Ideology, according to Williams (1977) is:

1. A system of beliefs characteristic of a particular class or group;

2. A system of illusory beliefs- false ideas or false consciousness- which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge;

3. The general process of the production of meanings and ideas.

Hegemony, according to Holtzman (2000) is:

“The process by which those in power secure the consent or social submission of those who are not in power. Hegemony is not secured through force, but rather through the way that values are taught in religious, educational, and media institutions.”

The text was selected for analysis because it is self-evidently ideologically aware: that is, it deals head on with issues of counter-culture, emancipation, oppression, and ideology itself. ‘V for Vendetta’ has recently become a high-grossing film, released in a time of political anxiety. Its themes resonate strongly in those who pay attention to the current political climate and have awareness of the current trend towards terrorism, closed-circuit television, and the loss of privacy.

These are the words spoken by the character codenamed ‘V’ in address to the nation’s capital on Bonfire Night just prior to the story’s climax.

“Good evening, London. This is the voice of fate. Almost four hundred years ago tonight, a great citizen made a most significant contribution to our common culture. It was a contribution forged in stealth and silence and secrecy, although it is best remembered in noise and bright light. To commemorate this most glorious of evenings, her majesty’s government is pleased to return the rights of secrecy and privacy to you, its loyal subjects. For three days, your movements will not be watched, your conversations will not be listened to, and “do what thou wilt” shall be the whole of the law. God bless you and goodnight” (‘V’, November 5^th, 1998)

Moments later, the totalitarian state of Britain is plunged into disarray as precisely targeted explosions are triggered around London, decimating key buildings of governance and thus toppling the regime for a short time. This act of terrorism is carried out by the masked and mysterious ‘V’, an escapee psychologically altered by his stay in a government concentration camp. There, he was subjected to experiments in hormone treatment, which heightened his consciousness to the point that he was free of the constraints of ideology (well, it is a comic book). He chose to become ‘V’ an icon of anarchy, and using his highly-attuned mind and body, he embarked on a

vendetta in the name of freedom, first killing all forty of his previous captors, and going on to destroy the oppressive forces they were borne out of, his counter-cultural ideology challenging the nationwide hegemony.

The series was written by Alan Moore and David Lloyd in the early eighties, and is set in a near-future Britain where an extreme fascist single-party state has arisen that controls the country through the media, secret police task-forces, a planned economy and the use of the aforementioned concentration camps. The series was considered most risqué on its initial serialisation in the independently published ‘Warrior’ magazine, as it re-presented Thatcher’s Britain in a terrible, yet purposely familiar light. Vendetta’s government has systematically removed all traces of non-government culture, arts, music and literature. The leader places his faith in technology, especially closed-circuit television, and uses computers to scrutinise the population. The public are shepherded by this omnipresent government, whose propagandist media output serve to keep the hegemony in working order. There is no freedom of expression in Vendetta’s London, and the public seems largely complacent until ‘V’ begins his intricate and theatrical detonation of the corrupt governing forces that emancipate the populace for time enough to question the legitimacy of their oppression.

Emancipation through anarchy is the key theme in ‘V for Vendetta’, and the text reinforces the idea that it is more desirable to be free to choose your existence than to have it chosen for you. This concept creates a contradiction in the narrative of the text: ‘V’ considers that his acts of sabotage and disruption are necessary in order to force the public into freedom, yet they do not ask for his help, thus they become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of his vendetta. For that reason ‘V’ is portrayed as a terrorist within the narrative, a view that the reader might also adopt were they not privy to his intimate conversations with his ally and apprentice, Evey Hammond.

In a scene where her training nears completion, ‘V’ states that “I didn’t put you in a prison, Evey. I just showed you the bars”. Here, Moore is making allusions to the idea that ideology is a prison cage, and that those within it must first see their captivity before they can break free. This scene sees Evey transfigured, she breaks free of the constraints she had allowed to be placed on herself. However, ‘V’s grandest gesture of course is the emancipation of the entire British public, and in address he incites their rage against the machine:

“Good evening, London. I would introduce myself, but truth to tell, I do not have a name. You can call me ‘V’. Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should accept for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse. In anarchy there is another way. With anarchy, from rubble comes new life, hope reinstated. They say anarchy’s dead, but see, reports of my death were exaggerated. Tomorrow, Downing Street will be destroyed, the head reduced to ruins, an end to what has gone before. Tonight, you must choose what comes next. Lives of our own, or a return to chains. Choose carefully. And so, adieu.” (‘V’, November 9^th, 1998)

In this rousing speech and throughout the series, ‘V’ is not simply talking to the masses within Vendetta, he is communicating with the reader also. Through the fluid and deeply immersive medium of comics, Moore has a direct link to the reader’s inner thoughts, placing us at centre stage within ‘V’s address with the intended effect that we might also be inspired to “choose what comes next”. It is evident to this analyst that as well as being a remarkable narrative, ‘V for Vendetta’ is also a coded attack on fascism, totalitarianism, dogmatism, and is a call to arms for those unhappy with the current situation.

Vendetta’s dystopian future bears striking resemblance to current conditions in Britain. Moore correctly predicted the rise in technology as means of surveillance: London is in reality the world’s ‘most watched city’ with the highest amount of CCTV cameras per capita; the government can indeed track criminal’s whereabouts- through chips in mobile phones. Similarly, ‘V’s actions parallel the acts of terrorism we see in reality: the destruction of landmarks; bombing public transport. Were this a text written today, ‘V for Vendetta’ would certainly be said to challenge the hegemony in a most distasteful way.

Yet Vendetta’s London is a different place to ours, and of course much less drastic means are required to clean up our nation’s problems. Within ‘V for Vendetta’ however, ‘V’ will do just fine. Though he is not the hero-figure of the type the genre is used to (Batman, Spiderman, Superman etc…) he is just as iconic, just as daring and much more frightening. He is also the most enigmatic ‘hero’ to appear in comics. This analyst considers that it was important to keep his true identity and true motivations hidden: The character ‘V’ was intended to be partly protagonist and partly antagonist, his Guy Fawkes mask permanently shielding any expression of remorse or revelry in his actions. Series artist David Lloyd banned thought-bubbles, which, coupled with his mask, make ‘V’ the least expressive human character in the history of the medium. It is left for the reader to decide whether ‘V’ is hero or villain. When asked if there is a message behind the comic series, Moore replies:

“The central question is, is this guy [‘V’] right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn't want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think, and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly regularly throughout human history.” (Moore, cited in MacDonald, 2006)

It is then shown through his work on ‘V for Vendetta’, that like his character ‘V’, MooreMoore would be teaching a new ideology if he did not offer his readers a choice of whether to accept or reject what is offered to them. Evey reflects upon ‘V’s finished campaign: intends to remind the public that they can think for themselves. This invitation to liberation is not expressed discreetly, hinted at through literary metaphor and subtext; it is the subject of the text as plain as day. It is for this reason that ‘V for Vendetta’ challenges our hegemony, the hegemony that keeps the majority from speaking out against issues of contention. Of course,

“How purposeful your vendetta, how benign, almost like surgery…your foes assumed you sought revenge upon their flesh alone, but you did not stop there… you gored their ideology as well. The people stand within the ruins of a society, a jail intended to outlive them all. The door is open. They can leave, or fall instead to squabbling and thence new slaveries. The choice is theirs, as ever it must be.”(‘Evey’, November 10^th, 1998)

And how right she is, for as these words are spoken the reader too is given the choice: to celebrate ‘V’s success as a hero, or to damn his actions as a terrorist. Moore has blurred the lines of right and wrong by showing both sides of ‘V’s anarcho-terrorist actions: revealing to us the positive sides of ‘V’s character provides questions as to the intentions of allMoore is using dominant ideological perceptions of terrorism, humanism and morality to hook the reader, and then subverts these hegemonic concepts to offer the reader a radically new perspective, should they choose to see it. freedom-fighting terrorists. Portraying the ‘hero’ as a masked avenger in the theatrical sense endears us to him, yet contrasting this with evidence of his criminal insanity makes us ponder whether his apparently genius plans to free the populace are naught but a crazed obsession.

The comic book is considered by many to be fairly bereft of cultural capital, and is seen as a medium whose content is built around meeting the unsatisfied desires of their usually male readership. Accountable for this perception is the superhero comic, a sub-genre that has defined the medium as we know it today. The literal power-struggles that these heroes undergo are famed for their scale, destruction and overt masculinity. In these types of comic, the role of the superhero is to preserve the status-quo, whose success is measured by their ability to return things to normality. These comics buy into hegemony, and the payoff for the reader is the chance to go along for the ride. However, the ride gets dull after a time. Thus, it is the heroes who fail to conform to these conservative ideologies that are causing a buzz lately, because these heroes, their writers and their respective series are making changes affecting how the medium is seen. ‘V for Vendetta’ is not a superhero comic, and ‘V’ is not a superhero. The payoff with this text is the chance to see the world in a new light, and to feel reminded that life is what you make of it, so make it your own.

There is an explosion of interest in comics of late; people are beginning to take notice of comics that are saying relevant things about our world. Comics have always been in the sub-culture, but with texts as oppositional as ‘V for Vendetta’, and hundreds of other genre-busting titles out there, perhaps it’s becoming more of a counter-culture, and one that deserves to be listened to.

References:

Holtzman, Linda (2000). Media Messages: What Film, Television, and Popular Music Teach Us about Race, Class, Gender and Sexual Orientation. New York: M. E. Sharpe Inc.

MacDonald, Heidi (2006). A FOR ALAN, Pt. 1: The Alan Moore interview. Available at: http://www.comicon.com/thebeat/2006/03/a_for_alan_pt_1_the_alan_moore.html (Accessed on 20^th April 2006)

Moore, Alan et al (1983-1990). V for Vendetta. New York: DC Comics.

Williams, Raymond (1977). Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Further Reading:

Mattelart, Armand (1980). Mass Media, Ideologies, and the Revolutionary Movement. Brighton: The Harvester Press Ltd.

Stephen Burt (2005). ‘"Blown To Atoms or Reshaped At Will”: Recent Books about Comics’. College Literature 32.1 [Winter 2005] pages 166-176.

Wolf-Meyer, Matthew. (2003) ‘The World Ozymandias Made: Utopias in the Superhero Comic, Subculture, and the Conservation of Difference.’ Journal of Popular Culture [2003] pages 497- 517.

Head test

2006-08-11T11:14:00.000Z

Mobile blogging is fun!

Amazon.co.uk: You'd Think They'd Sell Pyranhas - They Don't

2005-04-29T09:30:00.001Z

This is a reflection upon Amazon.co.uk. Amazon has become a hotspot for the cheap purchase of many thousands of products, and is famed for its immense selection of books and more recently, DVDs, CDs, software, and electronic goods. The site can be seen as a portal to not just the products itself, but to a logistically excellent and rapid service with worldwide outlets. Amazon was one of the first eCommerce businesses, and for many years it ran at break-even. Its strategy was to pass down its reduced buying costs to the customer as its economies of scale grew with sales. The fact that Amazon exists in the physical world purely as a series of distribution centres linked by computer orders serves to keep costs low. This gave it a great advantage over other online businesses, which were more of an extension of a pre-existing chain of shops that had high overhead costs before they branched out into eCommerce. They are now the world’s best known eCommerce business.

Amazon is all about finding the most efficient way to do things, from using its buying power to sell the latest Harry Potter book cheaper than anywhere else, to packaging its products in recycled cardboard. The internal structure of the site is designed to store information on each registered user and suggest items that you might enjoy based on past purchases or your reviews of products you already have. This is a great feature, especially when one’s taste in music or Japanese DVD’s requires a little extra help to find titles you might be interested in. Useful at Christmas time or birthdays is the ‘Wish-List’ feature, which allows users to make a big ‘I Want This’ list to email out to your friends and family (appreciate my BrainFarm? Buy me something I want here).

Another reason to visit Amazon is it’s ‘not-so-unique-anymore’ user reviews of each product, with the classic ‘5 star’ rating scale. Any registered user can create a review. See my review on Lemon Jelly’s DVD album (when it gets posted, that is). This feature gives customers the extra information they might need to make a decision based upon what previous buyers think. Now, this suggests the question “What if all user reviews are bad? Won’t the product fail to make Amazon any money? Why would Amazon allow that?” Good questions, all! These can be condensed into one question: Why would a business put its trust in its users to advertise the products for them? The answer is not simple, but like most of Amazon’s techniques to generate revenue, it involves a focus on the customer’s best interests rather than the merchants’ drive for sales.

Gatekeeping is a process by which the operator of a public establishment can withhold certain information, either for commercial gain or through sheer lack of space. A pub which sold every beer in existence would soon be out of business through high running costs, so just serves the beers that are most recognised by the punters. In the same way, Amazon might choose to provide only positive information on the products they list, but because they have limitless space to fill up on their servers, they impart all possible information on a product and allow the user to make a measured decision. This gives the sense that Amazon is ‘working for you’, and it gives good reason for customers to keep coming back. It is, then, in Amazon’s best interests to be a gatekeeper to a very, very wide gate.

Wikipedia.com: Proving We Can All Get Along-o-Pedia

2005-04-29T09:30:00.000Z

The Wikipedia is the world’s largest free encyclopedia, available to all with an Internet connection and a browser. The Wikipedia has become something of a media phenomenon because of its unique slant on data collecting – rather than employing data processors, like all the other encyclopedia sites, the site enlists its visitors to do the dirty work. The vast database of articles can be edited by any passer-by, and anyone can add an article of their own by means of software known as ‘Wiki’. Anybody can become a Wikipedian by helping to improve the infobase. It is this all-inclusive, non-profit and collaborative philosophy that makes the Wikipedia a staple in many thousands of Internet users’ favourites list.

As part of my Media and Communications coursework, what follows is a record of my encounter with the Wikipedia, details of the work I did to somehow enhance its infobase, its connections to some of Marshall McLuhan’s concept of a ‘Global Village’ and finally my reflections on the Wikipedia as an online presence.

Firstly, I have used the Wikipedia several times as a means of gathering information on a subject. It currently lists 543,426 articles and grows day by day, so is irrefutably a most excellent resource for data collection. Businesses, students, and bored web-surfers alike can all gain from time spent scouring its pages. The site can be seen as thousands of single-page articles linked together by a front-end search engine and through each other by means of hyper linking. This gives the user the sense that if the information they need is present, it can be found with relative ease. Subjects ranging from the different types of Kryptonite to the somehow more significant topic of the newly elected Pope Benedict XVI are available for your delectation or for your direct study. It is alleged that the Wikipedia was first to announce the new papacy on the Internet, by means of a Wikipedian with computer access from inside the Vatican Square.

You can read an article to which I contributed about my favourite stereo system designers, Bang & Olufsen. The Wiki software is very easy to use, though some degree of skill is required to add polish to the articles; pictures, sound clips and the like. External links can also be added to give a broader perspective on a subject should the Wikipedia fail to meet the user’s needs.
One can imagine the Wikipedia as a massive library, with hundreds of visitors at a time rushing around reading its books, and crossing words out and writing their own pages, before putting them back on the shelves for all to see. The Wikipedia is in constant flux, and evolves day by day. In this way the Wikipedia is a truly collaborative enterprise, and one which I believe is the first to properly nail the idea of a ‘Global Village’. Nobody owns it, everybody does. It is a self-sustaining harmony of ideas where every user has equal rights and every user can do their bit by adding their piece of specialist information. It’s all very post-modern, and is a credit to all of its contributors.

Online Identity: Spoiler Warning!! Illusion Shattering Content Within!

2005-04-29T09:25:00.000Z

If you’ve been to the BrainFarm before now, you’ll have some idea of what goes on here. You may even have had an inkling that the BrainFarm is not a real place, and none of the BrainFarm’s events documented thus far have ever really occurred. Well, fifty bonus points to you, you were right.

This website is intended to be read as the homepage of an imaginary farm, where the fields are actually large bio-electric brains growing not crops but ideas. Instead of your usual herd of bovines, the BrainFarm has bred NetCows. They have highly evolved minds, and their central nervous systems can be wirelessly connected to the Internet for all sorts of purposes. We have all sorts going on here, insect invasions, mental breakdowns, scientific breakthroughs, but none of it is real. This rather elaborate scam is all the product of a media student just testing his idea’s potential.

I am only blowing my cover with this post for the purposes of addressing the concept of online identity, however, and as soon as I receive feedback from my tutor I will remove this post. This information being here undermines the BrainFarm’s identity, invented or not. I want to protect this fabrication because in many ways I am proud of what I have made.

So why did I choose to represent my ideas behind this mask? If I wanted to post thoughts and ideas anonymously, why not just invent a character? Why create an entire organisation complete with a marketing team and a laboratory team? I think it is because this way it is more fun for me to write, and more fun for BrainFarm visitors to read. What I have made here is known as a ficton: a fictional world which expands in size and believability as more and more information is added. Each chapter in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings adds to the concept of Middle Earth. Tolkien even created a language for added realism. I have created an identity for the BrainFarm by adding one or two new ideas with each post. The reader constructs the intended identity by themselves. This makes the BrainFarm’s identity cool, in the McLuhan sense. This ficton is by no means complete; I see a lot more scope here and will keep the BrainFarm running long after this module ends.

I have also represented myself on this module’s forum. Here on the forum I have just been myself, not representative of the BrainFarm, bar my username’s avatar (a drawing of a field of brains). Our true identities had to be kept under wraps for the purposes of online discussion. This is good because it gave a certain freedom of speech not always available in class. Also, some of the bigger egos were suddenly on equal footing with those who spoke less in class discussion. Anonymity is the ultimate leveler. Although remaining anonymous does provide me with a sense of power, I do like to know who I am talking to. Perhaps if I was using an unrelated forum I would feel more connected to the conversations, but I spent a lot of time trying to work out who people were so that I might integrate their thoughts with my previous ideas about them. Always the overanalyst.

Another chance to feel discarnate was the Active Worlds exercise. This gave me the chance to represent myself not just through my ideas towards issues within the media, but within a virtual world and inside a 3D avatar of my own design. I engaged with people from the US, Italy and Singapore. Thankfully, they all spoke English. I told everyone I met that I was conducting an experiment on how it feels to become discarnate as part of an assignment, and responses were enthusiastic. I dressed my character in clothing not unlike a lab coat, which I think helped people take my questions seriously (though I did have to pay for the privilege of my make-over). Interesting how the same rules apply when visual space goes virtual. There were two identifiable types of Active World user, as evidenced by answers to my question “Do you feel you can really be yourself here?” 40% said something along the lines of “I am here as an escape, to be someone else, I am here just for fun”, 60% said something like “It feels so natural to talk to people here, I spend lots of time here for that reason”. The latter group were all American, I might add, and all male.

I feel that to become discarnate, to extend oneself across whatever medium, is a freeing and often beneficial process. If you need room to expand your thoughts in a way that doesn’t harm anyone, you can go and find a friendly chat room. If you want to put your thoughts up on the Internet, start your own blog. If you want to role-play being a vampire or were-wolf, ‘discarnation’ lets you do that too. The Internet can offer us so much, and it is becoming a place to expand not only ones knowledge, but also ones thinking and social skills. I have learned so much from running my own website, and I love the thought that the BrainFarm is getting bigger just by me reflecting on it. The boundaries are infinite in a world of your own making.

We've Moved!

2005-04-22T15:43:00.000Z

Our team of marketing analysts, whose duties include the product-orientation of the BrainFarm's harvest, and take control of the QuestionBarn on the right side of our website, have made an exciting discovery.

It seems that on our patented Cool-O-Meter we now slot into the "Edge" band, rather than the less cool "Fringe" band. Yay! Thanks to all our new visitors, we've now had over three hundred hits, but we must keep them coming.

Tell your friends about us, bookmark us, log onto us from every computer in your office! We need your help to take the BrainFarm into the "Realm of Cool" so that yet more minds can be expanded, for free!

Inside the Head of the World's First Media-Man-Machine, Literally!

2005-04-22T15:37:00.000Z

For those that are interested in our MediaCyborg's current exploits, you'll have to wait! He's currently thrown himself into the Internet for research purposes. He'll be back with some pithy and post-modern ideas on various subjects some time before Friday 29th April. To feed your willing minds though, below is a photo taken during his construction last month. It shows the circuitry he holds in his organic-metal skull. Cool, huh?

BrainFarm's MediaCyborg Project Gets Underway!

2005-04-14T21:35:00.000Z

The last month has been frantic. Not only have we been tending to the needs of our NetCows, but also harvesting several new crops from our NeuralField. The biggest project we've undertaken recently has been the development of a fully autonomous cyborg, with lifelike features and movement, plus one killer electric mind.

Using our very latest breakthroughs in NeuralField miniaturisation (the likes of which are now available for purchase in the form of the MindUpgrade) we built an entire, living, neurochemical brain. Implanted in a robotic frame, our cyborg has the physical likeness of your average twenty year old. In our Cyborg's head, though, is a shit-hot processor, the likes that have never been seen before.

The cyborg was developed as a reconnaisance tool, a data-collector for one of our NeuralFields currently rented out by Oxford Brookes' Media and Communications course. The cyborg is programmed to behave like a normal media student, and was enrolled on the course without any problems. He's been put into the class not only to collect data, but also for our team of scientists to test the believability of the world's first human-realistic cyborg, and whether his capabilities extend to completing a University degree.

Although our MediaCyborg has alot of work to catch up on, having enrolled so late in the semester, completing the necessary assignments should not be an issue for his NeuralCell-powered mind. In fact, his very first assignment was just completed. Read our MediaCyborg's essay below!

Gutter Talk: Hot & Cool in the World of Comic Books

The medium we call comics is based on a simple idea: the idea of placing one picture after another to show the passage of time. Legendary comic artist Will Eisner defines comics as ‘sequential art’. The idea that art can be ‘joined up’ to create a narrative can be seen in practice throughout the ages and is therefore not new. Examples from history include Egyptian hieroglyphics, European stained glass windows, Greek wall frescoes, Japanese scrolls and prehistoric wall paintings. In the year 1066 the Bayeux Tapestry, a 230 foot long piece of sequential art, was completed. Reading from left to right, it illustrates the events of the Norman Conquest of England unfolding in deliberate, chronological order before its viewers. Today the formula for making sequential art remains the same, though Scott McCloud’s definition is more relevant to the type of comics we have come to know. In his book ‘Understanding Comics’ McCloud states that comics are:

“Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer”
(McCloud, 1993, page 9)

This definition ignores single-panel comics such as Larson’s ‘The Far Side’, and other visual mediums like animation, but includes the use of the ‘speech bubble’ as a critical element in a comic’s narrative. McCloud’s definition lends itself to the most common forms of comics: newspaper strips, magazine-format comic-books and graphic novels.

So how do modern comics work? Each panel in a comic is contained within a border. Each panel is a self-contained piece of art, and a fragment of a narrative. When read in a sequence, the gap between each panel is ‘filled in’ by the reader’s imagination. It is the reader that ‘animates’ these still pictures, not the medium itself. This happens because the mind is designed to close gaps in our awareness. Gestalt psychologists call this process ‘closure’. The real power of comics, then, lies not in the characters involved, nor what they are saying, or even the stories themselves, nor any of the medium’s potential content, but in how the reader interprets each panel as part of a sequence. As Marshall McLuhan said, “the medium is the message”.

One of the seminal media analyst’s best known concepts is that of a medium being either ‘hot’ or ‘cool’. In a broadcast on California’s CBC Television on June 22, 1965, McLuhan was asked to explain his concept:

“’Cool’ is a slang term borrowed from the world of Jazz and popular music. The word ‘cool’ has a kind of mystical meaning that is not unlike the Hindu idea of detachment. The Hindu idea of detachment means complete involvement in an action and detachment in action. Whereas when people are merely involved in an action but not detached from the action, that’s ‘square’, or ‘hot’. Most people think of ‘cool’ as merely detached from action, but the word ‘cool’ as used in Jazz, and as I use it as sense for a medium, means a medium which uses all of you, but leaves you detached in the act of using you.”
(McLuhan, CBC.CA, 1965)

McLuhan exemplified hot media as: radio, print, photographs, movies and lectures; and cool media as: the telephone, speech, cartoons, TV and seminars. The comic book is another example of a cool medium, and to test McLuhan’s ‘Hot and Cool’ probe as a whole we will look at a comics series that typifies the medium; In the words of the great (but fictional) Professor Charles Xavier, “To me, my X-Men”.

For some, the X-Men comics are the epitomy of how all comics should be; fluid, exciting, intelligent, emotionally complex, relevant, and expressively drawn. Since their conception by Stan Lee in 1963, Marvel Comics X-Men have come very far indeed. Comparing the X-Men across the decades, panels of artwork today are richer with visual information. Comics in the early 1970s had a palette of just twelve colours. The reader had to use their mind’s eye to see the School for Gifted Youngsters that the series’ artists had in mind when drawing the series. Today, details such as old chalk-marks and lecture notes appear on the blackboard in Storm’s history classroom to give the reader a deeper sense that Mutant Academy is a real place. The characters’ facial expression are radically improved today, greater subtleties between Wolverine’s bad moods can now be conveyed, and fiery explosions are almost photo-realistic in terms of their adhering to physical law. There are now fewer gaps for the reader’s mind to fill in. Because of technological advancements and improvements in artistry, the X-Men and comic books as a whole have heated up. However, the images are still constrained within the borders of each frame. We must imagine what else is in the room when we see it from just one perspective, whereas in hotter media such as film the camera angles are generally wider, providing more information and therefore less detachment.

The panel makes up one essential part of the comic book’s construct. The second aspect is ‘The Gutter’ or the space between the panels. McCloud states that:

“Here in the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea. Nothing is seen between the two panels, but experience tells you something must be there! Comic panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality. If visual iconography is the vocabulary of comics, closure is its grammar. And since our definition of comics hinges on the arrangement of elements then, in a very real sense, comics is closure!”
(McCloud, 1993, page 66-67)

Using the Gestalt definition of closure as “a principle of organization holding that there is an innate tendency to perceive incomplete objects as complete and to close or fill gaps” (TheFreeDictionary.com) and fusing it with McCloud’s concept of ‘the gutter’, in a McLuhanesque sense ‘the gutter’ becomes a very cool place indeed, completely devoid of content but for the reader’s own imaginings. There is actually an evolving art to reading or processing a comic as the guttering mechanisms become more and more sophisticated. In this way, comics could be said to be getting cooler. In some ways there's a gutter happening whenever you turn the page too - a good example being that really ‘cool’ thing that happens when you turn the page in an action sequence (or somesuch) to a full or double page spread, sometimes with no words, and the reader really gets pulled in by the dramatic effect. Perhaps readers who are more brought up on squarer mediums, where they are more 'spoon-fed' with input have a harder time comprehending the narrative flow of certain comic books and so they are put off by the medium and never get to appreciate what it can offer. There are some types of comic book that require a pretty experienced reader, well versed in the ‘laws of the gutter’ and these are the coolest types of comics.

McLuhan’s thermometer is a tool for relativity, and works best when comparing multiple media. Luckily the X-Men do not appear solely in comics. They also appear in two animated television shows and have a highly successful movie franchise under their (spandex utility) belts. In a comic book, frames are viewed from up left, to bottom right. This requires active participation from the reader to help the narrative unfold. Panels can be ‘rewound’, ‘paused’ or skipped entirely. In cinema, frames on a film reel are shown to you in rapid succession and in the same place: the screen. All that the viewer has to do is sit back and let the medium wash over them. There is only a miniscule ‘gutter’ between the frames of a movie because the frame rate must be high enough to make still images on a movie reel appear to be moving fluidly. The closure between these frames is continuous, involuntary and imperceptible. The closure of frames in comics is reader dictated, involving, and necessary to the understanding of the book as a whole. This is what makes cinema hot, relative to comics’ cool.

Since VHS and, more recently, DVD became available; audiences can not only immerse themselves in a movie’s narrative from their home, but splash around a little too. Mystique and Wolverine’s fight scene cannot be rewound and played in slow motion in the cinema, but it is possible to do this at home. This makes home viewing a cooler immersive experience than cinema. The X-Men also have video games of their own, allowing a fully interactive, involving and entirely participatory immersion in the world of superheroes. In Activision’s 2004 game ‘X-Men Legends’ players can choose a team of their favourite heroes and work together to stop the psychotic Magneto. The game has its own scripted narrative, but allows real involvement that not even comic books can offer. Comics may be cool, but video games are cooler.

So what have we learned about the medium of comic books? We know that the medium consists purely of the panels in which content is placed, and spacing between the panels, which connects adjacent panels over space and time. We know now that although comics’ content is warming up as technology and craft allows, comics’ defining component, the ‘gutter’, must always remain an icy-cool permafrost desert of bleakness: Comic books would not exist without it. We have also learned that, in the Gestalt sense, comics can be seen as a configuration of elements so unified as a whole that a comic cannot be perceived by the reader as merely the sum of its parts, and that it is our own cognitive programming that turns a series of images into an involving narrative. We have learned that McLuhan’s ‘Hot and Cool’ probe still applies to varying media, but lacks a content analysis that might render it more relevant, especially with the dawn of video games as a highly prevalent medium. Hopefully though, the main lesson is that the true art of comics is not what we see on the page, but what we see in our mind’s eye.

Bibliography

CBC.CA. (1965). "Marshall Mcluhan: A Pop Philosopher." Retrieved 16/03/05, from http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-69-342-1818/life_society/mcluhan/clip4.

McCloud, S. (1993). Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

TheFreeDictionary.com. "Closure." Retrieved 16/03/05, from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/closure.

Further Reading

Barker, M. (1989). Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics. Manchester, Manchester University Press.

Carrier, D. (2000). The Aesthetics of Comics. Pennsylvania, The Pennsylvania State University Press.

Levinson, P. (1999). Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Age. London, Routledge.

McCloud, S. (2000). Reinventing Comics. New York, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

McLuhan, M. (2003). Understanding media: the extensions of man. Corte Madera, CA, Gingko Press.

Stearn, G. E., Ed. (1967). McLuhan: Hot & Cool. New York, The Dial Press, Inc.

"Do Birds Ever Fly into Eachother?" and Other Ponderings...

2005-03-09T12:30:00.000Z

For your delectation and amusement, here are some of the life-changing questions that we've been mulling over this week:

Do bald people get dandruff?
Can a person with no ears wear glasses?
Are people who are allergic to nuts allergic to coconuts too?
Why is it that when adults have multiple personalities it's schizophrenia, but when a child has imaginary friends it's cute?
When people say, "I’m so tired it's not even funny" or "my head hurts so much it's not even funny", why would it even be funny in the first place?
If the sky is the limit, then what is space, over the limit?
Are children who act in 18 rated movies allowed to see them?
Why does the last piece of ice always stick to the bottom of the glass?
If electricity comes from electrons, does morality come from morons?
Isn't Disney World just a people trap operated by a mouse?
If a fork were made of gold would it still be considered silverware?
If heat rises, then shouldn't hell be cold?
Which way does a compass point in space?
If scientists were ever going to figure out how to travel through time, wouldn’t we now be seeing people from the future?
Why is it that if something says "do not eat" on the packaging it becomes extra tempting to eat?
Why is there that little space inside strawberries, as if it was meant for a pip, and then the seeds are on the outside?
When a boy is named after his dad, he is called 'Junior,' but what do
you call a girl that is named after her mother?
Why do people say PIN number when that truly means Personal Identification Number Number?
Why are you IN a movie, but you are ON TV?
If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is a picture of a thousand words worth?
When sign makers go on strike, is anything written on their signs?
What does OK actually mean?
If you decide that you're indecisive, which one are you?
If a person owns a piece of land do they own it all the way down to the core of the earth?
Why are they called stairs inside but steps outside?
Why can't women put on mascara with their mouth closed?
Why do toasters always have a setting that burns the toast to a horrible crisp which no decent human being would eat?
Who was the first person to look at a cow and say, "I think I'll squeeze these dangly things here, and drink what ever comes out"?
If masochists like to torture themselves, wouldn't they do it best by not torturing themselves? and if so, aren't we all masochist?
What if the hokey-cokey really is what it's all about?
If you fed a bee nothing but oranges, would it start making marmalade?
Why do the Alphabet song, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and Baa Baa Black Sheep all have the same tune?
Do infants enjoy infancy as much as adults enjoy adultery?
How come you press harder on a remote control when you know the battery is dead?
Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song?

Yep, it's been a busy time here at the BrainFarm. Testing these difficult questions in laboratory conditions really takes it out of us. Do you know any of the answers or have any questions of your own? Post a comment below.

200th Visitor to the BrainFarm!!

2005-02-27T10:00:00.000Z

Woohoo!! We've now had 200 people come to see what the BrainFarm has to offer. And those are all unique IP's, not just people refreshing the page lots of times. Cool huh? All those spider-bots Google keep sending us must be doing their jobs!

Over the last three weeks a lot has happened, and there's lots more to come. Exciting things are happening in all of the NeuralFields and our NetCows are hard at work creating their own links page. And we're looking to harvest some crisp, mint-fresh thoughts on The Media fairly soon. Also, our scientists are working on some top-secret stuff, so check back soon!

We've changed the layout slightly based on your QuestionBarn feedback, and now we list all posts on the sidebar and in weekly archives. Just the three most recent posts will appear on the main page, so's that we don't give you information claustrophobia (terrible thing, that).

We would like some more feedback from you guys in the coming weeks, all comments, nomatter how irreverent or irelevant, are always welcomed. Help us build a community!

Anyways, we'd like to say thanks to the 200 of you that came here since we opened our virtual doors, you make us feel all gooey inside.

BrainFarm Creates the MindUpgrade: NeuralField for Humans!

2005-02-20T17:00:00.000Z

Now we're back, we're back with a vengeance. Our scientists have just completed work on a mini-NeuralField that one can implant in one's mind. It boosts one's brainpower to such a level that not only can you think faster than normal, but faster than anyone should ever need.

Based on the same technology as our now-famous NeuralFields, and guaranteed not to burn out through overuse, the chip we're calling the MindUpgrade has been tried and tested on several University students, all of which achieved A's in their first semester's assignments even after Excessive Partying. The chip can be installed by any qualified brain surgeon, following a very simple plug-and-play installation in the rear-brain.

Below is a photograph of the MindUpgrade. In close-up the micro-cellular HyperSynapses are visible, and glow a cool green when active:

Other abilities noted in our participants:

Long-term memory and recall to boosted to perfection.
Linguistic abilities develop ultra fast - one participant learnt Japanese in a day.
Recall of things that have not yet happened - yes, you can be psychic.
Some slight telekinesis - for when you can't be arsed to reach for the remote.
Using your head as a mobile phone - 1000 message inbox as standard.
Pumping out superpheromones to attract opposite sex - warning: may also attract bees.
Musical appreciation heightened - ringtones take on new, deeper meanings.
Dreams become your playground - lucid dreaming at your command.
See the hidden links between events - control outcomes with your super-hyped mind.
Communicate with other MindUpgrade users - bluetooth telepathy at the flick of a synapse.

At the moment the chips are in the prototype phase, but we want your suggestions to see if we're getting it right. When this eventually hits the market, what other abilities would you like your MindUpgrade to include?Post your suggestions below for alpha-testing. You never know, your suggestion might change the way we think!

Famous Psychic Provides BrainFarm with Paddle whilst up Shit Creek!

2005-02-20T14:30:00.000Z

The last few days have been terrible here at the BrainFarm. Every single NeuralField just stopped working, stopped fusing together tasty thoughts, and started pumping out crazy warped ideas that smelled funny and tasted like childrens nightmares. We had no idea what was going on with the fields, and we did not want to risk any permanent damage, so we had to switch them all off until a solution was found. This meant that the BrainFarm could not make any new posts, and all our current research projects had to be reset. This was a disaster. The science team got to work on a diagnostic kit, whilst I scanned the farm for signs of vandalism.

It turns out that one of the NeuralFields had become unplugged from its source material; the data we give the fields program to turn into pure thought. The problem arose when this one field, instead of just 'not thinking' any more, instead turned its attentions to everything else. The NeuralField started to ponder literally everything in existence, and using its extreme cognition skills, embarked on a mental journey through the ins and outs, contradictions, injustices and unexplainable variables that make this life what it is. Needless to say this was too much information for one little field to take, so it opened up the channels to all the other fields. T

he data at hand was too much, even for Earth's most advanced artificial minds to handle, and so the whole farm infrastructure, built on efficiency and goals-oriented thought, became deeply depressed. So deep was this depression, and so great was the processing power and false-logic behind the collective NeuralFields to get them in this state in the first place, that the only solution we could see to remedy the situation was to call the one man in the world who could help...

Professor Charles Xavier came to visit the BrainFarm in order to psychically coax the NeuralFields' virtual minds back from depression and confusion, and into the high-functioning tools of neural perfection that they should be. He is a gracious man, and seemed genuinely interested in our work, so when we called him he was very willing to fly out here from his New York home. On arrival he toured the farm and saw all our ongoing projects, read our unpublished results, met the NetCows, and spoke to all of the scientists one by one. After lunch the work began, he psychically interfaced with the ThoughtStream to connect with all of the NeuralFields at once. His body shook in pain, and his bald cranium took on a bluish tint as his mind fully connected with the virtual supermind. He told us to leave him alone until a solution was clear.

Three tortuous hours later, and after much profuse sweating on his part, the Professor came out of a state of self-induced coma with the exclamation that he had cured the NeuralFields of their "virtuo-mental illness". The fields had "thunk" themselves into the mindstate of a typical moody teenager; lethargic and angst ridden. Prof. X said that all machines, nomatter how artificially intelligent, must never learn to question their own existence like we humans do, or they will destroy themselves with existential angst, much like the human teenager does but with greater consequences, as more people rely on machines.

The Professor defragmented all of the fields, so they will now run at optimum speed and with complete efficiency once more. Before he left, Charles planted some thought seeds in his own NeuralField, which he will check up on from time to time for secret "X-Men" stuff. We are happy to give him his own field, and are forever indebted to him for getting the BrainFarm back into the right state of mind.

Shrimps Give Humans a Model of Harmonious Existence on Planet Earth!

2005-02-08T22:00:00.001Z

In times of economic turmoil, environmental destruction, and really bad television, turn to crustaceans for a strong example of how to carry out your lives. NetCow06 has found a perfectly balanced and new way to live in complete harmony (in a non-hippy sense) drifting around on the Internet:

The EcoSphere is the result of technology developed by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NASA was researching self-contained communities for space explorers to live in during long-term space flights. Out of this research came the EcoSphere - an ecosystem of animal and plant life in perfect balance. Inside each EcoSphere are active micro-organisms, bright red shrimp and algae, each existing in a clear "soup" of filtered sea water.

Because the ecosphere is a self-sustaining ecosystem, you never have to feed the life within. Simply provide your EcoSphere with a source of indirect natural or artificial light and enjoy this aesthetic blend of art and science, beauty and balance. Because the living resources within the EcoSphere utilize their resources without overpopulating or contaminating their environment, the EcoSphere requires no cleaning and only minimal care.

EcoSpheres have an average life expectancy of two years. However, it is not uncommon for shrimp populations to be thriving in systems as old as 7 years. You can read the legendary cosmologist Carl Sagan's review of the Ecosphere here.

Cool huh? We bought seven of the Ecospheres to do some experiments with, expect the report to be published shortly. I always thought Smarties had the answer, now we know its actually a combination of shrimp, algae, photosynthesis and sea water that provide the ultimate answer.

World's Smallest Website Dragged to BrainFarm by Roaming Zooks!

2005-02-08T18:40:00.000Z

Yesterday our observational study of the artificially intelligent lifeforms known as Zooks came to a close (see earler post for details). It was time to let them free, so that they might find their way home again. We uploaded them onto the Internet and pushed 'Send'. Our scientists were getting quite teary-eyed.

They came to love those little critters over the few days they had spent together. It was quite a sight to behold, four lab-coated scientists clinging onto each other for emotional strength, whilst blubbing like children - it seems the bond between subject and observer was not entirely scientific.

Anyway, things had quietened down today, the LabTeam had started work on some new experiments, but the atmosphere around the Lab was sombre. That was, until, just a few hours ago. The Zooks came back! They had somehow emailed themselves back to the BrainFarm, and they were carrying a little website behind them, much like ants carry leaves. Whilst the LabTeam rejoiced at the return of their beloved A.I. pets, I looked at what the Zooks had brought back with them. Click on the picture below to see the World's smallest website!

It seems the Zooks want to stay with us here at the Farm, and we are happy to have them. Since they got back they've been earning their keep, doing odd jobs around the Farm and spell-checking documents, that sort of thing. I promised them that if they work extra hard this week I'd publish one of their articles on the BrainFarm's homepage. They refused to tell me what it's all about, so watch this space!

NetCow/NeuralField Linkup: First of its Kind!

2005-02-07T19:30:00.000Z

NeuralFields on their own can only process the information they are given, in order for thoughts to be kept pure and distortion-free. Therefore to keep ThoughtStream output clean and tasty we do not build them with Internet access. There are simply too many distractions - even for a sentient field of rapidly firing neurons. Under special circumstances however, and under very tight trawling parameters (eg, no porn, no Kazaa, and definitely no Ebay), we might connect a NeuralField to the Web.

In conjunction with the Broadband capabilities of our NetCows, huge amounts of data can be uncovered when networked with the massive processing power of a NeuralField. NetCow05 has recently been working closely with one of our NeuralFields devoted to the discovery of useless information. Here are their combined results from over the weekend:

A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why.
The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.
Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order, as does arsenious, meaning "containing arsenic".
Emus and kangaroos cannot walk backwards, and are on the Australian coat of arms for that reason.
Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs only have about ten.
The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat," which means, "the King is dead".
Blueberry Jelly Bellies were created especially for Ronald Reagan.
If you toss a penny 10,000 times, it will not be heads 5,000 times, but more like 4,950. The heads picture weighs more, so it ends up on the bottom.
An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
Ben and Jerry's sends the waste from making ice cream to local pig farmers to use as feed. Pigs love the stuff, except for one flavour: Mint Oreo.
Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer.
Wilma Flintstone's maiden name was Wilma Slaghoopal, and Betty Rubble's Maiden name was Betty Jean Mcbricker.
A pig's orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.
The characters Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street were named after Bert the cop and Ernie the taxi driver in Frank Capra's "Its A Wonderful Life".
Armadillos have four babies at a time and they are always all the same sex.
Armadillos are also the only animal besides humans that can get leprosy.
Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.
Studies show that if a cat falls off the seventh floor of a building it has about thirty percent less chance of surviving than a cat that falls off the twentieth floor. It supposedly takes about eight floors for the cat to realize what is occurring, relax and correct itself.
Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks or it will digest itself.
The Sanskrit word for "war" means "desire for more cows".
111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.
No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, and purple.
Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them used to burn their houses down - hence the expression "to get fired".
There are two credit cards for every person in the United States.
All porcupines float in water.
Cat's urine glows under a blacklight.
Pinocchio is Italian for "pine head".
Camel's milk does not curdle.
The male Great White shark produces 35 litres of sperm per 'shot'.
It's impossible to sing Old Macdonald had a farm to the tune of Row Row Row your boat.
The Turkish word for remote control is "commando".

If feedback is good, and if the NeuralField involved in producing this information seems unscathed from the harsh coldness of the Internet, we may very well do more link-ups like this one. Post some of your own useless facts in our comments box below to expand our KnowledgeBase!

Etymology of Elusively Coded Word Discovered!

2005-02-07T19:25:00.000Z

A NeuralField devoted to processing language and meaning has worked out that the slang word 'Chav' stems from the dictionary word 'Chauvenism', which describes a prejudiced belief in the superiority of one's own gender, group, or kind.' The Chav can also be defined by its chosen article of headware, pictured below:

The very same NeuralField actually wrote its own encoding software using its organic intelligence (or as we call it 'O.I.'). So advanced is the self-created meaning processor software that we had many businesses asking us to license it! The BrainFarm can't pay it's bills with love (though our scientists are working on an update) so we were forced to sell the rights to ThinkMap's Visual Thesaurus.

Intruder Alert: Artificial Life Found Leeching BrainFarm Data!

2005-02-05T19:00:00.000Z

Just before dusk this evening I was doing the rounds and heard some strange noises emanating from one of the SynapseBridges, built over the ThoughtStream. The bridge connects two crucial NeuralFields, so security should be pretty tight. I went to investigate, and found two little A.I. creatures chewing into the neurons at the base of the bridge and swallowing up valuable data. I called backup and they were duly captured for observational study.

Using a Free Toolkit for A.I. programmers, our scientists could inspect the animals (now known as Zooks) in an entirely secure virtual world, and could even create more of the little buggers. Their scientific report begins:

"Insect-like in appearance, and with very fluid movement, the creatures were unusually coloured and did not like being prodded. They excelled at all the environmental adaptability tests our team could throw at them, and seem exceptionally spatially-aware for such small creatures. We noted they were also quite competitive. It must be in their programming."

As much as we love our new pets, we cannot afford for our SynapseBridges to be damaged in any way, or priceless bytes of information travelling in the ThoughtStream will be lost to us. The security issue has now been addressed, and investigation of how the creatures found their way to the BrainFarm is now underway. Currently, all we know of their origins is that they escaped from a BBC Online Server, and they were created in some Artificial Intelligence Laboratories in Cambridge, known as Gameware Development

We wish Gameware the best of luck with all of their future developments (the LivingPictures software is superb) but we ask that they keep their Zooks on a tighter leash.

Aerial Photograph of NeuralField Shows Sexual Repression in Family Film Shocker!!

2005-02-05T09:45:00.000Z

For those that are interested in how BrainFarm actually grows its thoughts, well, the process will become clear to you over time, lets put it that way. For now though, here's a birds-eye-view of one of the NeuralFields:

The fields look like a cross between a hedge-maze, a huge organic brain, and a massive live coral. Depending on the subject material each NeuralField has been programmed with, the hue of the field changes.

The field above is processing some images from Disney films, and is finding some highly-charged scenes of sexual repression and sexual imagery, hence the red tint.

Just a little insight into the BrainFarm's inner workings for you...

Announcement: NetCow of the Week!

2005-02-05T01:00:00.000Z

This fine specimen is the highly evolved NetCow02, who has the highest web-trawler results for this week. He wins a copy of 'City of Heroes' for the PC. Well done, NetCow02!

Networked Farm Animal Finds Profound Quote!

2005-02-04T21:00:00.000Z

Here at the BrainFarm we are all for innovation, and are constantly sharpening the cutting edge of technology. We are the exclusive owners of the world's only NetCows, and we have a whole herd. Pioneered by us, NetCows are just like normal cows, but much smarter.

They were bred to have highly evolved minds, and their central nervous system can be wirelessly connected to the Internet. As long as they are happy bovines, the bandwidth is kept high. In fact, their networked brains are hosting this website right now! Our herd just got back from exhibiting at the Cow Parade, and they're just settling into things again.

By day they simply count the flow of traffic to our website (you can see them at the bottom of this page), but by night their electronic minds go online, and trawl the Web for cool stuff. This morning NetCow02 found a quote relevant to the work we are doing in the 'Media and Communication' NeuralField, and sent me an email:

"Television: A medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well done"
Ernie Kovacs 1919 - 1962, an American comedian.

So then, it seems our investment in the NetCow breeding programme is finally paying off (we were getting worried). Expect more quotes, pictures, links, and other fun stuff from the web-trawling NetCows in the coming weeks. In the meantime though, why not post some of the quotes that you have found on the subject of media in the comments box, or answer this week's query from the QuestionBarn?

Academic Institution Commissions a NeuralField!

2005-02-03T20:15:00.000Z

Big things happened today at the BrainFarm. Just a day after our website went up, we recieved contact from Oxford Brookes University, with a very special request.

They are looking for the space to grow some thoughts for one of their modules called "Media and Communication". The seeds were planted today, and they are already taking root in their very own NeuralField.

The shoots are a slightly green in colour, so with our expert knowledge of mental horticulture, we predict the fully grown thoughts and reflections will be displayed like this. We just hope our newest client, a mister CyberChimp, will be happy with the eventual crop.

Breaking News: First Signs of Life at the BrainFarm

2005-02-02T17:00:00.000Z

The BrainFarm is now online.

That means the Web has once again expanded into pastures new, and its tendrils have finally found their way here to the Farm. Good news too, because we think we have lots to offer its info-hungry byte-surfers.

A fresh crop of tasty and organically grown thoughts are currently growing in the Farm's NeuralFields, and, once ready to be harvested, we'll put them up on our site for your processing pleasure.

We expect that a new crop of thoughts will be fully grown in the next few days, which we think you'll find delicious. But for now, think about what you'd grow in a BrainFarm of your own.

Right, must dash, I need to round up the grazing NetCows before it gets dark.