The Medium is the Massage | Porter Robinson & Madeon's Shelter

A few days ago, I was watching the music video for Porter Robinson and Madeon's Shelter, their trending electronic single.  I was very surprised that Robinson had chosen to create an anime film to feature their hit song.  You can watch the video down below.

The story of the music video is straightforward, and is described in the description of the YouTube video:

"Shelter tells the story of Rin, a 17-year-old girl who lives her life inside of a futuristic simulation completely by herself in infinite, beautiful loneliness. Each day, Rin awakens in virtual reality and uses a tablet which controls the simulation to create a new, different, beautiful world for herself. Until one day, everything changes, and Rin comes to learn the true origins behind her life inside a simulation."

After watching this music video, I instantly thought of McLuhan's work.  As we have learned from Marshall McLuhan's "The Medium is the Massage," often times the medium can have a larger effect on the message than the actual content itself.  Robinson could have chosen to make his music video like any other (live action), but instead, he decided to choose anime as his medium.  What is the message that we can take from this?

By choosing anime as the medium, Robinson was able to portray his ideas in a fantastical theme as often seen in many other anime films, as well as connect to a completely different audience as opposed to one he might have seen with a less original music video.  Additionally, Robinson was able to demonstrate the huge influence that Japanese culture and animation has had on his work.  Choosing the medium for this music video was not a small decision, and Robinson's collaboration with Madeon in Shelter shows us how the theory of McLuhan can be used in a real world example.

First the sentence, and then the evidence!

First of all, welcome to the first post on my blog/portfolio for Cat 125: I/Eyegasm.  For my first post, I will be talking about two pages (pg. 42 and 43) that caught my attention in Marshall McLuhan's "The Medium is the Massage."

After doing some research on this image, I discovered its origin lies from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, where the King and Queen of Hearts are with a jury and conducting trial on a Knave.  In the image above, the King is waiting for evidence before coming up with a verdict for the prisoner.  however, the queen is suggesting to issue the sentence first, before looking at the evidence.

To be honest, the first things that came to my mind after seeing these two pages was the age old question of what came first, the chicken or the egg?

Source: http://media1.iterated-reality.com/2015/03/ChickenOrEgg.jpg

However, the difference between these two is that the first scenario is a much more serious topic, and involves the life of someone who may be innocent.  In my opinion, the author of the story was trying to satire the eagerness of people to make uneducated decisions without thinking things through.  In our modern society, we have the system "innocent until proven guilty" for a good reason, as we would rather have criminals running around than innocent people having to pay for crimes they did not commit.

So how does this excerpt from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland relate to McLuhan's "The Medium is the Massage," and more importantly - how does it relate to this course?  In the pages immediately after these two, McLuhan talks about how rationality and visuality have been around as long as life.  Without rationality, an audience cannot understand the message being portrayed - regardless of the medium.  This connects to the excerpt from Wonderland because the Queen's thinking is flawed - you can't declare a sentence on someone without having the evidence to back it up.  Furthermore, this relates to the overall theme of our course "the self," as we need to make sure that we ourselves are rational beings.