tang ren jie traces chinatowns as avant-garde, multimedial, and heterotopic sites.

 

“For the mosaic is not uniform, continuous, or repetitive. It is discontinuous, skew, and nonlineal, like the tactual TV image. To the sense of touch, all things are sudden, counter, original, spare, strange. . . . The nonvisual mosaic structures of modern art, like those of modern physics and electric-information patterns, permit little detachment. The mosaic form of the TV image demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole being, as does the sense of touch. Literacy, in contrast, had, by extending the visual power to the uniform organization of time and space, psychically and socially, conferred the power of detachment and noninvolvement.”

 

-Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

 

“Most of us, having grown up in the visual world, are now suddenly confronted with the problems of living in an acoustic world which is, in effect, a world of simultaneous information. . . . The visual world . . . has the properties of being continuous and connected and homogeneous, all parts more or less alike. Things stayed put. If you had a point of view, that stayed put. The acoustic world, which is the electric world of simultaneity, has no continuity, no homogeneity, no connections, and no stasis.”

 

-Marshall McLuhan, “Living in an Acoustic World” (lecture, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, 1970).