The knowledge of the artist and human survival

Marshall McLuhan’s assertion that the artist’s capacity for awareness of the medium character of reality represents a form of knowledge that is, ‘… now needed for (human) survival’ is employed to probe technology as world-view – reality mediated by representation – that is historically disremembered for the alienating condition of technopoly to prevail. The artist paradoxically renders the unconscious environmental character of mediation apparent to thought and sensibility, bringing ground in the figure/ground relationship to awareness as ground – without objectifying ground as figure – similar to knowledge of chora that Plato in Timaeus provocatively named, a kind of ‘bastard-reckoning’. Referring to Einstein, Grant, Heidegger, Descartes, and Arendt, technology as world-view is historically/philosophically un-framed to recuperate this non-objective sensibility of our worldreality within modes of praxis – thinking, making, and acting – as the foundation for re-forming our irrevocably intertwined social and natural worlds transformed to the point of devastation by technological activity.