I realize in my previous blog entry, I ended up not really talking about McLuhan as much as I did Jung and a sort of slightly psychedelic notion of the impact of an art object.

Let's get back to the idea of a confrontation with scale.  Duration, Age, Size.  These are the vectors of the aesthetic pressure applied by outer space. McLuhan writes about a Tetrad of media effects.  It's a later idea, I think published post-humously, and meant to describe the impact of a new technology on a society.  I'm going to apply it more specifically to the effects of outer space on aesthetics:  replacing society with aesthetics seems OK,  applying the broad rule to the narrow subset.

The 4 points of the tetrad represent the different ways that the technology can modify an existing system. 

• enhance
• make obsolete
• retrieve from
• reverse (push towards extremes)

I think there's an interesting overlap between these 4 points, and the memetic behavior I touched on in the last post (variation, mutation, inheritance and competition).   The characteristics of space art revolve around our planetary perspective, here's a useful breakdown of the general categories of space art:

• Art executed on the earth but at a scale to be seen from space.  
• Art that captures the experience of a rocket launch, or that documents the surface of other planets.  
• Art designed so that it is complete only when it has moved into outer space, that trajectory changing the piece.   
• Art that is executed away from gravity.  Sculpture that can be exquisitely thin and hugely long at the same time.
• Art where the content and the architecture is formed by an analysis of data.

All of these I see as an enhancement  of existing form.  What would the reversal of art look like?  That's where I was headed before, talking about the Jungian imagination.  Driven by the vectors of scale, the art object becomes primarily a virus to direct the propagation of specific memes.