control for painting with light in association with CBS and NBC technicians. The relevance of his work for housing is that it enables us to conceive of totally new possibilities for architectural and artistic modulation of space. Painting with light is a kind of housing without walls. The same electric technology, extended to the job of providing global thermostatic controls, points to the obsolescence of housing as an extension of the heat control mechanisms of the body. It is equally conceivable that the electric extension of the process of collective consciousness, in making consciousness-without-walls, might render language walls obsolescent. Languages are stuttering extensions of our live senses, in varying ratios and wavelengths. An immediate simulation of consciousness would by-pass speech in a kind of massive extrasensory perception, just as global thermostats could by-pass those extensions of skin and body that we call houses. Such an extension of the process of consciousness by electric simulation may easily occur in the 1960s.

Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan - Page 146 Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan Page 145 Page 147