Looking For Marshall Mcluhan In Afghanistan Iprobes And Hipstamatic Iphone Photographs

the long version

In 2011, Rita Leistner embedded with U.S. Marines in Afghanistan as a team member of the experimental social media initiative Basetrack. What resulted is Looking for Marshall McLuhan in Afghanistan. In this insightful and provocative, playful and original merging of theory and practice, Leistner applies the pioneering Canadian media theorist's ideas on language and technology to contemporary warfare and increasingly ubiquitous smartphones. Leistner uses her iPhone Hipstamatic photographs as a portal between image and text in a series of iProbes - a portmanteau of iPhone and probe - to focus on man's artefacts and technologies. Where in her previous work Leistner has shown the human face of war, here she reveals the face of war through what McLuhan calls the extensions of man.