The Coach House / An Inventory

I have been living with Marshall McLuhan’s books for more than thirty years, so when I was in Toronto, in the spring of 2010, a visit to McLuhan’s institute was inevitable. McLuhan was the man who anticipated the internet four decades in advance of its inception, the man “who perpetually stated his loathing and contempt for most of the electronic age, yet a man who perversely and ironically is considered its biggest cheerleader.” Mulling over the impact of McLuhan’s writing as well as the impact of the internet on the perception of his ideas, I decided to test the internet and specifically the search engine, that mnemonic slot machine that the modern world relies upon, using McLuhan as an example. The Coach House, McLuhan’s professional home, a tiny building behind a grand old mansion on the university’s campus, served as my object of investigation. On the anniversary of McLuhan’s death, December 31st, 2010 a Google image search for “Coach House” Toronto produced “about 12,100 results.” The search engine presented a selection of 908 “relevant” photographs. All of them are now printed in this publication. Five of these images relate in some way to the coach house in question; two of them show the house itself and a further two show Marshall McLuhan at this coach house.
2011 in collaboration with Graphic Design Museum Breda and NPN Drukkers
offset, colour
16 x 22 cm, 96 pages
softcover, sewn
250 copies
24 €