Explorations in Anonymous History
the collaborations and experiments that developed during the landmark interdisciplinary Culture
and Communications Seminar held at the University of Toronto (1953-55). Funded by the Ford
Foundation, the weekly seminar was organized by the then little-known English professor
Marshall McLuhan and anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, along with urban planner Jaqueline
Tyrwhitt, political economist Thomas Easterbrook, and psychologist D. Carleton Williams.
Informed by studies of the bias of communication (Harold Innis, 1951) and the effects of
mechanisation on culture (Sigfried Giedion, 1948), this group placed special emphasis on
studying the effects of new media on oral and visual cultures, collaborating in part with the
fledgling Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, whose first television broadcasts had aired in
1952. The group developed interdisciplinary methodologies using a "field approach” to discern
the new "grammars" and environments created by electronic communications technologies (with
an emphasis on film, television, radio and early computing). The project culminated in the journal
“Explorations” (1953-59), a periodical of unusual intellectual diversity for its period, including
anthropological studies of media effects, experimental poetry, scientific studies, and urban
studies.
While McLuhan, the seminar's Chairman, rose quickly to international prominence, the
contributions of the group's other members to media scholarship have been largely overlooked.
Carpenter was the project's Co-Director, founded the “Explorations” journal and acted as its
chief editor. His cultural anthropological studies of visual media and indigenous cultures
contributed to the very shape that media studies would take during this period. Tyrwhitt acted
as liaison with modernist architectural movements, providing vital links to members of Bauhaus
and CIAM (International Congress for Modern Architecture). Easterbrook represented Innis'
seminal studies of media biases in space and time. Williams introduced the group to
contemporary psychological theories of perception. The participation and work of prominent
external scholars (e.g. architectural historian Sigfried Giedion, ethnolinguist Dorothy Lee) were
fundamental to defining the group’s research agenda. Many of the seminar's students went on
to illustrious careers across the arts, humanities and sciences.
