“The media are not toys; they should not be in the hands of Mother Goose and Peter Pan executives. They can be entrusted only to new artists, because they are art forms.”

Marshall McLuhan, Counterblast (1953)

McLuhan’s light bulbs are mediums without a message, but who needs content when there is a form (of a pear) and a format (of 230V, 60Hz)? Media are life forms that create their specific habitats; in this definition, all the old ways of understanding media are miraculously amalgamated: now it is both a substrate and material (clay, stone, paper, chipset), hence technique and genre (cuneiform, ink on paper, oil on canvas, bitmap), hence profession and habitus. The border between body and knowledge is finally disappearing: our media are our antennas and roots, leaves and batteries, hearts, ears and tails. It is both the matter and the meaning met halfway thanks to a ghostly guide who is looming behind all of this, blinking: a medium, a conductor, a mediator between reality domains.