In 1936, Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” had already signaled the technological shift taking place in the production of “cultural objects," noting how a medium like film, as mass technological reproduction in general, releases “the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual," from the religious “aura” of high culture (224). Benjamin, however, doesn't quite seem to know what to do with the democratization of art, but Cocteau has a plan. He sees cameras in everyone's hands.

And indeed, today cameras are in everyone’s hands. We upload our do-it-yourself media all the time. But the work of understanding how our technologies and the objects with which we compose orient us continues. And they are everywhere, those technologies, aren’t they? If anything, Parade—though debuting nearly a hundred years ago—is about the saturation of our environment with orienting spectacles and machines. Now, Cocteau’s dream somewhat fulfilled, they’re in our pockets and purses; we carry them around with us, frequently contributing our own content to the spectacle.

How might we understand such media saturation and ourselves in and through it?

David R. Cole and Darren L. Pullen note in Multiliteracies in Motion: Current Theory and Practice that, particularly for young learners, “the emotional impact of environmental circumstances is a major component of becoming literate” (6). We see the technologized environment as a major, if not the signal dimension through which literacies and affects become intertwined and mediated. Techne offers an enacted and embodied exploration of the emotional impact on becoming literate in multimediated environments. Even more important, it queers those enactments and embodiments to create new genealogical and rhizomatic possibilities—looking both backwards and forwards simultaneously—as models for being differently.