It is human consciousness itself that is the great artifact of man. The making and shaping of consciousness from moment to moment is the supreme artistic task of all individuals. (The Emperor’s Old Clothes, 1966)

Time is plural for McLuhan in multiple senses. First, there are different kinds of time — see McLuhan’s times. Second, it is peculiar to human experience that it is fundamentally remade in every moment, in every microsecond. The passages below detail this moment to moment drama or dynamic of experience. Third, it is peculiar to art to retrieve this drama by ‘arresting’ it — see “Arrest in time”. Fourth, such artistic arrest is already made and remade in every moment of all experience — see Ordinary apprehension is poetic. These four are knotted in the creative process, in, that is to say, all experience whatsoever.

the Symbolists [took] aesthetic experience as an arrested moment, a moment in and out of time¹, of intellectual emotion for which in their poems they sought the art formula by retracing the stages of apprehension which led to this moment.² (The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951)

The rational notes of beauty, integrity, consonance, and claritas traced by St. Thomas were actual stages of apprehension in every moment of human awareness. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954)

The exterior world in every instant of perception is interiorized and recreated in a new matter. Ourselves. And in this creative work that is perception and cognition, we experience immediately that dance of Being within our faculties which provides the incessant intuition of Being. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954) 

Language itself and every department of human activity would in this view be a long succession of ‘momentary deities’ or epiphanies. (…) William Wordsworth called these momentary deities ‘spots of time’, Hopkins called them ‘inscapes’ and Browning built his entire work on the same concept of the esthetic of the ‘eternal moment’. (The Little Epic, late 1950s, unpublished manuscript in the Ottawa archive)

Auditory space has no point of favored focus. It’s a sphere without fixed boundaries, space made by the thing itself, not space containing the thing. It is not pictorial space, boxed in, but dynamic, always in flux, creating its own dimensions moment by moment. (Auditory Space, 1960)

the field of nuclei that is the global village is assuming more and more the character of language itself, in which all words at all times comprise all the senses, but in evershifting ratios which permit ever new light to come through them. Is not this the problem that we have now to face in the management of inner and outer space, not fixed but ever new-made ratios, shifting always to maintain a maximal focal point of consciousness (MM to Jacki Tyrwhitt, Dec 23, 1960 Letters 277)

an event like radio or even telegraph has the deepest consequences for the momentary sense ratios of the ordinary person. (MM to Walter Ong Nov 16 1960? 1961? Letters 280)

Each of us forms a body percept, from moment to moment, based upon his intake of sensations, perceptions, but we are completely unaware of this body percept which we form of ourselves from moment to moment.³ It takes considerable dexterity and skill to observe one’s own body percept, the image we form of ourselves. The immediate surrounding — the new environment, whatever it is — is always invisible… (Contribution to Technology and World Trade, Session — Technology: Its Influence on the Character Of World Trade and Investment, 12, 1966)

Lewis Carroll looked through the looking-glass and found a kind of space-time which is the normal mode of electronic man. Before Einstein, Carroll had already entered that very sophisticated universe of Einstein. Each moment, for Carroll, had its own space and its own time. (Gerald Stearn Interview, 1967)

The thing that is most intimate and most totally surrounding us at all times is our own body percept. We create a body percept from minute to minute, or second to second by simple sounds and inputs that we experience, and if this body percept were totally unconscious, it would take the toil of a psychiatrist to reveal it. We do not know what our body percept is without special efforts at getting into a new environment from which to examine it. (‘Education in the Electric Age’, 1967