02/04/2016
Hosted by the Design and Computation Group
Department of Architecture
Introduction: Moa Carlsson, PhD, Design & Computation
Organized by Theodora Vardouli and Professor Terry Knight
Today we find ourselves surrounded by screens – on our iPhones, our tablets, our desktop computers. Little do we know that we are living out the multimedia dreams of several dozen Cold War social scientists, a handful of Bauhaus artists, and the musician John Cage. This talk will track those dreams and the politics that drove them from World War II to the psychedelic sixties. It will lay bare the long-buried cultural roots of today’s multimedia revolution and in the process, provide a rich historical context for thinking about the design of highly interactive digital environments.
Fred Turner, Professor of Communication, Stanford University
Fred Turner is a cultural historian and Professor of Communication at Stanford University. Since the late 1990s, he has been tracing the ways in which changes in computing and American culture have shaped one another. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, and most recently, its prequel, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties.
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