Technocrats of the imagination : art, technology, and the military-industrial avant-garde
- Submitting institution
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University of Southampton
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 50035267
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Duke University Press
- ISBN
- 978-1-4780-0660-2
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- March
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- As a long-form output, this 227pp. co-authored book resulted from several years of research, emerging out of an earlier related volume Cold War Legacies: Systems Aesthetics Theory (2018) and a workshop in 2016. Bishop’s contribution to the volume draws on key archival research at Stanford University and the Getty Museum. The book provides an in-depth exploration of the collaborations between the American avant-garde art world and the military-industrial-university complex during the 1960s, in which artists worked with scientists and engineers in universities, private labs and museums. It is Open Access via Duke UP and Knowledge Unlatched.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This book explores the collaborations between the American avant-garde art world and the military-industrial-university complex during the 1960s, where artists worked with scientists and engineers in universities, private labs and museums. The point of convergence between these two asymmetric avant-gardes occurred when a loose confederacy of artists participated in collaborative, interdisciplinary projects aimed at plugging American art into the power grid driving US scientific, technological, and industrial innovation. For artists, designers and educators working with the likes of Bell Labs, the RAND Corporation, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and MIT, experiments in art and technology presaged not only a new aesthetic but also a new utopian order predicated on collective experimentation. In examining these projects’ promises and pitfalls and how they inspired a new generation of collaborative labs populated by artists, engineers and scientists, the authors reveal connections between the contemporary art world and the militarized lab model of research that has dominated the sciences since the 1950s. Part of the story here is the way in which the Cold War generated the conditions and the modes of thinking that enabled neoliberalism to take root as the latest non-ideological ideology. The work on probability that made possible the innovations of the Manhattan Project and migrated, postwar, to think tanks like the Rand Corporation, where game theory underpinned nuclear strategy before finding widespread applications in economics and the social sciences, is a narrative that runs alongside, and periodically intersects with, the history of the artistic avant-garde. This dual track, crisscrossing series of knots and loops binds the history of art and the history of science and technology in the US during the twentieth century, the assumptions from which continue to shape our sense of the limits of the possible. This book is available open access through Knowledge Unlatched.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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