Libidinal engineers : three studies in cybernetics and its discontents
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Libidinal Engineers offers a cultural history of automatic control in North American avant-garde media cultures of the Cold War. It tells the story of how three artists worked through the implications of Cold War "closed world" discourses of control and communication, their disastrous application in the "technowar" in Vietnam, and in the lived condition of "control societies." The dissertation follows this trajectory by means of three dilating rings: from instruments to delimited environments to lived conditions. First, I examine an instrument of automatic control, the Camera Activating Machine in Michael Snow's now-canonical La région centrale (1971) and its heretofore unknown relation to discourses of Cold War surveillance, in particular technologies of the Early Warning Line and anxieties of representation. Second, I address a delimited environment of multimedia assemblage, Carolee Schneemann's Meat System 1: Electronic Activation Room (1970), and how it appropriated both the discourse and devices of automatic control, such as human intrusion detectors, as a means to foreground issues of sexuality and gender immanent to media cultures of the Vietnam War. Finally, I introduce an examination of the lived conditions of technocratic determination, formulated in Tom Sherman's performance Hyperventilation (1970) and his construction of the part-instruments, part-sculptures Orgone Energy Accumulator (1972) and Faraday Cage (1972), where Sherman explores the darker side of American counterculture's techno-utopia and the coextensive character of control and communication on terms of not only cybernetics but a longer history of discourses of mind control. Based in new, in-depth archival research, I examine the interrelation of technologies and discourses of national defense and artistic experiments in film, video, and multimedia design. Emphasis is placed on terms of desire and affect. I focus especially on cybernetics, defined as "control and communication in the human and machine, " a discourse originating in the defense industries of World War II and scientific research in fields of physics, mathematics, and engineering. Drawing upon primary sources such as patent records, declassified wartime reports, and operating manuals, I assert artists' engagement with the mechanical basis of cybernetics in mechanical and electrical engineering, insisting upon a necessary shift from the prevailing focus upon metaphors of feedback to the hardware by which feedback was materially constituted: servomechanisms, the technology of automatic control.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2015 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | White, Kenneth Allan, Jr |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Art and Art History. |
| Primary advisor | Levi, Pavle |
| Primary advisor | Turner, Fred |
| Thesis advisor | Levi, Pavle |
| Thesis advisor | Turner, Fred |
| Thesis advisor | Alter, Nora M, 1962- |
| Thesis advisor | Wolf, Bryan Jay |
| Advisor | Alter, Nora M, 1962- |
| Advisor | Wolf, Bryan Jay |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Kenneth Allan White Jr. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Art and Art History. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2015. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2015 by Kenneth Allan White
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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